Traveller: The New Era

In February 2018 we presented the Traveller New Era Bundle featuring Traveller: The New Era, the 1992 SFRPG from Game Designers’ Workshop of collapse and revival in the galactic empire of Traveller.

The Third Imperium provides the setting for Marc W. Miller’s classic SFRPG Traveller (1977) and its follow-up MegaTraveller (1986). In 1992 GDW adapted Traveller to its House System introduced in Twilight: 2000 and Dark Conspiracy. Traveller: The New Era moves the timeline forward to show the Imperium destroyed by civil war and a deadly artificial intelligence, the Virus. Trying to rebuild civilization, explorers venture across the fallen empire, making new contact with worlds cut off for decades from interstellar trade. Most planets are graveyards; the few survivors are low-tech and xenophobic. Many are ruled by TEDs (technologically elevated dictators), elites with access to a small cache of high-tech weaponry with which they control the population. But vigorous survivors are forging a better, more vibrant history across ten thousand worlds. In the New Era, the future starts now.

This rich offer presented the 1993 Deluxe Edition of the TNE rules along with almost all the key GDW-era supplements. There were six rulebooks and supplements in our Starter Collection (retail value $70) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks:

• Traveller: The New Era Deluxe Edition (retail price $30): The complete 386-page rulebook plus many maps and play aids. Includes the 160-page technical architecture sourcebook Fire, Fusion, & Steel.
• Survival Margin, World Tamer’s Handbook, and Vampire Fleets (retail $10 apiece): Three essential setting sourcebooks.
• TNE Players’ Forms (retail $10): Fourteen new sheets that let you organize all the stuff in the rising new empire.

Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price also got our entire Bonus Collection with eight more supplements and adventures worth an additional $80:

• Two Regency sourcebooks: Keepers of the Flame and the Regency Combat Vehicle Guide (retail $10 apiece).
• The complete four-book set of Star Vikings (retail $10 apiece): the Path of Tears sourcebook, the adventure collection Smash & Grab, the Reformation Coalition Equipment Guide, and the Star Vikings character collection itself.
• Aliens of the Rim (retail $10): The manipulative Hivers and their elite shock troops, the Ithklur.
• The complete Virus Redux adventure trilogy (total retail $30): 1: The Guilded Lilly, 2: Belly of the Beast, and 3: Into the Darkness.
• TNE Referee’s Screen (retail $10): Useful charts and a 16-page reference booklet. Includes, for the first time anywhere, a .PDF version of Lady Elise, an eight-page introductory adventure outline sold with the original hardcopy Referee’s Screen in 1994.

Ten percent of each payment (after gateway fees) went to this offer’s designated charity, Human Rights Watch.