Travelers with one 'L'

(Disclaimer: This post initially appeared on my Substack on 25th August)

We’d just finished our particularly epic TTRPG campaign of Aegean (though playing as mythic Vikings, rather than Ancient Greece) and the question arose of what to play next in our weekly game. Our GM is a big fan of a sci-fi TV series called “Travelers” which is thankfully on Netflix, and said he had been wanting to run a game based on the series for a while. 

So the group, at varying speeds, have all watched the series over the last couple of weeks, and I must admit to being surprised.

The basic premise is a bit like Terminator. The future is well and truly screwed, and an AI known as The Director is trying to save humanity from itself by sending ‘Travelers’ back in time to the 21st Century to try to prevent all of the major disasters from happening. However, they can’t come back to the past physically, they can only upload their consciousness into a host body which effectively kills the host. As this has terrible ethical problems, the Traveler is only uploaded into a host that the Director has identified as dying in the past. Once the TELL is determined (Time, Elevation, Longitude, and Latitude) the Traveler is transmitted in, overwriting the host personality, in what would be their final seconds of life. They arrive with the knowledge of the host’s death, so they can avoid and rectify the situation and take over the host’s life, having memorised their life through internet records and social media that has survived through to the future.

It’s a bit bleak, and I remember sitting down to watch it about five or six years ago, watching it on my lunch break at work. The doomed future, the doomed characters and their mission to save humanity from itself just was a little dark for me first time around and I only got a couple of episodes in before I started on something a little lighter and completely forgot about the series. So when the GM suggested we played it as an RPG, I was a little skeptical.

However, we fired up the first few episodes, and pushed on through.

Each Traveler team consists of five members - A Leader (FBI Special Agent Grant MacLaren, played by Eric McCormack), a Medic (Marcy Warton, played by MacKenzie Porter), a Tactician (Carly Shannon, played by Nesta Cooper), a Technician (Trevor Holden, played by Jared Abrahamson, and a Historian (Philip Pearson, played by Reilly Dolman). Each would have come to a suitably nasty end (pushed down a lift shaft, attacked by thugs, killed by an abusive boyfriend, too many head blows in underground fighting, or drug overdose), so you can see why those first couple of episodes can come across as being particularly gloomy. The characters pick up the pieces of their hosts’ lives, discover why they were in such a bad place, and try to get on with things while awaiting orders from the Director for a series of missions to save the world.

It takes a bit to get going, but it’s the time the series takes over the struggles of these characters that makes it so compelling. The first real mission they undertake is quite a small one, and it doesn’t happen until the end of episode 2, but it leads into something bigger that’ll make sense by episode 6. Things develop, there’s another faction of travelers (called, simply, ‘The Faction’) who believe the AI Director is wrong and humanity should choose its own fate. And there’s a slightly psychotic first Traveler (0001) who was supposed to die during 9/11. But these missions seem unimportant compared to the struggles of the characters in their real lives.

There are a whole set of protocols that they have to adhere to in order to preserve the timelines, including ‘don’t reproduce’ (Protocol 4), ‘don’t take a life, don’t save a life, unless otherwise directed to’ (Protocol 3), and 'in the absence of direction, maintain your host’s life’ (Protocol 5). 

In each case, Protocol 5 becomes the what makes these characters special. Agent MacLaren has a suspicious (and slightly paranoid) wife who falls pregnant. Marcy falls for the social worker who was looking after her (David, the social worker, played by Patrick Gilmore, is easily my favourite character in the whole series). Carly has to deal with an abusive boyfriend (who is also a cop) and the constant threat of having their child taken into care. Trevor may be a teenager, but the Traveler within (0115) is one of the oldest living humans, while Traveler 3326 has uploaded into the body of Philip, a heroin addict. 

Together they work through their problems, fall in love, overcome the threats, bond, develop further problems, and as an audience, we grow to love every single darn one of them. To the point that when bad things happen to them (and they happen a lot) we’re so invested in these characters that you can’t help but get emotional. 

Heck, David’s speech at the funeral of one of his clients as a social worker is incredibly powerful, and many of the scenes afterwards are absolutely heartbreaking. The poor team hardly gets a break, and it goes from one emotional gut-punch to the next before the series was unceremoniously cancelled with Season 3. Though, the storyline is perfectly wrapped up with the opportunity for a follow up.

On the whole, it’s highly recommended, but be prepared to be dragged through the wringer emotionally by the end. 

Will it work as an RPG? Can we bring the same emotional attachment to our characters as the TV series? I doubt it in my case, but we’ll see.