The former allows you to make a reasoned choice as to where you set your Rebellion-era campaign.

On paper, the idea of a fresh new edition of the game which gathered together the cream of the crop from various disparate supplements and accessories in order to provide a brand new unified version of the rules complete with, at last, a universal task resolution system, something vanilla Traveller had been sorely lacking was a good one.

Moreover, the core books are absolutely riddled with errata; the Consolidated MegaTraveller Errata is some 71 pages long, and of those pages 4 consist of explanatory material at the start, 48 consist of errata for the MegaTraveller core books, and the remaining 19 pages cover errata for some 11 supplemental products coming to less than 2 pages per supplement on average, whilst the MegaTraveller core set has an average of 16 pages of errata per book therein.

Still, its clear that the task of actually implementing all of this errata to the entirety of MegaTraveller, even if you limited yourself to just the core books, would be a mammoth undertaking and, arguably, not really worth the effort especially when the Classic Traveller material that MegaTraveller was based on (or the Mongoose Traveller stuff that came out later) is more accessible and much more amenable to letting you pick and choose what to use.

The actual explanation of the task resolution system isnt that bad, with the only errata being mild issues with one of the examples (although it still yields a perfectly serviceable task profile).

This is particularly useful for interpreting other MegaTraveller material in light of whichever Traveller version you are drawing on.

It also rehashes the advanced character creation system that Classic Traveller s supplemental books offered for different careers, like how Book 6: Scouts fleshed out the Scout career.

The martial slant to most of the careers in the core LBBs tend to lend themselves to a militaryaction-oriented take on the game, with exploration and trade getting some mild representation but the implicit assumption being that most PCs will be military veterans.

The careers in Citizens of the Imperium include scientists, diplomats, pirates, asteroid miners and a swathe of other concepts, which in turn helps broaden the assumed action of Traveller it makes it more open to games based around social skills or around hard science.

Mongooses character generation progress yields characters with more skills and takes somewhat longer, so to my mind it really comes down to whether for a particular game you want fast character generation and a setup where getting even 1 point in a skill is a big fucking deal, or slower character generation where you get more skills.

That said, MegaTraveller does include one new class in its tables which wasnt in Citizens Law Enforcer and it should be simple enough to use the MegaTraveller tables and the Classic Traveller character creation process to get Law Enforcers for your Classic game.

This is not an issue if everyone in the party was produced through the advanced generation system so you went with an all-Navy party using the High Guard creation rules, or used more books from the line to have a wider range of advanced characters.

It is, however, clearly a problem if you have a mixed party of basic-style and advanced-style characters.

As such, even if you had the patience to apply errata to the character generation systems there, theres still no solution to that problem.

Whereas Citizens of the Imperium in physical format remains relatively easy to find, Scouts is trickier, so having a hard copy of this system is quite nice.

For the purposes of adventuring in the Official Traveller Universe, this is a great compilation of the core setting canon.

Aside from some ship designs which carry over errors from the ship design system, its gratifyingly errata-light, since great swathes of it consist of pure setting information, no system details given.

Prior to this, GDW had put out that Library Data I mentioned earlier and had done bits of worldbuilding through adventures and Journal of the Travellers Aid Society articles.

I believe that this, however, is the first time GDW had given over an entire book to an in-depth examination of matters relating to the Imperium.

The closest earlier analogues I can think of are the various Alien Modules from the Classic Traveller days, but by definition those were about non-Imperial cultures.).

Such worlds have sufficient numbers of bodies that nobody can control them without the backing of the population, or at least not usefully you can occupy then to deny them to the enemy, but thatll take more resources than the world gives you, so theyll be a net resource sink rather than the eager source of resources and personnel that they could be.

Apparently, the various intelligence apparatuses of the Rebellion factions are all eagerly researching ways to sway High Population worlds the direction they want (which I think, given the retro-hard-SF leanings of Traveller, means that theyre developing a weaponised version of Asimov-style psychohistory).

I still maintain that your typical Traveller campaign will never range so far across the Imperium as to allow the PCs to encounter more than a fraction of the Rebellion factions the Imperium is really absurdly big but the book crucially gives you an idea of what each faction is like and what goes on at the front lines of the conflict.

The latter gives you various ideas for adventure, ranging from the martial to the espionage-based, which is good because the odds of player characters being in a position to seriously sway the Rebellion are remote but the odds of them being hired as agents for the local faction (or the local factions enemy factions).

Classic Traveller Rpg Downloads