In April 2020 we revisited the Shattered Imperium — twice! — with two resurrected offers featuring 1980s and ’90s follow-ups to the pioneering SFRPG Traveller. First, the March 2015 MegaTraveller Bundle presented GDW’s 1987 SFRPG of adventure amid Rebellion in the Third Imperium. And, from February 2018, the Traveller New Era Bundle made you a Star Viking living your best life amid collapse and renewal in the fallen galactic empire.
1. MEGATRAVELLER
[from March 2015]
After a thousand years, the interstellar Imperium has splintered into warring empires. In the wake of the seeming assassination of the Emperor, Strephon, rebellion has spread to ten thousand planets, finally reaching even to the Spinward Marches. This is the setting of MegaTraveller, (1987), which pushed the Traveller timeline forward and plunged its default setting, the Imperium, into chaos. Supplements and magazines produced during this era detailed the progression of the Rebellion from the assassination in 1116 to the collapse of large-scale interstellar trade in roughly 1124 (the beginning of the supplement Hard Times). The tabletop RPG also inspired two licensed computer games from Paragon Software, The Zhodani Conspiracy and Quest for the Ancients.
Revived from March 2015, this MegaTraveller Bundle once again presented almost the entire GDW MT line for a bargain price. There were six titles in this revived offer’s Player Collection (retail value $66) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete MegaTraveller rules in three books (Player’s Manual, Referee’s Manual, and Imperial Encyclopedia), along with the line’s most highly praised supplement, the Rebellion Sourcebook. And new in this revival, we added two issues of the Digest Group Publications magazine MegaTraveller Journal. (If you bought this offer during its original March 2015 run, you received the new magazines automatically on your Wizard’s Cabinet download page and in your DriveThruRPG Library.)
Those who paid more than this revival’s threshold (average) price also got this offer’s entire Referee Collection with seven more titles worth an additional $70, including the Referee’s Companion, COACC (Close Orbit and Airspace Control Command), Astrogator’s Guide to Diaspora, Hard Times, and the adventures Arrival Vengeance, Assignment: Vigilante, and Knightfall. It’s everything you need for your own space-opera campaign of Rebellion across the Third Imperium.
2. TRAVELLER: THE NEW ERA
[from February 2018]
In 1992 GDW ceased supporting MegaTraveller and adapted the Traveller setting 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. (Ahem.) 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.
Revived from February 2018, the Traveller New Era Bundle presented the 1993 Deluxe Edition of the TNE rules along with almost all the key GDW-era supplements. There were five titles in this revived offer’s Starter Collection (retail value $66):
- Traveller: The New Era Deluxe Edition: The complete 386-page rulebook plus many maps and play aids. Includes the 160-page technical sourcebook Fire Fusion & Steel.
- Survival Margin, World Tamer’s Handbook, and Vampire Fleets: Three essential setting sourcebooks.
- TNE Players’ Forms: Fourteen sheets that let you organize all the stuff in the rising new empire.
This offer’s entire Bonus Collection added eleven more titles worth an additional $110:
- The Regency government in the Spinward Marches keeps the Imperial dream alive in two sourcebooks: Keepers of the Flame and the Regency Combat Vehicle Guide.
- The complete four-book set of Star Vikings: Path of Tears, Smash & Grab, Reformation Coalition Equipment Guide, and the Star Vikings character collection itself.
- Aliens of the Rim: The manipulative Hivers and their elite shock troops, the Ithklur.
- The complete Virus Redux adventure trilogy: 1: The Guilded Lilly, 2: Belly of the Beast, and 3: Into the Darkness.
- TNE Referee’s Screen: Useful charts and a 16-page reference booklet. Includes 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 these two Traveller revivals’ pandemic-related charity, Folding@home, a distributed computing project that simulates the dynamics of protein folding. The small-molecule screening simulations running on Folding@home helped prioritize the molecules to be synthesized and assayed by the PostEra COVID Moonshot aimed at rapidly developing new therapies against the SARS-CoV-2 main viral protease.
