Free Trader Beowulf

Traveller is a science fiction RPG where characters explore star systems, engage in trade, battles, and sometimes interstellar politics. Key elements include:

• Commerce: The backbone of civilization.
• Human-centric but cosmopolitan: Focus on humans but includes aliens.
• Limited communication: Without FTL communication, information travels at ship speeds, resulting in stronger local than remote governance.
• Moral complexity: People display both virtues and vices.
• Sociological: Interstellar society is stratified, often managed by independent nobility using classic titles such as Baron, Duke and Archduke. Characters can be human, robot, alien, or genetically engineered, with civilian, military, or noble backgrounds. Equipment supports wilderness exploration, hazardous environments, and combat: vehicles, sensor equipment, communicators, rations, personal armor, weapons spanning low-tech (swords, shields) to high-tech options (e.g. cybernetics, robots, energy and kinetic weapons). Blade skills for close combat are common, especially aboard spaceships, where firearms can cause dangerous collateral damage. Spaceships range from small scouts to massive colony ships. Worlds vary from barren moons to large gas giants, from uncolonized territories to planets teeming with people. Humaniti includes Solomani (descendants of Earth), Vilani (humans transplanted from Earth millennia ago by the long gone Ancients), and Zhodani (humans ruled by psionic nobles). The Vilani-dominated Third Imperium is the largest interstellar empire, its local nobility enjoying autonomy constrained by feudal obligations. Six major races developed faster than light travel independently: Humaniti, honor-bound catlike Aslan, winged lizard-like Droyne, sixfold symmetric manipulative Hivers, centaur-like militant vegetarian K'kree, and wolf-hybrid Vargr. The Ancients were a major race whose ruins and advanced artifacts remain. Though long vanished, their works shaped modern civilization, from seeding humans from Earth across dozens of worlds to creating the Vargr from uplifted Terran wolves.