Murdok Madness House Rules

For the most part we follow the rules of Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition. However, there are a few house rules we've started using and this page documents them.

In July of 2024 we had a big discussion around what was fun and what was boring. We decided as a group that we wanted less tracking of minutia and more narrative. We introduced three major changes as a result of this discussion tracked below in Money, Travelling Between Systems, and Skills Progression.

Philosophy

Alignment, Morality & Death

Characters have no alignment in Traveller. There is no set definition of good and evil, nor is there guidance on your disposition towards societal institutions. You want to genocide a local population? Fine. However, the world will remember your actions, and there may be consequences down the line for your actions. You want to shoot your companion in the back of the head. Ok, but I doubt you’ll live long after that. Maybe if you help a poor farmer with his tractor he’ll help you later, or maybe his neighbor will hate you for it and try and harm you. There’s not a giant list of good and evil deeds that I’m going to keep track of. The referee is not Santa Claus keeping a naughty list, nor does karma always come to fruitition. But in general it is better to make friends instead of enemies. Especially if you wish to live a long life of adventuring.

In short, players can make any choices you want in this galaxy, but it will react in ways that will be consistent, realistic, and proportional to the players’ actions.

The galaxy is a dangerous place and the vacuum of space will kill you instantly. Players are not superheros and the referee has no problems with killing your character if that’s what happens. There is no magic in Traveller. When you’re dead you’re dead, and recovering from injuries can take weeks in a hospital.

Lore

We will usually keep as true to the lore and setting as possible. It's easier to remember things that way. Sometimes it makes sense to deviate and these deviations will be noted on this wiki.

Natural 2 and 12

There should always be a chance for failure and a chance for success. At any time when rolling 2D6 a player will fail their roll if they roll a natural 2 and will succeed at their roll if they roll a natural 12. This goes for both skills checks and combat. However, general reason still applies and if the referee determines it is completely unreasonable to have a player succeed or fail in a given situation. The referee always gets the final say.

Effects on Task Chains require special consideration. If the final roll of a Task Chain is a natural 2 the task fails disastrously. Likewise if the final roll of a Task Chain is a natural 12 the task succeeds spectacularly. When it is not the last roll, a natural 2 applies DM-6 and a natural 12 applies DM+6 to the next roll. For more info on Task Chains see page 63 of the Core Rulebook 2022 edition.

Inspiration

The referee can reward players with an Inspiration Token for inspired role playing from the character. A player can never have more than one Inspiration Token at any time. A player can trade their Inspiration Token to reroll one of their dice rolls. The player must then take the new roll.

Character Creation

Character creation in Traveller is a group story telling exercise. It is not like DnD where a player designs a character by making a bunch of decisions up front. Character creation in Traveller weaves the character’s back story into the character and allows an opportunity to engage in group story telling before the adventure even begins. During character creation you need to flow with your dice rolls and choices. The choices you make and the dice rolls you succeed or fail at will cause you to take alternate paths. Just like actual life, you don’t have complete control over how things turn out and you often have to make the best of the bad situations you find yourself in.

For our purposes we only allow human or vargr non-psionic characters. WRT psionics, we don’t need no stinkin space magic! Psionics feel unbalanced and they drastically change the galaxy away from being based in physics and physical laws to a fantasy adventure set in space.

Character creation is broken up into four year terms. You start when you are 18 and continue going through terms until you feel you are done and want to adventure. Once you are 34 you will begin to age, and with each successive term aging has a greater chance of negatively affecting your characteristics.

Characteristics

The first step in character creation is to determine the six major characteristics of your character.

1 Strength

2 Dexterity

3 Endurance

4 Intellect

5 Education

6 Social

Each player will roll 2D6 until they have two different numbers between 1-6. These two numbers correspond to the two characteristics that a player gets an additional boon die for. For these two characteristics the player rolls 3D6 and adds the two highest dice for the characteristic. For all other characteristics the player rolls 2D6 and uses that total. A boon die in Traveller is similar to advantage in ADnD, and a bane die is similar to disadvantage in ADnD.

Characteristics are rolled and assigned in order. Players do not get to choose which number is for which characteristic.

After all characteristics are rolled the player has an opportunity to do the entire process over again. You can repeat this process once. So it’s a risk that the second time is even worse. If a player chooses to reroll their characteristics they must take the new ones.

These are your starting characteristics, and they may change during character creation. Characteristics may never go lower than zero or higher than 15.

Background Skills and pre-career Education

After your characteristics are determined you’ll choose background skills.

You are now an 18 year old idiot. Bright eyed, bushy tailed, and naive to the world.

Now you choose your pre-career education. It is possible to ignore pre-career education and go right into a career, you can also try and enter an education and fail. It is in your character’s best interest to attempt an education term.

In addition to University and Military Academy from the Core Rule book, you may also choose Colonial Upbringing, Merchant Academy, School of Hard Knocks, or Spacer Community from the Traveller’s Companion. I am not allowing Psionic Community.

Careers

Payers can choose from all of the available careers in the Core Rule book. In addition the Believer career is available either as a chosen career or as a fallback career. We are not allowing the Truther career from the Traveller’s Companion.

Don’t feel bad if you fail to survive a career check or fail to enter your chosen career. Sometimes those can be the most interesting characters. It really is what you make of it.

Connections

Throughout character creation players may gain allies, contacts, rivals and enemies. For each of these we will use the optional Affinity/Enmity rules and Special Characteristic rules described in the Traveller’s Companion chapter 3. We don’t use the Power/Influence rules because the referee thinks they restrict story telling too much. If a player rolls on the Special Characteristic table and the effect is related to Power/Influence they will reroll.

The player should have a story for each ally, contact, rival and enemy they gain during character creation. It doesn’t have to happen during the session, but it definitely can.

If two players agree, then any event rolled for one Traveller can involve another if you can tell a good story about it. Also, if a character gains an ally, contact or low enmity rival they can choose them to be another player character. For this both characters gain one extra skill that fits with the story. See The Connections Rule on page 19 of the Core Rule Book for details and limitations.

Mustering Out & Benefits

For benefits players can take things from the either the Core Rulebook or the Supply Catalogue. These are described in more detail on page 46 of the Core Rulebook. Players can substitute stuff from the Supply Catalogue if it fits and we can work this out individually.

The referee may assign a skills package for the party at the beginning of the adventure.

Skills Progression

Skill progression changes from time based to adventure based. We do not roll for skills progression after a set amount of time. Instead the referee hands out points at logical ends to adventures. A typical 2-4 session adventure will generate 1 point.

Points can be spent as follows

• Skill from nothing to 0, or 0 to 1. (1 point)
• Skill from 1 to 2, or 2 to 3. (2 points)
• Multiply this by 3 for the Jack-of-all-Trades skill

The skill a character advances in should be something they used during the adventure. It's important to be flexible, but we also do not want a character that never drove anything in an adventure to somehow increase their Drive score. The player must present a logical explanation for how their character advanced in their chosen skill. It requires a realistic story. Players should track unused points, but players don’t have to declare in advance what they plan on spending the points on.

Combat

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Players and NPCs can become afflicted with PTSD through traumatic acts occurring to them. Players afflicted with PTSD must succeed on an Simple (2+) END check at the beginning of every combat round or they remain frozen in place for that combat round and must pass their turn.

At this time there is no known means to cure PTSD.

Tactics

House rules rework how the Tactics skill is used in both ground and naval combat.

Page 73 of the Core Rule Book contains this text

So long as they are not surprised, one Traveller (or character under the referee’s control) may make a Tactics check at the start of a combat. The Effect of this check is then applied to the Initiative of everyone on the same side.

Page 165 of the Core Rule Book contains this text

In addition, the commander of each spacecraft (or the commander of a fleet, if more than one ship is present) may make a Tactics (naval) check at the start of a battle. The Effect of this check is added to the Initiative of the spacecraft (or fleet).

In practice this single roll can have an incredibly powerful impact on the battle. In order to lessen this effect our house rule is to take the highest tactics skill in the party and add/subtract that from each combatant's initiative roll. This stacks with other modifiers to the initiative roll (e.g., ambush, pilot, thrust). If no combatant on one side of the combat has a Tactics skill the Jack-of-all-Trades modifier is applied like a normal skill check.

Example

The party encounters a group of baddies on the ground and initiative is rolled. Neither party is ambushed. The highest Tactics Military skill in the party is 2 and the highest Tactics Military skill in the baddies is 1. In this case each party member would receive a DM+1 to their initiative roll. The baddies' rolls would not be modified.

Space Combat

We ignore the Radiation trait of space based weapons.

NPC Interactions

Money

We do not like thinking about money and tracking it. Money will henceforth have two states. If the party wants to do something that requires money they will either have enough or not enough. For small stuff(hotels, food, ammo) they will always have enough. For larger ticket items they may not have enough. At the referee's discretion a Broker|Streetwise/SOC check may be required to determine if the Travellers have enough money. Travelling between star systems generates some basic profit, so as the Travellers move around in-game they will gradually generate a small profit.

If the Travellers wish to do something that requires money they may need to complete a side quest, or wait until a main adventure finishes and they receive their reward.

Getting Around

The Core Rule book has no rules for finding transport between systems without a ship. As a house rule we roll a number of D3's based on the average starport quality rounded down. The result is the number of days Travellers must wait at the starport before available transport shows up to transport them to the next starport. A score of zero means no wait.

Class A	1D3 - 1
Class B	2D3 - 1
Class C	3D3 - 1
Class D	4D3 - 1
Class E	5D3 - 1
Class F	6D3 - 1
Class X	7D3 - 1

For example, our Travellers want to go from Acrid(2722) to Inurin(2724) in the Trojan Reach sector. Acrid has a starport quality of A and Inurin has a starport quality of E. Their average is C so the Travellers will wait 3D3 - 1 days until transport is available.

Travelling Between Systems

Travelling between star systems requires a single Average difficulty task chain. If no passengers are onboard, Astrogation -> Pilot/Spacecraft, if passengers are onboard, Astrogation -> Pilot/Spacecraft -> Steward.

If the players find themselves in a particularly hairy situation a bane die may be applied by the ref. (e.g., damaged j-drive) Boon dice are less likely, but possible. Jumping in combat raises the difficulty to Difficult 10+.

If the players succeed the jump is uneventful. However, if they fail the referee will roll on a table for something bad to happen :) Failing should be rare. The random bad thing could be a ship problem, passenger problem, crew problem, cargo problem, etc. And, who knows, it might completely derail the session into dealing with this new problem.

We do not roll for mail, cargo, or trade. We will assume the ship makes enough money travelling between systems to support itself and also a little profit. We will also assume ship passenger berths are full, cargo is legal, refueling happens, and general maintenance happens.

Exceptions

* Looted cargo may be an exception to this at the referee's discretion.
* Ship damage and upgrades may be an exception to this.
* If the Travellers are carrying any illegal cargo it will be handled separately.

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