Freelance TravellerDrama at the Starport
This article originally appeared in the January/February 2025 issue.
Drama at the Starport. Alex Treacher with Ade Steward.
Space Weasel Productions (No website found)
24pp., PDF
US$3.99/UK£3.17
The subtitle on this folio is “A D66 ideas book”, and modulo a few pages of general explanatory information (for example, definitions of terms such as die-rolling notations and the two types of starport), the subtitle tells you the basics of what you’re going to get. Unlike other D66 tables, though, you don’t get just a single line of description or a short paragraph with a single outcome (although a few rolls are singular outcomes); you get up to four possible alternatives, and not everything is an ‘outcome’ of a situation – sometimes, all you get is the situation, and what happens next is entirely up to the referee. Or the players.
With a little work, an experienced – or, at least, imaginative – referee could actually convert most of these into “complete” Adventure Seeds, complete with six 1D-selectable denouements, and there’s no reason that many of them couldn’t be further developed from the ideas presented here into full long-form adventures.
The last two of the D66 ideas involve “mail calls”, where the PCs receive packages at the starport (this would be the equivalent of what the United States Postal Service calls “General Delivery”, other national postal services call “Poste Restante”, and isn’t a bad model for the typical OTU-compatible Traveller setting). Instead of just the one-to-four options that most of the others have, these have two simple options, and one option that suggests you roll a further 1D, on additional tables that suggest additional information about the package(s). The ‘simple’ table gives a quick description of the package and contents, e.g., “The covering letter of the package identifies the recipient as beneficiary of a recently deceased contact/former colleague/family member/old flame etc. The content is a memento of sentimental, rather than financial value.”. The ‘advanced’ table is really six tables, each of which answers a single question such as “Does the package have unusual characteristics?” or “Worrying coincidences: Not long after the package is received…”
Illustrations are used on the cover and to break up the table a little; all pictures are credited to authors and sites where the pictures are available via CC0 or CC-BY. Layout is clean, without lots of decoration to obscure the text, and the fonts chosen aren’t bad (although I wouldn’t have objected to a larger point size).
A note for those of you who like to take PDFs and print them out: This is formatted to A4; printing on US Letter paper risks cutting off the page numbers.
I’m not generally a fan of letting the dice choose ideas for me; I’d be more inclined to sit down with this, read through all the options, and choose-with-intent. That having been said, $4 for this isn’t out of line, and I’d like to see what the authors can do in expanding some of these into full adventures.