The Fire Hose

Traveller is a gigantic universe using just the published materials, let alone the shared stuff that GM's did on their own.

Traveller also has more than one published timeline, depending on the publisher.

OG GDW goes into Megatraveller and a new long night.

GURPS: Traveller and Mongoose reject the event that leads to that dark night.

"Long night?  NEW long night?  What are you on about, Thag?"

If you know Traveller history then you know that The Long Night is the collapse of the 2nd Imperium before the rise of the 3rd Imperium.  It's 1,500 years long.

In the generic Traveller campaign, it's 1,100 years ago.

I know all this because I've been playing since before this was established.

A problem for a new player is their character is FROM the Imperium.  They grew up there, they took history classes in school, they were raised with the cultural norms of the Empire.

How do they learn this?

Well, technically, they can learn the same way I did.  Open the books and read up on it!

Just the GURPS books are a stack more than a foot tall.

I read it in little bites from 1980 or so to present.

It's a big ask to expect the player to read all that.

So, how does one get a person from TL8 USA to make a character from TL11 3rd Imperium?

I figured out a cheat.

Have them make a character from a TL8 world that joined the Imperial military.

The Imperium pretty much HAS to have a training program to bootstrap people from low-tech backwaters to productive members of the military; otherwise only the high-population, industrial and technologically developed worlds will be carrying the entire load of defending the place.

The military isn't so much interested in their recruits learning Imperial culture, as they are to get them effective at their MOS.

So our prospective character has Cultural Familiarity in their home TL8 culture and their branch of service and they get to learn Imperial culture on the fly as the game proceeds!

An entire party of these waifs works because there are a lot of undeveloped worlds.

I suddenly see how the Traveller's Aid Society came into being!