One of the few appealing things about Dungeons & Dragons aside from its thriving community is its ubiquity, the understanding players have when picking it up, even for the first time, that lore invention is encouraged (not to say, necessary). Though it has a default realm (Faerûn, or the Forgotten Realms), I would venture to say that the majority of players who use the system choose to set their games in other worlds - worlds of their own creation or realms from favourite pieces of media. Its standard "races" are ubiquitous and uncreative, which means they can be picked up and flavoured to fit just about anywhere.

Traverse, however, is not only an original game without a community - it's a game with a built-in original world! Its unique species are fully tied to the history and geography of its planet, which may result in the impression that there are two huge things to learn when a player first takes up the manual: not only the brand new mechanics, but also a detailed world! Even an enterprising game leader would find it difficult to extricate something setting-neutral from the standard game manual - and so I've done it for you.

Though the standard manual encourages players and game leaders to invent, to take and leave pieces as they wish, to do so on a major scale (to transport the game to a different fantasy world) would be an enormous undertaking. So here's Traverse without the trappings! The liberating mechanics are still here, of course, and the explicit feminist flavour, but its playable species and heritages have been stripped to their most basic archetypes and its lore and location appendices have been removed.

No more made up words - instead of Drenn, it's "Reptilian"; it's not Tulean, it's Elvish; there are no longer three "human" people groups, there's just the very general one. No more fictional histories, cultural portraits, or canonical example characters - instead, there's all the space in the world to apply your own flavour and lore.

Hopefully this new edition provides players new to the system a better leg up, a quicker way to get into the mechanics. Lore and flavour text can be a big barrier! It is my dream that this gives players who were overwhelmed or turned off by a specific setting an opportunity to try this system - because I still believe it's an amazing one.

Happy adventures!