How to make a Traveller Sandbox

So you are part of the new Mongoose Traveller revival. Or perhaps you found one of Far Future's Traveller reprints. The core rules are pretty straight forward but overwhelming at the same time. There are lot of choices to be made when setting up a Traveller campaign. Hopefully this will help.

1. Roll up two subsectors side by side.
2. Note all the high population planets.
3. Write a short paragraph on each placing them in the context of your background (Empire, Federation, Free Space, etc)
4. Find any high tech planets (the highest ones you rolled )
5. Make notes on them.
6. Find all class A and B starports
7. Make notes on them.
8. Scan the remaining planets pick out 4 to 8 that grab your attention.
9. Make notes on them.
10. Look at your notes and come up with two to four "plots" that ties one or more locales together.
11. For each of the planets you have notes make up four "patron" encounters for each. They should start as one sentence each and be self contained in respect to the major plots.
12. Come up with 6 to 12 general patron encounters that can be placed anywhere in your subsectors. Make them flexible like (set in a seedy starport, etc)
13. Make up a rumor chart with 10 to 20 items that feeds the players into what you prepared.
14. Then use the NPC resources that were suggested to make a list of NPCs. Assign them to the various items you created above.
15. Look at your notes and decided where recurring NPCs will occurs. (Captain of the subsector Revenue Patrol, Custom Offical, Badger the Broker, etc). Probably need 6 to 12 of them. Give them a paragraph description in addition to their stats.
    

This should take about four evenings of Prep for two sub sectors probably two to three evenings for a single subsector. Each subsequent subsector will be slightly less time to prepare as you can reuse elements.

After your first adventure (or before if you are going to railroad it) evaluate the players actions and decide if any sites will be needed for the next session. Prepare it like however you do your Fantasy RPG module.

Traveller is VERY amicable to the use of Computer Software to generate many aspects of the game. In the 80s on a TRS-80 I would make printouts of a hundred random entries of what every type (subsectors, animal encounters, NPCs, etc) scan the list and pick out the ones I would be using.

Whatever you do don't just accept the first thing that pops out. Relying on totally random results leads to nonsense at times. The Traveller Charts are good but not that good.

The point of all this is to make a "kit" that you can pull out whatever you need for your campaign without spending a boatload of time in prep. Once the kit is formed then running Traveller is pretty much responding to what your players do.