WELCOME TO HELLBOX (Traveller)

26 Aug, 2026

There are no noble rebellions against evil galactic empires in Classic Traveller. Classic Traveller is about mud, rust, and most of all the crushing weight of compound interest. You want a planet for your campaign? Give your players a rock that actively hates them. Give them Hellbox.

Hellbox is a mistake. It is a clerical error in some sector capital database. A hundred years ago, a faceless megacorp set up a massive strip mining operation here. They cracked the crust open, sucked all the heavy metals out, and packed up their drop ships. No forwarding address. They left three million indentured laborers on a rock with a dying atmosphere and absolutely no water. Fast forward to the present day. The descendants of those abandoned miners have built a society out of scavenged hull plating and pure, unadulterated spite.

The air on Hellbox is a toxic soup of silica dust and unburned hydrocarbons. You cannot breathe it for more than ten minutes without your lungs turning into bloody sponges. Everyone wears compressor masks. The masks are cheap, loud, and constantly breaking down. The sound of Hellbox is the sound of three million people wheezing through clogged filters while staring up at a sky the color of a bruised vein.

The official Universal World Profile says Hellbox's starport is class X. That means it does not exist. There is no orbital traffic control. There is no refueling manifold. There is no hotel. There is only The Scab. The Scab is a fifty square kilometer plain of fused black glass, created when the megacorp used orbital lasers to flatten the terrain for their bulk freighters. You land your ship wherever there is a clear patch. The moment your landing gear touches down, the scavengers descend on you like flies on hot shit.

They come riding loud, belching dirt bikes fueled by fermented underground fungus. They come in ramshackle buggies welded together from broken crane parts. They want your garbage. They want your water. They want the scrapings from your exhaust baffles. To them, a piece of high tech trash from a working starship is a holy relic.

The gravity here is weak. It is about a third of standard. The locals move with a strange, loping grace. But do not let their brittle appearance fool you for a second. They are mean. They are survivors. They will shank a heavily armored marine for a half empty protein pouch without hesitating.

The government is a brutal, self perpetuating oligarchy run by the Water Barons. Hellbox has no surface oceans. All the water is locked in deep, irradiated aquifers. The Barons control the massive drill rigs and the purification plants. If you want to drink, you pay the Barons. If you want to wash the corrosive dust off your ship, you pay the Barons. They sit in their fortified citadels built from stacked shipping containers, surrounded by private armies equipped with precollapse laser rifles.

The rest of the population lives in sprawling shanty towns built directly into the sides of the abandoned strip mines. These settlements are chaotic, vertical mazes of steel, tarps, and flickering neon signs powered by failing generators. The smell is a potent mixture of ozone, sweat, and cheap synthetic alcohol. Once it gets into your clothes it won't wash out.

If your players land here, they are going to need money. The ship mortgage is due. The jump drive is making a noise like a dying grox. They need to find a job, and they need to find one fast.

Roll 1d6.

1-2. A local mechanic needs someone to dive into a collapsed mining tunnel and retrieve a specific servo motor from a buried excavator. The catch is that the tunnel is filled with blind, carnivorous albino centipedes that perfectly mimic the voices of dead miners to lure you into the dark. The payout is fifty liters of purified water and a cracked fuel crystal.

3-4. One of the Water Barons wants to send a message to a rival. The players are hired to hijack a water tanker mid transport and dump the cargo into the irradiated wasteland. The pay is excellent, but the players will make a permanent enemy of a very powerful warlord who holds grudges for decades.

5-6. A desperate void cultist believes their missing leader was abducted by a rogue artificial intelligence that lives in the ruins of the old corporate headquarters. They will give the players a map of the ruins and a literal bag of shiny rocks that might actually be uncut diamonds. The AI is hopelessly depressed and just wants someone to play a digitized game of chess with it before it self destructs and takes the city block with it.

d66 street trash generator When your players wander into the bazaar, they won't find plasma swords or personal shield generators. They find garbage. But in Classic Traveller, garbage can save your life.

Roll d66.

11. A compressed air rifle that fires jagged shards of rusted metal. It jams on a roll of eight or higher, but it will absolutely shred unarmored flesh at close range.

12. A half empty canister of military grade coagulant foam. It expired forty years ago. It might stop bleeding, or it might cause severe chemical burns.

13. A hand cranked radio that only picks up the frantic, looping distress signal of a ship that crashed two centuries ago.

14. A heavy lead box containing a single, glowing fuel rod. It is highly radioactive. The vendor is wearing a thick lead apron and looks very sick.

15. A pair of goggles fitted with crude thermal imaging lenses. The battery pack is the size of a brick and weighs ten pounds.

16. A map drawn on a piece of dried human skin, detailing a safe route through a minefield left behind by the megacorp.

21. A combat stim injector. The fluid inside is black and smells like copper. Taking it grants temporary strength but permanent paranoia.

22. A set of lockpicks fashioned from reinforced plasteel. They are completely useless against electronic locks, but great for popping open ancient supply crates.

23. A localized gravity nullifier. It is broken and only works on objects smaller than a grapefruit, making them float an inch off the ground.

24. A thick, grimy manual titled How to Hotwire a Grav Tank. Most of the pages are stuck together with dried blood.

25. A canister of fungal spores. If thrown into a crowd, it creates a cloud of hallucinogenic dust that causes violent panic.

26. A fully functional robotic prosthetic arm. It is covered in spikes and painted hot pink. The neuro interface requires painful surgery to install.

31. A brick of synthetic protein paste. It provides a day of nutrition but causes intense nausea and a lingering metallic taste in the mouth.

32. A small, brass compass that does not point north. It points toward the nearest source of refined starship fuel.

33. A jagged combat knife made from a piece of broken starship hull. It vibrates slightly when drawn, emitting a low hum.

34. A flare gun with two rounds. The flares burn with a blinding white light that can temporarily blind anyone looking directly at them.

35. A pocket watch that runs backward. The vendor swears it belonged to a famous smuggler who vanished into a black hole.

36. A heavy steel chain with a massive, spiked weight on the end. A brutal, primitive weapon for a brutal, primitive world.

41. A jar of glowing blue liquid. The vendor claims it is a cure for radiation sickness, but it is actually just engine coolant mixed with crushed glow worms.

42. A frayed, spark spitting taser meant for subduing large livestock. It takes five minutes to charge between shots.

43. A heavy leather coat lined with lead plates. It is incredibly hot and cumbersome, but it offers decent protection against background radiation.

44. A small, black box with a single red button. The vendor does not know what it does, and they are too terrified to press it.

45. A bundle of incense sticks that, when burned, completely mask the smell of unwashed bodies and fear.

46. A crudely drawn wanted poster featuring a picture of one of the player characters, offering a bounty of ten thousand credits.

51. A large, unwieldy cutting torch. It can cut through an airlock door, but it requires a bulky backpack filled with unstable gas.

52. A jar of pickled eyeballs. The vendor claims they came from a mutant psychic and eating them grants brief glimpses of the future.

53. A reinforced umbrella made of kevlar. Useful for deflecting acid rain and improvised bludgeoning.

54. A small, erratic drone that follows the user around, constantly broadcasting annoying corporate jingles from a forgotten era.

55. A set of bone dice that always seem to roll sevens, unless you are betting money, in which case they roll snake eyes.

56. A heavy metal helmet welded from scrap. It provides excellent protection but severely limits peripheral vision and hearing.

61. A syringe filled with a clear liquid that temporarily paralyzes the vocal cords of whoever is injected.

62. A dusty, analog camera with half a roll of film left. The existing pictures show a terrifying, shadowy entity stalking the photographer.

63. A pair of magnetized boots. They are heavily rusted and the magnetic field is prone to random fluctuations, causing the wearer to suddenly stick to bulkheads.

64. A small vial of acid strong enough to melt through standard plasteel binders in a matter of seconds.

65. A crude, hand drawn deckplan of a heavily armed mercenary cruiser that reportedly crashed in the eastern wastes last week.

66. A genuine, functioning laser pistol. It is a masterpiece of engineering, completely out of place on this garbage world. The vendor is asking a price so low it is obviously a trap.