Lev Grossman’s “The Magician King” includes a support group that calls itself “Free Trader Beowulf,” and the phrase is introduced as a reference to Dungeons and Dragons with a challenge to Google it.
Well, I played D&D a lot in the late '70s and early '80s and it means nothing to me.
Googling I see it is part of a distress call and has something to do with the RPG Traveller. I did play Traveller once or twice way back when but I don’t recall much about it and I don’t remember this distress call.
Can anyone put that distress call I context? What is its importance to Traveller that makes it ripe for a reference like this?
Exactly so: it was never actually developed in the actual game or authorized adventures.
I do believe the “Free Trader Beowulf” was used in a novel set in the Traveller universe.
(I just read the book “The Science Fiction in Traveller” by Shannon Applecline, which surveys Traveller-based fiction. An interesting survey of a VERY narrow sub-sub-sub genre of SF!)
ETA: It looked, at the time, like a cheap attempt to cash in on the allure of Larry Niven’s space-adventurer, Beowulf Shaeffer.
Did any of you play Traveller a lot? I wanted to get into space opera but never really got a good opportunity. I remember seeing the ads in Dragon magazine for a play-by-mail Star Trek RPG and at age 11 a Star Trek campaign sounded like the coolest thing in the world.
Traveller has a fantastic character generation process, which is at least 50% of the fun of the game. You roll dice six times and then assign the results to each of six attributes. Then you choose a job based on your attributes. You roll on different tables related to your job, gaining skills and getting events that affect your stats, all while you’re aging. At a certain point, age starts to tug downward on your attributes and you decide what age to stop the character creation process and enter the game. You can be older with more skills and experience, or younger and healthier.
The whole process lends itself to really awesome role play opportunities in character creation, especially for unusual formats like play by post message boards or play-by-mail. More than any other game, that’s the one I wish I could find a good consistent dedicated group for.
You can still die in character creation, but it’s not as bad as it was.
Each “term” (4 years of your character’s life) of character development, you roll for survival. In the original rules, this was quite literal, and you could die if you failed the roll. In the most recent version, the survival roll is just to see if your *career *survives. You can be forced out of your career (possibly suffering some type of injury or humiliation in the process) if you fail, and either must take a new career or end the character creation process. The only way I can think of to die in the current rule set is if you take a ton of terms to advance in lots of different careers, but suffer enough aging to bring one of your characteristics down to 0.
I got the original three-booklet boxed set back in…'82 I think it was. Maybe '83. There weren’t very many book stores or hobby shops that carried that kind of stuff, and the few supplements available were scarce. So we basically played Star Wars with Traveller rules.
We also took a crack at Space Opera; the character generation can be time consuming and exhausting. Again, we essentially wound up playing Star Wars.
I seem to remember a PC game…early 90’s maybe? That had similar sounding character generation as was mentioned. I’m wondering if it was a Traveller game…
Traveler showed up in Dragon Magazine all the time but I never actually played it. TSR ended up turning Buck Rogers into their Sci Fi game that used a D&D type system.
How many different versions have there been? There was the original three-booklet (not counting the expansions) version, the revised one-book one, the GURPS Traveller rules…
I remember when “Trillion Credit Squadron” tournaments were a thing. Eventually, they were moved aside for Star Fleet Battles, but now even that game (or its “lite” version, Federation Commander) can’t be found at either Origins or GenCon.
A few years ago, someone in my gaming group got his hands on an old edition of Traveller and we played around with it. As Mosier said, character creation is an absolute blast and we spent a lot of time rolling up characters to see what the generation process could spit out before it killed your character.
Sadly, when we got around to playing we found the actual game mechanics to feel as dated and clunky as you’d expect from a a SciFi RPG out of the late 70s. Range tables, armor vs weapon tables, etc.
We stuck with it through a campaign and then moved on.
I bought a bunch of the original Traveler game books when I first got into RPGs in high school, in '82 or '83 (and I still have them!). We played a handful of times, but I spent a lot of time creating characters, because it was a fun process. And, yes, I had more than a few die in the process.
Marines, in particular, got really good combat skills, but they also had a fairly high likelihood to die during a term of service. So, if you had a Marine who had made it through three or four terms, you had a character with good skills, and had had some good luck. At that point, you faced the difficult decision of whether to shoot for another term, and build those skills even higher, but with a good chance to lose it all, or muster out, and not advance any further.
!!!