Our original, "classic" Traveller game is set in the Gateway Quadrant, the four sector maps and associated adventures and supplements published by Judges Guild and "approved for Traveller" by MWM and GDW back in the day.
The JG for Traveller books were subsequently removed from canon with the publication of Atlas of the Imperium, and much later the rights were picked up by QLI, the publishers of Traveller^20 - QLI went on to publish a new book, Gateway to Destiny, which effectively overwrote all of the JG books.
I stumbled onto the JG Traveller material quite by accident: I bought the "classic" Traveller reprints and happened to see a bundle of the JG sector maps on eBay for a ridiculously good price (something like nineteen maps and adventures for twenty bucks!) and picked them up.
JG's Traveller offerings have a much more "space opera" feel, more like Vanguard Reaches or Beyond from Paranoia Press than GDW's The Spinward Marches or The Solomani Rim. The JG books include "space Arabs" and "space Sikhs" and "space Chinese," pirates with mind-control devices and a lost planet of hawkmen, and an alien monster called the Dyson with characteristics and abilities determined by the referee from rolling on various tables.
It's pretty campy compared to the Traveller books published by the likes of GDW, DGP, FASA, and Gamelords, but for the freewheeling sort of campaign I wanted to run, JG's "space opera" meme proved to be a feature, not a bug. In fact, I consider the Traveller material analagous to the "swords-and-sorcery" feel of their fantasy publications - both are throwbacks in a good way.
A guy named Jeff Rients has a wiki devoted to the JG Traveller material, along with some of his own more campaign-specific idea: .
Anyone else familiar with the JG Traveller material?
|