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       Traveller Character Generator 1.4
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  Hello! This program is a character generator for Classic
Traveller. What is Classic Traveller? It's the first version
of a science fiction role playing game created by Marc Miller. 

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  What you Need
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  A computer running Win 95, Win NT, or other 32 Bit Windows OS (sorry).
  The VB run time files, namely 40032.dll. This can be found in many places
  including one of my web sites, but is probably already on your hard drive. 

  http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Alley/8037/util.html 

  That is also the home of this program. 

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   What it does
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It generates characters based on the rules given in the 3 black books -
and prints them to a text file on your hard drive. It also now generates
characters in careers from Supplement 4: Citizens of the Imperium, plus
a custom career from Dragon Magazine #86, the careers from Alien Module 8:
The Darrians, as well as several custom careers.

It also generates characters from various alien races, including an 
implementation (not perfect) of the Droyne Castes.



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   How to Use it
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  Unzip all the files to a directory or folder of your choice. Click on
  Traveller.exe.

  Pick 'generate characters' to generate characters.
  Then pick Human (or Droyne)

  Once there, Pick a race to be., then hit roll stats.   

  Once you are satisfied with Stats, use the drop down box to pick a career. 
  Then try to enlist. If you don't make it, you get drafted. The results
  will appear in a box at the  bottom of the window labeled "Messages"

  You're now in a career. Now, you must press "Term Results". This 
  calculates the results of a term spent in that career.

  The program will now roll to see if you earned a comission. If you earn
  a comission, it checks to see if you earned a promotion. The number of
  skills you have learned in that term appears in a window labeled 
  "Skills". 

  To learn skills,  you pick from one of 4 categories. Personal Development
  generally improves your stats. Service skills generally teaches skills
  often used in that service. Advanced Education teaches advanced skills
  in that career. If you have an EDU of 8 or more, you can pick from 
  Advanced Education II, which teaches very advanced skills used in that
  career.

  The actual skill learned is determined by a die roll. The results are
  given in the Message Box.

  Once you have determined all your skills, you have the option to complete
  another term (by hitting  the 'Term Results' button or leaving your career.
  (By hitting the "Muster Out" button).  Completing another term repeats the
  above process, and ages your character by 4 years.

  If you muster out, you are given a number of mustering out benefits.
  You pick , much like with the skills, whether to take a benefit on the
  "Stuff" table, or the "Cash" table. As it implies, Cash gives you money.
  Stuff gives a variety of goodies, from starships to stat increases to 
  a pocket watch.

  There are a couple of additional features. The first is the Height and
  Mass calculation for the character. The height is generated randomly,
  depending on sex. (Men are usually taller). Weight is then calculated
  according to sex, body type and strength. The default body type is
  normal. You can select heavy build or light build by click on the
  radio buttons labeled as such. 

  If you are unhappy with the randomly chosen height, simply use the
  sliding bar to increase or decrease it. Weight is automatically 
  recalculated. If you're unhappy with the weight, feel free to enter
  whatever weight you want in the text box for it. Whatever you enter 
  will be printed out.

  The other option is preloaded homeworlds. A variety of homeworlds have
  already been entered. Simply use the drop down box to select a home
  world. If you don't like the limited selection of homeworlds, feel free
  to enter your own, simply by typing it in.

  Once you are finished, and are happy with the character, hit "Print to
  File" to print your character to your hard drive. You can then print it
  out or edit the character using notepad or your favorite word processor.
  
  You can also hit abrev form print, which prints it to a file in a format
  extremely similar to that used in GDW's 1001 Characters or Citizens of
  the Imperium.

  To create another character, simply hit Roll again. 

  



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       Options
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There are a variety of options. To change an option, go into the options
menu, and click on the item. A Check besides an option means it's in effect.

The first option is "Use Charisma Attribute?". This adds another attribute
to Traveller. What is Charisma? It's not exactly appearance, more it's a
person's presence.  This attribute was actually added in T3, but was
dropped in T4.

The main type of option is "Enhanced _______", where _______ is a career.
This option sort of evens things up for those careers that lack promotions.
By putting this option in effect, you get 2 skills per term, instead of 1.

The next option is Reenlistment check. When in effect, you must roll to 
see if you can continue in that career (or exit that career)

After that is the option for Survival. This makes character generation iffy
at best. You must roll to see if you survive that term

Then comes the most intriguing option, 'Permit Career Changes'. When in 
effect, you may change careers after mustering out or being forced out of
a career. You can only change careers once. This is non-canonical, and there
is nothing to prevent from entering the same career. Be warned, by entering
another career, you forfeit any previous earned rank.

Next comes the option to implement aging effects on statistics. At age 
34, you begin to possibly lose a point from physical attributes. For those
that feel this is unrealistic (because geriatrics should improve greatly in
the future), you may toggle them off.

Lastly comes another intriguing option. 'Print to File using D6 Traveller'
This converts the character to a whole new rules system. 
See 'D6 Traveller.doc' for more details.


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 Planet.txt
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Traveller CharGen loads a list of Homeworlds and their UPPs from a file
named 'Planet.txt'. It's purely optional to have it in the same directory.
You can edit the file yourself to add world names. They should be in the
format of:

Worldname, UPP

         For Example

JeremyWorld,A534323F
Funkytown,B473829
etc,

To make Chargen happy, please don't use any non alphanumeric characters. 
Otherwise, it will blow up, and destroy your computer. Heh, not really,
but it might crash. It all depends on what character you use.

Also be careful with your character returns. 





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 New Custom Careers
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To make things more interesting, I've created a few more careers. They 
are home made, so they might not be quite as balanced. But, they aren't
too bad.

Reporter - These are reporters. Fairly easy to enter. They have skills 
mostly focusing on dealing with people. 

Examples: Lois Lane, Walter Boyd (of 4 Day Planet)

Law Enforcement - Again, fairly easy to enter. They also have skills
mostly focusing on dealing with people, as well as weapon and vehicle
skills

Examples: Dirty Harry, Sledge Hammer, Steve McGarret, etc

Spy - Very difficult to enter, and survive. But, they acquire a wide
variety of skills. These are elite spies, employed by either governments
or corporations. 

Ex.  James Bond, Felix Leiter, Napoleon Solo, Illya Kuriochin (sp?), that
red headed woman on Soldier of Fortune, Inc.  

Scavenger - This is a career for a person on a planet whose civilization
has collapsed, and lives among the ruins.

Alternate Navy, Marine,etc - These are modified careers based on the ones in
the three black books (or the Traveller Book), only modified to include
skills introduced in High Guard and Mercenary


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Background (Not important, skip if you want) or why I wrote this program..
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Classic Traveller (CT) was eventually replaced by Mega Traveller
in the mid 80s, and then by Traveller the New Era, in the early 90s.
When GDW (the game's publisher) went under , a new version of Traveller
T4, was released by Imeperium Games. And boy, did it suck.

Because I had antcipated that T4 was going to be good, I had bought
several CT items I wanted to use. Some FASA stuff (the best) lots of
GDW stuff, even a module by Ral Partha (bad, very bad, but a previous
owner colored it in quite nicely).

But, T4 turned out to be awful. Very awful. And the head of Imperium Games
, Ken Whitman*, called me an idiot on Usenet. So, I sold the bulk of my 
Traveller stuff (keeping only the good stuff), and forgot about Traveller
for a year or so.

Anyway, the upshot of it is, it turns out I missed Traveller. Not liking 
Mega Traveller, nor T:TNE, nor the abysmally terrible T4, I acquirred the
original Traveller rules, and started to use them. But, character generation
was a bit slow, so I looked for a character generator. Couldn't find any, 
so I wrote this.


* Oddly enough, it seems Ken Whitman's new company, may ressurect one of my
favorite RPGs - Dark Conspiracy! However, he persists in calling it 
'Dark Conspiracies', so I'm hopeful yet very , very afraid. 


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      What it doesn't do:
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It doesn't generated characters based on Mercenary, High Guard, or the 
various alien modules (besides the Darrians). It's not that I don't want to
I just plain don't have those books, so it's impossible for me to put them
in the program. 

When and if I acquire Mercenary, High Guard, etc, I'll update this
program to include character generation information in them.  If you have an
extra copy of these books, and want to sell them cheaply or want to donate 
them  (I'm usually broke) drop me a line.

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      A Plea!!
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I'm looking for Traveller Careers/Alien Races for this program! If you 
have any in old magazines, JTAS, Alien Modules or whatever, please send
me a photocopy to my snail mail address below, or a scanned copy to 
my email address.  This is alright legally according to the owner of
Traveller (as it's all OOP anyway).

 Or if you have an original you don't want, I have some
extra Traveller stuff to trade.



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     Problems/Bugs/Features
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 1) For a couple of reasons I kept Gun Combat and Blade Combat as
single skills, instead of breaking them up into separate weapon types. Why?
A) It's simpler and B) It's a rules mod I use in my campaign. I mean, if
someone has Carbine-1, he's going to be roughly as good with a Rifle. Pistols
are a strech, but it works okay in Shadowrun...


 2) There's a similar problem with Vehicle skill. I've broken it up into
vehicle, Grav, and ATV. You can assign a specific vehicle by just using
a text editor/word processor. 
      

I'm working on a way to fix these two things without re-writing the whole
program, but at present, the solution eludes me. 


 3) Printing to Print might just crash the program. I don't have a printer,
so quite frankly, I don't know if it works.

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     Misc Legal Stuff:
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 Traveller is a trademark of Far Futures Enterprises, and is used here 
without permission. It's use here should not be construed as a challenge 
to that trademark.


 This program is copyright 1998 by Jeremy Reaban. It's freeware - use and
distribute freely. However, this program may NOT appear on any cd-roms 
without my permission.

 Also, I'm not responsible for any damages that might happen through this
programs use. Not that you could really prove it, anyway, but still, I should
put it. 

========================-------------------==============----------------
     Thanks:
--------------=========================----------------------------------

   Marc Miller - For Creating Traveller
   All the people at GDW - for helping make Traveller great. RIP, GDW
   The Keith Brothers - Love your work for Traveller. It's brilliant! 
    The Sky Raiders adventure trilogy is the greatest set of modules I've
    seen for any system
   Lionrock - for the music I grooved to while writing this program
   KNSX - ditto
   Sean Schoonmaker - For trading me Citizens of the Imperium. Without his
    generosity, there'd only be 7 careers, and likely I would have stopped
    at version .50
   Gary Hickerson - For trading me the Darrian Alien Module




   Jeremy Reaban
   sirlamorak@geocities.com

   Snail Mail

   PO Box 496
   Dittmer MO 63023
 
 
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        What's New/Revision History
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1.40  Got 'The Traveller Adventure', and was delighted to discover that it
contains rules for the Vargr, as well as a decription of a couple of other
aliens. 

1.30A A few more enhanced careers (Army, Marines, & Scouts), as well as
some bug fixes.
 
1.30 A couple more careers - an enhanced Naval Career (using some skills
from High Guard), and the "Scavenger" (see TravMisc.txt for more info)

Also added: Half Term Support - if you miss your survival roll, then
you can just be wounded, and serve half a term. 

And when you get blade,bow, or gun a second time in mustering out,
you know get your skill increased (as per the rules)

1.20 I got back internet access, so I am posting this. New Features:
Droyne support (as per Twilight's Peak). It's not completely accurate,
I had to make some trade offs. 

Also added a Subsector generator. It creates one and writes it to file.
It uses the semi-standard format for subsector data. 

Also added some cheat codes (you have to discover how to access them 
yourself ;-}  ) in the character generation for humans.

1.10 Added Proper support for the Darrians, with their correct stats and
careers. Also added Aslan as a race. This is now the largest (code size)
program I've ever written. The source is over 275kb. Luckily, most of
it's repetitive.

Also, I've written a Character Generator for the D6 system. It's universal,
and includes modules from several D6 games, including my D6 Traveller
conversion. It's available from the same site as this program. 

1.00 Added (possible) support for printing to a printer, added some custom
careers to bring the total number of careers to #22. Cleaned up some stuff.
Added support for Darrians, using unofficial (guesses) as to their stats.
Added support for another characteristic, Charisma, as an option. 
Added support for D6 Traveller characters. 


.90 Added support for Homeworlds read from a text file, to speed creating
characters.

.80 Added Support for a new Alien Race, the Bwaps (See Jtas #11). Also 
added a streamlined version of my MassCalc program, so a character's
Height and Mass is calculated. And biggest of all, I forgot to include
a Randomize statement, so characters generated were not random! D'oh!
This has been fixed, and I feel terrible

.75 Fixed a couple of bugs

.71 Fixed a bug.

.70 Added the option to change careers. Also added the aging effects (as
an option)

.60  Got Citizens of the Imperium (Thanks!). Added the careers from that, 
including several new skills. 

.50  Implemented several options - options to check for re-enlistment, option
to check for survival, option to give athletes and others 2 skills per term

.40  Fixed a bug in the Engineering skill. Added the Athlete career from
Dragon #86 by Michael Brown, slightly modified. Still working on the 
addition of Droyne characters. 

.30  Upon re-reading Book 1, I discovered Scouts get 2 skills per term. D'oh
So, it's fixed. Also upon re-reading Twilight's Peak, discovered that it
contains info on Droyne characters. Am working on adding them

.20  First Public Release - creates human characters according to the 3
black books

.10  Convert my SF char generator to Traveller.

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   End of Document (well, not quite)
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