I have played Traveller on many occations. I had some of my best games while running Traveller too. As for advice:

1. Good start on the generation of the Universe. Make it your own. Don't worry about what is already in the book, use what you want and throw out the rest. The book is just a set of guidelines anyway.

2. Pull on what you know. If you are familiar with Shadowrun (I am too) then use what you know. You don't have to use all the computer and hacking from Shadowrun, but Contacts and jobs are key to the success of the game system. So, using that aspect of Shadowrun will enhance your game. Just try to keep it from becoming a Shadowrun game in Space using a D20 system. For now, contacts and job concepts will do nicely.

3. Do something unique or interesting. I like the first job you have set up, however, what if the world the players are on is attacked by an unknown race of aliens and the planet is destroyed? They could be caught in this attack while trying to escape and be forced to steal a starship to get off the planet. This will automatically push the players into one place where they all have to work together to escape.

I hope this helps. Let me know.

Steven

best way to get started with something like this is to invent some villains, and maybe an organization or two.

after the first session, count the aproximate number of rounds played during the last session and give your "off screen" characters that many "actions". keep them in the dark as much as they would were they players, but figure out what their "moves" are, how their plos are developing... give them die rolls like everyone else.

Its always fun to see how much story generates this way. the players are gonna do what their gonna do, no matter how you coax them... so the more they miss and/or ignore the plot; the more the villains get their act together... and the better the final conflict!

Well.... I found a nifty program to help with the universe generation. "Heaven and Earth", it's a few years old, but thankfully since I'm just doing a "random" generation here, it doesn't matter too much what system I use as long as I like the spread. A tad more detailed than I needed, but it's a start. I'm going to run with a fairly small spread (maybe only 20 or so colonized systems, the rest uncharted) so I just needed the system/planet generation. After that, I made a map for my players, that just shows the star layout (with Solo, Binary, Trinary). I'll fill in the inner worlds later, but I like having that vast empty frontier surrounding it all.

img436.imageshack.us/img436/...l5nt.png
PNG for whoever wants it. It can at least save you some time laying everything out. I have a larger PNG/layered XCF/etc for anyone who REALLY wants it. It's only half layered though. Took a break for lunch and mistakenly finished it off by editing the background instead of my icon layer. *cries* So I'll have to redo about half of it when I fill in the inner worlds.

As far as the setting goes, Serenity helped kickstart that. All humans, with only a few empires (the Chinese being one, and I'm tempted to make the Catholic Church another ;) Psionics are a new-age legend. And speaking of new-age, there's a group of nutjobs that worship jumpspace as god and promote unshielded contact. Yes, the same unshielded contact that drives you nutso. And they don't so much "promote" as hijack ships and unblock all the windows and observation decks.

I'm getting together with a bunch of friends to watch Sin City this weekend, hopefully I can scrounge up some players then.