"Additional Rules" booklet for Starter Traveller

[GM Joe]

To OP GM Joe;

I don't suppose you can remember the year you bought the set with this booklet in it can you?
I have a suspicion that it was probably late in the life of CT and it was produced to use up stocks of deluxe boxes - I know they made a deluxe set with the softback Traveller Book in it.

You may be right. The original Deluxe Starter Traveller set I bought back in the early 80s didn't have this booklet in it -- or if it did, I both lost it and forgot about it.

After I graduated from college and moved to IL, I discovered Games Plus in Mount Prospect. They had quite an extensive selection of Classic Traveller merchandise, all marked down! So I bought a bunch of stuff, including Starter Traveller and another Deluxe Starter Traveller. Of the two, only Deluxe Starter Traveller had the Additional Rules booklet in it.

I remember opening them both and looking through them (these were backup copies, and haven't been used to this day) and I saw that Additional Rules booklet and thought, "Crap, I must have lost my original one. It would have been nice to have had these rules back before I bought The Traveller Book and discovered the experience rules..."

That trip to Mount Prospect was probably sometime in 1993 or 1994. I remember being not-at-all confident in my ability to drive there and back without getting lost, so it was not too long after the move.

This all came up because I'm gearing up for a Traveller campaign, and was going through my CT stuff and decided to open the still-new Deluxe Starter Traveller box and take a peek at a fresh copy of the game that started it all for me. That's when I came across the Additional Rules booklet and remembered wondering whether I'd lost my original one, or if it had never had it. So I looked at the CT CD-ROM contents, and there was no sign of it. That's when I decided to ask on here, figuring someone else might know the answer as to the origins of this book, or if not, maybe we could figure it out together.

As it turns out, it appears to be rather rarer than I thought. I'd be happy if this ends up adding to the preserved materials available to the community.

 

[GM Joe]

So, there's nothing new in it. It's just stuff that is also in the Traveller Book?

It varies. The Introduction is accurate when it says the booklet includes "game rules presented in The Traveller Book and Basic Traveller."

So, for example, the first section after the Introduction in the Additional Rules booklet is Personal Combat. That gives the listings for Hand Cannon through Percussion Revolver that are on page 43 of the 1981 edition of Book 1, but which do not appear in The Traveller Book.

The next section is Starships, which (in addition to describing how to use the included TAS Forms 3 and 4) describes how to build a custom starship by contracting with a naval architect...which is in fact something included in Starter Traveller. But this section is really about rules clarifications. For example, it clarifies that starship and non-starship hull tonnage must be at least 100 tons -- just omit the jump drive from the latter, keeping the pricing otherwise the same. Another clarification is that if you want to install weaponry later, you still have to designate and provide space for hardpoints in the ship design plan. And so on.

Next up is Starship Combat, which details vector movement by giving us the Vector Movement Diagram familiar from TTB p 75 (albeit repositioned, with the two Figures side-by-side rather than stacked), and then a section on Vector Movement that starts at column 1, paragraph 5 on page 73 of TTB and continues on through the Gravity section on the same page, and then adds the paragraph on Atmospheric Braking from page 78 of TTB. We then get the section on Planetary Templates from pp 78-79 of TTB, complete with diagram, formulae, and the Standard Worlds table.

The booklet goes on similarly with sections on Worlds (dealing exclusively with the included TAS Form 7), Encounters (which presents the Events section -- Wirebushes, Cold Snap, etc.), Experience (which seems to be word-for-word from p 103 of TTB), Drugs (again, it appears to be p. 106 of TTB, plus the table from the bottom of p. 105), the three TAS Forms (the two-sided Form 3, plus Form 4 and Form 7), and finally some additional Equipment on the last page, where we get full descriptions of Handcuffs, Wrist Watch, Shotgun Microphone, Chain Saw, and Disguise Kit, plus some vehicles: Wheeled Armored Fighting Vehicle, Tracked Armored Fighting Vehicle, Dirtmover, Small Steamship, and Destroyer.

 

[Supplement Four]

It varies. The Introduction is accurate when it says the booklet includes "game rules presented in The Traveller Book and Basic Traveller."

So, for example...

Thanks. That's awesome.

 

[edmundhudson]

CTSS4-The-Lost-Rules-Special-Supplement

 

[GM Joe]

CTSS4-The-Lost-Rules-Special-Supplement

Yes, it could be considered a proto version of that modern document, I suppose. While the origins of each of the additional rules is not noted in the Additional Rules booklet, it does explicitly draw "lost" rules from multiple editions (the 1981 edition and The Traveller Book), and so is very much along the same lines as Special Supplement 4.