In the previous article of this series, I offered up a listing of the many sectors of Charted Space that you could place Traveller campaigns in, beginning with the lightly developed Core sector and ended with Challenge magazine's Hinterworlds.

In this article, I'm going to finish up that list, running from the Old Expanses to the Trojan Reach. Along the way I'm going to hit the two best detailed sectors of Traveller space: the Solomani Rim and the Spinward Marches.

Traveller Sectors: Old Expanses to the Trojan Reach

Old Expanses . This was another land grant, which is to say another sector given by GDW to one of their third-party licensees. The Old Expanses sector was the home base of the High Passage Group, a short-lived Traveller publisher whose main claim to fame was High Passage magazine.

The Old Expanses lies on the trailing border of the Third Imperium, adjoining the K'Kree's Two Thousand Worlds. It's thus another of Traveller's classic frontier sectors. Because the Old Expanses wasn't in print for very long, it's been largely overshadowed by other nearby realms like Diaspora and the Gateway domain--both of which I covered in last month's article. However, issues #2-5 of High Passage (which were published by FASA) are pretty easy to find, so the Old Expanses might be an interesting sector if you want just a little bit of definition for your campaign.

Old Expanses (along with the aforementioned Diaspora) was also the main setting for Traveller: The New Era, though things have changed so much by then that the the data for that era is largely useless for any other play.

Reavers' Deep Sector . The most scattered of all the Traveller sectors was the one land granted to the Keith brothers. They used it for their own Marischal Adventures folios, but also for some of their material published by FASA, Gamelords, and (eventually) Steve Jackson Games.

Located between the Third Imperium, the Solomani Sphere, and the Aslan Hierate, Reavers' Deep is yet another frontier. As is often the case, there are a number of smaller states amidst those goliaths.

There is a Reaver's Deep Sourcebook that was published in extremely limited quantities by Cargonaut Press in the late 1990s, but it's largely impossible to find now. The only other background information on the area appeared in Gamelords' A Pilot's Guide to the Drexilthar Subsector and in "A Pilot's Guide to the Caledon Sector, which appeared in Traveller Chronicle #5-7. The Caledon guide has also been collected into a PDF book that was made available on Far Future's Gamelord's CD. A variety of Reavers' Deep adventures were published back in the 1980s too, while in the 1990s a variety of Reavers' Deep articles were printed in Traveller Chronicle (though many of them advanced the sector to the New Era).

Because the information is so scattered, and because it's all pretty hard to get today, Reaver's Deep probably doesn't have much value as a setting for a modern GM, but is included here for the sake of completeness.

Solomani Rim . The Solomani Rim was the second great sector of Classic Traveller, followed Spinward Marches (which we'll get to momentarily). It offers a more understandable setting for the modern player than some of the other campaigns sectors, because it centered on Earth.

The Solomani Rim isn't a great melting pot of alien races like the frontier sectors (though the Aslan and the Hivers are both pretty near), but it does offer a great story: part of the sector lies within the independent Solomani Sphere, while the rest is occupied by the Imperium, who is trying to redress old problems centering around the last Terran rebellion, about a hundred years earlier (in the Gateway Era).

There are many references on the Solomani Rim, the best of which are probably Rim of Fire for GURPS Traveller and the much older Solomani Alien Module for Classic Traveller. The Solomani's home sector is also the home of some of the later Classic Traveller adventures and double adventures.

The Solomani Rim can be used in many of the more far flung eras of the Imperium, not just the Golden Age. It's the center of the Interstellar Wars era and there's also a setting for the New Era which was published in the later issues (#10-13) of Traveller Chronicle magazine.

Spica Sector. Spica Sector would have been a bold new extension of the Traveller universe, for the first time depicting a sector mostly within the Hiver Federation, and thus full of the Hivers and their many client races. Instead Spica, as of now, is the story of the sector that didn't happen.

There were some discussions of the Spica Sector on the Citizens of the Imperium forum, but those seem gone now. Then Spica Publishing was going to publish Spica Sector books with the OK of Marc Miller, but that got canceled due to the release of Mongoose Traveller. The latest news suggests that we might still see the sector detailed in a free PDF. If so, it'll prove a nicer resource, as it's right next to the Hinterlands (which itself is adjacent to the Gateway domain and the Empty Quarter).

The Spinward Marches . The Spinward Marches is by far the best described sector in all of Traveller. Located at the spin-coreward corner of the Imperium, it's a classic frontier state where exploration and adventure are very possible. It also acts as a nice nexus, centered between the Aslan, the Vargr, the Zhodani, and the Imperium itself, upping the possibility for intrigue and even warfare.

There are complete descriptions of the Spinward Marches for almost every version of Traveller. I'll point you toward my series of Spinward Marches reviews for more information on each of them:

• Traveller Supplement 3: The Spinward Marches (GDW, 1979)
• The Spinward Marches Campaign (GDW, 1985)
• The MegaTraveller Journal #1 (DGP, 1991)
• The MegaTraveller Journal #2 (DGP, 1991)
• The MegaTraveller Journal #3 (DGP, 1992)
• The Regency Sourcebook: Keepers of the Flame (GDW, 1995)
• GURPS Traveller: Behind the Claw (GDW, 1998)
• 1248 Sourcebook 3: The Spinward States (Avenger/Comstar, 2008)
• The Spinward Marches (Mongoose, 2008)

Besides this plethora of overviews, there have also been many books published which describe individual subsectors, clusters, or worlds of the Marches. I'll detail these in a future article (though you can already find reviews of some of the cluster and world books in my ongoing Spinward Marches review series). In addition, most of the Classic Traveller adventures and double adventures are set in this area of space.

Finally, campaigns in the Spinward Marches can be extended by adventures in other adjacent sectors. Both the MegaTraveller Journal and the Regency Sourcebook included information on the full Domain of Deneb. In addition, other books and articles have detailed some of those sectors individually.

Besides Trojan Reach(es) and Foreven, which I've included in this article as standalone sectors, you should also look at the existing sources for Deneb Sector (which is still pretty sparse), Gvurrdon Sector (soon to be expanded by the Vargr sourcebook from Mongoose), and even the slightly more distant Corridor Sector (which got some good attention in the MegaTraveller era).

Theta Borealis Sector . The most far flung of all the Traveller campaign sectors is the Theta Borealis Sector, which was the land grant of Group One, another of the Traveller publishers of the 1980s. It's located five sectors spinward of the Third Imperium and two sectors rimward of the Zhodani Consulate, in a sector so far from the rest of the Traveller Universe that I'm not sure you could even call it part of Charted Space.

I suppose if you want a sector that doesn't have any of the traditional issues of the Third Imperium, you could go with this area, which was detailed through a number of world books and some ship-based adventures, all of which were connected together in the sector booklet, Theta Borealis Sector--but I've never seen most of the Group One books in my years of collecting Traveller.

Trojan Reach(es) Sector . Though The Trojan Reach (called the Outrim in some old sources) can be used as a supplement to the Spinward Marches, it's also strong enough to stand on its own. In some ways, it's like a sideways mirror of Foreven. There you have frontiers lying between the Imperium and the Zhodani and here you have frontiers lying between the Imperium and the Aslan. There are also some major independent states in the area, the most notable of which is the Florian League, probably my favorite minor human state. (Like the Darrians, a lot has been done to show off how the Florians can be human but still very unique.)

The reason that the Trojan Reach can be played on its own is that it's got two great resources. First, there's the recent Aslan book put out by Mongoose. But that itself was built on a Canadian fanzine of the 1980s called Third Imperium. Almost every issue of that fanzine centered on a new subsector of the Reach. Here's even better news: they're all available online, making the Trojan Reach super accessible.

Other Campaigns

The Trojan Reach is, as of this writing, the most recently published sector in the Traveller universe. By chance that also brings to an end my look at the sectors of the Traveller universe that could be used to (easily) run campaigns. But before I close out this second article, I'd like to call your attention to one final campaign setting of note ...

The Grand Tour. One of the most unique campaign setting in roleplaying can be found in the pages of the 21 issues of The Travellers' Digest. That magazine centered around a 21-adventure "Grand Tour", where a group of friends are given a tour of the Imperium, from Behind the Claw to Sol and back. Along the way they hit some of the most important worlds of Charted Space, including Capitol and the Aslan Homeworld. It's a campaign truly worthy of the name "Traveller".

You can find the first four adventures of the Grand Tour in The Early Adventures. From there you'd need to collect issues #5-21 of the magazine to get the rest; it's not impossible on the internet, but probably somewhat expensive. Of course, along the way, you'll also put together a collection of one of the best magazines ever written for Traveller.

I've wanted to run The Grand Tour for years, but its 4-character setup has kept it too small for me to run any time recently; maybe some day.

Conclusion

In this article I've covered another set of potential sectors to run your Traveller campaign in. The Solomani Rim and the Spinward Marches are the most obvious, but there are other possibilities. The Trojan Reach offers a pretty good, well-supported alternative. Old Expanses, Reavers' Deep, and Theta Borealis would require a lot more hunting for old publications--and a lot more design work--but could form the foundation of a very unique Traveller game. And maybe someday Spica will receive some love.

That's it for my look at the sectors you could easily run Traveller campaigns within. I'll be back in a couple of months with a final installment in these series, looking at where in the Spinward Marches you might want to run a campaign, if you decide to choose the most obvious sector for your Traveller game (as I have).