Review: The Traveller Adventure (1983)

The Traveller Adventure is the companion piece to The Traveller Book I reviewed earlier.

I always wanted this book. It would have looked so great next to my Traveller Book. But more importantly it would have given me some more ideas of what to do with Traveller.  At least Traveller was better for me than Star Frontiers, which tended to be D&D in Space.

I did pick this up on DriveThruRPG as a PDF almost as soon as it came out. 

This book (well. the cover) was my first experience with the Vargr.

The Traveller Adventure (1983)

For this review, I am using the PDF from DriveThruRPG.  154 pages, color cover, black and white interior art with red ink accents.

This book is a collection of connected adventures which today would be called an Adventure Path.  See I told you Traveller was ahead of its time. 

The conceit of the adventures is the player characters are all members of the merchant vessel, the March Harrier, where they befriend a Vargr (a fantastic way to introduce an alien species btw) and leads them on a series of adventures.  Additionally, we (or me rather, it could have shown up earlier in another book) were introduced to the Spinward Marches, the frontier of the Imperium.  Even someone only tangentially familiar with Traveller has heard of the Spinward Marches.

So yeah already a lot in this book.

The book begins with all this information as well as background on the Aramis Subsector and some Referee notes.  These notes include details on the overall plot and what all the major NPCs want. There are even some Pre-Gen characters to use.  Seriously. This thing is so much better than I expected it to be.

There are about a dozen and a half or so adventures here of various sizes and types.  Each moves the plot forward in a different way and each can have an effect on the other.  They did not appear to be overtly linear to me, so there is a lot freedom of how these can be used.

There are also deck plans for the March Harrier and a bit on using Vargr as player characters.

There is just so much information here and just so much of value that I am really kicking myself for not getting this back then.  It really would have changed my Traveller experience.

Reading through this now I also really get an appreciation for how deep and rich the Traveller lore is.