Freelance Traveller

Foreven Worlds: Creatures of Distant Worlds

reviewed by Brett Kruger

This article originally appeared in the March/April 2020 issue.

Foreven Worlds—Creatures of Distant Worlds. Dale E. McCoy, Jr.
Jon Brazer Enterprises https://jonbrazer.com
29pp., PDF
US$10.00/UK£7.65

The PDF document consists of 29 pages, which includes the cover page, a disclaimer page, table of contents and 4 pages of ads at the end, which leaves 22 pages of content. Not too bad for AU$15, better if you can get it when on one of the numerous sales on DriveThruRPG.

The book starts with a great two page introduction with five different ideas on how to use the creatures in your own adventures. The information is detailed enough to hopefully get your imagination working but not so much as to tell you do this, this and this. I think there is enough information for even a new GM to use the creatures outlined in the following pages.

Next come 17 pages of creatures, one type per page. Each page includes a description, combat tactics, ecology and habitat and one or more characteristic blocks of different varieties of the creature. The characteristic blocks are standard Mongoose Traveller 2nd edition statistics so are useable for most versions of Traveller. I found the description of each creature the most interesting for two reasons. First, the descriptions are clearly inspired, at least to my mind, by creatures from movies and TV shows. It became a fun little game as I read the book to try and work out where the inspiration came from. Some were self-evident, others not so much. The second reason I liked the descriptions stemmed from the first, knowing a source for the creature gave me ideas on how I could use the creature in my own games. The creatures are varied enough to use on almost any world your characters might find themselves. Oh and yeah, the artwork is great throughout the book and they definitely add value to the book.

After the creatures is a page of stats for everyday creatures from Earth, which gives you a good basis of comparison for the previous creatures. The final two pages are the Traits pages, which gives you an outline of each of the traits covered throughout the book. This is especially good if you don’t have the Mongoose 2nd edition core rule book and want to pick up Creatures of Distant Worlds for use in a non-Mongoose Traveller game.

So overall a really worthwhile edition to your Sci-fi gaming collection. Good formatting, clean, easy to read with great artwork. Only two things I can think of that would make this book better. First, a little more detail into where you would find the large and gigantic creatures, as opposed to the standard versions of them, such as giant creature X is 5 times less likely to be encountered and even then only in X locations. I guess this does allow the GM to be creative but would be helpful to new GMs. Second, more creatures!

When is edition 2 coming out?