Traveller Bestiary

While doing some mini painting, I was thinking about how various creatures or monsters are common throughout multiple fantasy game systems. Take for instance, the fire elemental.

(and yes, I am actually pretty happy with how this one turned out!). I have a few fantasy RPGs, and at least for OSE & the Fantasy Trip, there are some consistencies with this one. Cannot be hurt by non-magical weapons, cold magic affects it, and so on.

Traveller, on the other hand, has thousands of worlds, thousands of biomes, and a near infinite number of creatures. What you encounter on one world is not going to show up on another. There are some exceptions, creatures that have been transported around and on many worlds. The JTAS had a bestiary section in most issues, and most of the creatures were native to a specific world. Some, such as the tree kraken, seemed to get on to other low gravity worlds (which in Traveller, most worlds tend to be low gravity worlds I'd really make that curve more likely to yield normal gravity worlds...well, that is a post for another day!) Some, like the beaked monkey, are more or less pets, and so available everywhere.

Each planet, using book 3, can generate a plethora of creatures rapidly (see my post on random encounters, which is what sparked this post of rambling thoughts). The same idea for creatures as for random encounters struck me, but in a different way. 

Traveller breaks down creatures into a set of reactions: Flee, Attack or pretty much ignore. Those rolls are dependent on the type of creature, and the entire animal creation rules in Traveller are pretty well thought out.

What they lack though, at least for me, is the chrome, the flash. While that is the purview of the referee really, we just don't have a bestiary in Traveller simply because it deals with many worlds. Not just a few planes of existence as per several fantasy games, but literally millions of potential worlds. Each world would have its own bestiary, and it is extremely unlikely that you would encounter a creature from Regina on Glisten. One being a garden world, the other being an asteroid belt.

I've backed two bestiaries recently, both really for OSE. And I do have the Fantasy Trip's Old School Monsters. And while Mongoose is republishing a lot of old JTAS with a bit of the new (and FINALLY going back to top-down deck plans versus the entirely useless isometric ones) and have a bestiary section as well. But in Traveller, you have to adapt those to fit your universe. 

And in the end, unless you are playing a low-tech adventure in Traveller, creatures have an entirely different purpose in my opinion for Traveller. They add chrome to the world, but unless you go out of your way, you are not going to interact with native fauna. And for those well-armed adventurers, few creatures pose any sort of a threat.

While I really like using Heaven And Earth to help me flesh out my worlds, and it generates the multitude of animal encounter tables, unless you are running a game like Across the Bright Face, how often do those tables get used?

I did manage to use those in a Traveller game I ran a few years ago at the gaming club. But it was forced: the system was a post-apocalyptic world that at one time had a TL-17 level of computers: the AI took over basically. Fortunately, space-wise they never got above a jump 1. Anyway - technically the world was under a red zone from the Imperium as it still had a thriving nanobot culture what would wipe out any Imperial tech in 2-12 hours. The Pax Stellar game forced the animal encounter tables as I removed the ability to have them use grav vehicles by referee fiat. I took away player agency in one sense, though there were "real" reasons to do so. 

But other than forcing things like that (your shuttle crashes in the jungle) I can't see really using those animal encounter tables all too much. Exceptions do apply: playing a science/exploration game, a hunting scenario, and I am sure there are a few other cases. And perhaps I've just not managed to get the right group for that. Traveller is a very broad SF RPG, and while it does have a defined setting you can use, it is a really, really BIG setting that few people (other than my 19 readers, well, 18 as my wife subscribes but she is not into gaming, just fishing - and musky fishing at the moment) really get into. Heck - I've played Traveller off & on for over 40 years and I am not that much into the setting. Why I mostly lurk about on COTI as there are people who seem to live and know every corner of the OTU.

But you can see where those tables came from: an extension of the random encounter tables but for animals. and both have their DNA firmly based in fantasy games that came before. GDW just extended those basic ideas into the Traveller universe, using the 2d6 process and limits.

To try and wrap up this rambling post: I don't think Traveller lends itself to having a universal bestiary. You have to develop one per world. Fortunately, there are tools to automate that. I have Heaven And Earth, and there are probably on-line tools (I thought the TravellerMap's Generate World Map did that, but I can't find encounters there. But wow - that is a great resource! There have been a lot of updates since I last looked at that. Though I like making my own maps, for those who don't want to, this does it all for you Traveller style)

A Universal Bestiary in Traveller, if not an electronic system, would be like the old Encyclopedia Britannica - a huge set of large volumes, 1 book per world. Fortunately for Traveller, and players and referees, computers have caught up and so we can have those tables automatically generated for us (and now wondering if I could try & do that as well. As I've never gone back to my old trade program. Maybe when I retire, I'll return to my hobby software development. Currently I do way too much of that for work and don't much feel like doing it even more in what little free time I have!)