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*Freelance Traveller

The Electronic Fan-Supported Traveller® Resource

December 2011

 

December 2011 Department Article Title Author
From the Editor   Jeff Zeitlin
Critics Corner Twilight Sector Campaign Setting Sourcebook, Revised Edition kafka
Tinker, Spacer, Psion, Spy Jeff Zeitlin
Off the Table: To Dream of Chaos Shannon Appelcline
Off the Table: The Praesidium of Archive Shannon Appelcline
Raconteurs Rest Drop Out (Part 11) Ken Murphy
Doing It My Way Traveller: Childs Play Mark Graybill
Up Close and Personal Bancroft Nassir Pham-Trask Ken Murphy
In A Store Near You The Showroom: Eisenhardt-class Armored Limousine Ewan Quibell
Active Measures Lady Luck Andrea Vallance
Kurishdam At Home, We Do It Like This: Slice of Life: Highways and Traffic Grids Mike Cross
Multimedia Gallery Image from Second Life Traveller Jeffrey Schwartz

This issue also contains a consolidated listing for all articles published in 2011

Download this issue: ANSI A (US Letter) format or ISO A4 format

The articles listed and linked above are also linked in their appropriate sections of our website.

From the Editor

This issue marks the end of our second full year of publication. In that two years, we’ve put out as many issues as the original print Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society did before being folded into Challenge magazine—and we probably have as much content as that print run (remember, we’re using full-sized pages, vs. the digest-sized JTAS). Perhaps, though, it’s not really fair to make that comparison—after all, the original print JTAS wasn’t building on over thirty years of Traveller development, with a large and experienced community.

That thirty-odd years of development didn’t happen in a vacuum, either—it would be hard to deny that today’s Traveller has been influenced by advances in scientific knowledge, and by themes and ideas in science fiction. Those changes have, in some cases, reinforced what the community has seen as flaws in Traveller; in others, they’ve led to sea changes in the rules, the setting, or our views of either. Other changes involve the very perception of what a role-playing game is.

Those changes are reflected in the style and quality of the articles that you, the community, have submitted to Freelance Traveller. Each type of article has its own way of expressing it, but it’s definitely there in all of them. The result is to make Traveller a richer experience, an interactive and collaborative story, rather than a mere game of ‘Let’s Pretend’, complete with stereotypical Good Guys and Bad Guys. It means that ‘Universe’, in the phrase “In My Traveller Universe”, is more than just a shorthand word for each of our individual versions of a Traveller setting; it carries with it the implications of depth and detail that the real universe does.

That’s what thirty-odd years of Traveller development means, and as Freelance Traveller’s editor, I’d like to thank the community—once again—for your contributions to the beginning of the next thirty years of Traveller, at the end of which I hope someone will look back, and view Freelance Traveller as an important building block of what to them will be ‘the past sixty years’.