Amazing how much of this stuff is still floating around, as it is well over 40 years old. Various trawls through eBay produced this lot, although a lot of it came from collectibles shops with eBay store fronts. I’m not interested in the modern versions, which have no doubt been mucked around with.

First lot were these two. I was used to the original box set, and as it is impossible to tell on the internet how big things are, I was bit surprised to find that these were much larger than expected. All you need to play Traveller apparently.

Clearly the first set was missing Book 2, so I bought this. Except it turned out it wasn’t, as the large format edition had rolled the original Books 1,2 and 3 into two volumes. Doh. The text seemed largely identical. I might sell this as surplus, but I actually prefer the layout in this one.

Between them, I’d forgotten how rich the basic set of rules are. I’m sure when we used to play we just ignored a lot of the stuff in here, we certainly never did any trading, but the whole thing is so well thought through and comprehensive. It very, very much reminds me of En Garde, but better developed.

To go with the basic set, you obviously need some background. The Spinward Marches are just a set of space regions to explore and have adventures in. I’ve got the GDW boardgames Imperium and Dark Nebula which also cover a lot of the Traveller Universe region of space, but the Spinward Marches is designed with RPGs in mind, not strategic space warfare.

This looks like a mint copy, but in fact many of the maps have been carefully hand annotated, adding in some of the useful stuff (Imperial star bases, refuelling points etc) which could so easily have been printed on the map, but instead is buried in the wierd hexadecimal gobbledygook system description codes.

The second supplement I bought back in the day was Mercenary, which adds military careers, some more interesting weapons systems, and a whole subset of mercenary adventures and the means to resolve them, including a combat system up to brigade level. The latter is sheer genius, straight out of Dupuys ‚Numbers, Predictions and War‘, and the combat results most definitely do not reward the big battalions, but the better quality ones. I spent ages number crunching this one calculating force ratios and outcome probabilities when I should have been revising for my second year exams at University. Ahem.

The third supplement we got was High Guard, which has a much more advanced ship design and combat resolution system. I had a lot of fun doing starship designs with this, and we used to use them as an alternative to Starfire for space combat games. This also includes naval careers for characters.

The basic books, Merc, High Guard and Spinward Marches was all we ever really used for Traveller, as it had everything we were interested in, and even then, most of it came out of our heads.

High Guard can also lead off into a whole rabbit hole of its own via the Trillion Credit Squadron supplement and infamous ‚Lenat Squadron‘ in the 1981 and 82 competitions which used computer assistance, a primitive form of AI, to minmax the rules and produce literally unbeatable fleets.

My good pal Mark is very interested in this stuff, see Geordies Big Battles: http://exiledfog.blogspot.com/2025/03/note-to-self-trillion-credit-squadron.html

In a class of its own however was….. 

Striker! Future tactical combat in the Traveller universe, by one Frank Chadwick.

Honestly, this one was just fabulous and we used to fight company level actions using these. I also invested/wasted a lot of time on vehicle designs when I should have been revising for my finals!  They included a functional Ogre and a lot of WW2 vehicles. sadly these designs were all lost when I sold my stuff.

I couldn’t find a physical copy of these at a price I was willing to pay, so I just got the PDFs (four of them) from DrivethruRPG. Enough to look at anyway, and marvel that I actually used to understand these enough to play them, as they are pretty complicated by modern standards. They were worth the effort as they were very realistic indeed in terms of small unit C3 etc. Alex has done a great job of streamlining them and making into more of a wargame and less of an RPG engine.

I’m glad I own these again, they have been a painful hole in my library for decades now, but although they are fun to read, I doubt they will ever get played as written. They might provide some good background for some online RPG sessions though. And rest assured, I did pass my exams at the LSE quite respectably, despite wasting so much time wargaming. I had a bigger, faster brain then, and rather more energy.