Freelance Traveller

Startown Liberty

by Ewan Quibell

This article originally appeared in the November/December 2024 issue.

Startown Liberty. John Marshal.
Gamelords (defunct, no website)
51pp., PDF
US$6.00/UK£4.62 or on the Far Future Apocrypha 1 CD-ROM

Startown Liberty was written to provide a number of encounters for PCs who frequent Startowns. It’s a pretty basic premise and the book does what it says on the cover. It provides a number (9 in fact) of table for the Referee to roll random encounters for the PCs who are wondering around Startown.

It then goes on to describe those encounters in more detail to put some flesh on the bones. It’s in a Patron encounter layout there being 1 to 6 different options for the encounter and tries to provide some variety, and the author does in fact reference 76 Patrons in the introduction.

I think that Patron encounters, which generally have 1 to 6 options so you can roll a die and choose one at random, should have a default option 0, which is the patron encounter is what it appears to be. If one of the options is “all appears to be as described” I think this is a cop out, I mean what’s the point of writing that? What help does that give the Referee? Also I think that there should be 6 options which provide variety and if you bundle one option through numbers 1-3 you have lost two opportunities to help out the Referee by sparking their imagination with different outcomes.

It’s a 1984 product so I’ll give it some leeway, it being only 10 years after the publication of Original D&D so there wasn’t the experience in Refereeing that there is today and what experience there was wasn’t as accessible and available as it is today on the internet. But it is padded an awful lot. If it was written today you could strip out a lot if not all the “GM’s advice” that’s written into it. The last two pages of “Referee’s Notes” are just this. Thinking back, I ask myself would have this been valuable to me at the time? It might have been, probably, but now it’s superfluous, or rather available on the internet, or written in books specifically about how to be a Referee.

It does try and provide a mechanic for reactions to the PCs to the encounters that is a slight variation to those in the rules, along with a perception mechanic by rolling under the PCs intelligence which was new at the time. Which I’ll give John credit for. And it’s an ok mechanic if you need one and you’re playing Classic Traveller. John also gives us a mechanic for alcohol tolerance and the effects on dexterity when the PC becomes drunk (which he credits to Marc Miller). John does say that these are presented with “tongue firmly in cheek” but as I’ve never thought about this before they seem like an ok mechanic so I’d give them a go. There may be better ones that have been printed since but I’ve never had cause to look them up to use them.

As to the encounters themselves they are pretty standard stuff. Back in the day when there was limited access to gaming materials this was probably ok, or good. If you hadn’t experienced con men you wouldn’t know what the cons might be, and then this would have been a benefit. There is a lot better stuff out there nowadays. John duplicates encounter in the different tables again limiting the opportunity to aid the referee. He details street encounters, different types of entertainment (read drinking) establishments and encounters within them and finishes with criminal encounters.

The artwork is by William H. Keith Jr, and I like it. I have a soft spot for it. To me it’s Traveller, it’s the artwork that’s all over the early Traveller material, and it’s The Traveller Book that introduced me to Traveller, and roleplaying really, back in the day.

But is Startown Liberty worth the £4.62 it will cost you to get a copy from DriveThruRPG? No. It’s dated. There is better stuff all over the internet that will have you sparking ideas for your games that this won’t. I mean it might give you one or two, or you could combine a few to make them interesting (you’d probably have to). So why did I bother reading it? I hear you ask. I have it in paper from when I was collecting and it caught my eye when I was skimming DriveThruRPG and I wondered if there was anything in it that was worth having. And the answer is not really. I mean it’s not that bad for what it is, but it’s dated and there is better stuff out there that won’t cost you anything. Spend your gaming cash on something else.