Traveller in 2024
What can you expect to see for Traveller in 2024? Lots!
We are making some serious roads into expanding Traveller into a variety of playing styles, allowing you to pick and choose the type of universe you want to explore, as well as the nature of adventures and campaigns you want to experience.
The Singularity campaign was announced last year and we had been hoping to bring it to you, well, about now-ish. However, it has very much suffered from ‘hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…’, which means you will likely be seeing it relatively early next year. The manuscripts for its books (four of them, all destined for a nice slipcase!) have been rolling in and it looks like a real cracker of a campaign. Penned by Chris Griffen, Singularity has a heavy focus on the nature of AI within the Third Imperium, and will have your Travellers questioning their actions, their humanity, and perhaps even their own existence!
The Starship Operator’s Handbook, an in-depth look at the functionality and use of common starships that Travellers are likely to use – basically a showcasing of what it is like to actually live and work on the likes of a free trader – was also due in 2023 but is having the finishing touches put on it right now. It will be appearing quite early in 2024, and should prove to be the essential guide for every free trader and scout captain.
A full campaign centred on xenoarchaeology, Legend of the Sky Raiders is being written right now (having been delayed a little by work on Pioneer), and we are properly looking forward to this one! A re-imagining of the classic adventures, Legend of the Sky Raiders will be taking full advantage of modern approaches to scenario design.
Following an overview of the entire conflict, the Fifth Frontier War will be kicking into high gear quickly, with a range of sourcebooks and campaigns that will allow your Travellers to witness – and alter – key events of the conflict. Who knows… maybe they will be the ones who started it? Expect to see tomes covering War Fleets of the Fifth Frontier War, the Riverland Front, and campaigns to support them.
As a bit of a left turn at the traffic lights, in 2024 you will see This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller. Heavily researched and then penned by Shannon Appelcline (of Designers & Dragons fame), this book will present the entire history of Traveller – its origins, the people involved, the companies that drove it forward, its effect upon the RPG market and, well… everything! Having just finished going through the manuscript myself, I can tell you this is a must-have for any serious fan of Traveller as it provides an amazing perspective on the game, putting each building block in place as the years march on to modern Traveller today. We are categorising this one as a ‘must read’.
The Travellers’ Aid Society programme has been running on DrivethruRPG for a good while now, and has over 250 titles from other publishers and fans that support Traveller – the programme allows publishers to directly support any aspect of the current edition of Traveller, including diving into the official Charted Space universe with scenarios, source material and rules. In 2024 we will be revising and updating the TAS programme in a big way, providing more support materials, more templates and art (bringing everything up to spec with the current ‘Update’ format), and more publicity and focus, showcasing what is available to Travellers and Referees from other publishers.
Speaking of other publishers, we have been working on another project to open up Traveller, similar to the previous Traveller OGL SRD, allowing publishers to produce their own material, be it print or PDF, based upon Traveller mechanics (though not the Charted Space universe – that is the province of the TAS programme) whilst retaining ownership of their own intellectual properties. For many (and often obscure) legal reasons, we will not be proceeding with the ORC licence as we had previously hoped, but instead be producing a bespoke licence for Traveller alone. We have been engaged with several publishers from the Cepheus Engine community to hammer out the terms of this licence and have managed to reach a broad agreement on the principles. We hope to be able to go live with this relatively early in 2024 and, again, will be looking to promote and bring attention to the best that the community of this licence has to offer. The aim here is to benefit the third party publishers, players of Traveller and, of course, grow Traveller itself.
Some time ago, we released the official soundtrack for the Pirates of Drinax campaign. We can now reveal that we are working on a new soundtrack album for release in 2024, this time centred on a very specific aspect of the Fifth Frontier War…
The first issue of the Far Trader comic was released, and we are pleased to announce that issue #2 is being worked on right now. You can expect to see this released in early 2024, but we can already tell that there is a lot of interest in Traveller comics – Markosia has therefore decided to commit heavily to this line and you will see issues #3 and #4 a lot quicker after issue #2 has been released. Furthermore, another two Traveller volumes, introducing new characters and new stories, are being commissioned – 2024 is going to be a great year for Traveller comic readers!
