Well in Mongoose Traveller (and the retroclone of it that is
Cepheus Engine), you don't die in chargen anymore. So you can get past chargen thankfully.
There have been a number of neat non-3rd Imperium settings (no connection to the history of the OTU settings) made for Cepheus Engine including:
These Stars Are Ours!
Clement Sector (had some stuff made for Mongoose Traveller but then switched over to Cepheus Engine along with a Cepheus Engine edition of their Clement Sector Core Book. You play people who got stranded 60,000 LY from Earth on the other side of a wormhole after a 100 or so years of colonization there. FTL can only go 2-parsecs per week instead of the full potential 6-parsecs a week we see in the standard Traveller setting and it's primarily a small-ship universe.)
HOSTILE (pretty much think Aliens-verse if it were done in the Traveller rules)
Orbital 2100 (Traveller in the Solar System before FTL)
And a bunch of other 3rd party stuff. It's pretty neat.
What did this involve? Someone party killing everyone with that plasma cannon battledress users can employ?Yeah Scarred Lands was a neat setting. I have a bunch of the old PDFs if you want. I can send them to you via gmail. The city-state books were really neat I found. The fluff was great but I've read from reviews that often the crunch and mechanics were not the best.
It recently got remade for 5e D&D and Pathfinder by Onyx Path which IIRC is a successor company to White Wolf.I've seen some of the material for Stars Without Number. It looked interesting.
I wish I could find people to actually play any of this stuff with. I've never actually gotten to play a TTRPG with anyone.
Hmm
here is are some Free Traveller settings Zozer Games offers that include a Roman-based one called Mercator. As in you're playing in the Roman Empire instead of in space.
Also, cool thing. The
Cepheus Engine SRD is free so you can get it without having to pay anything.