Freelance Traveller

Traveller Compatible Product: Career Book 1

reviewed by Allen Shock

Traveller Compatible Product: Career Book 1. Richard Hazelwood (John Griffiths and Nik Kraakenes, contributors).
Spica Publishing, available via DriveThruRPG.com and associated sites
36pp, PDF e-book
US $9.99 (on sale for $6.40 for a limited time)

On the ... Shelf?

An attractively laid out and well organized PDF. I was especially impressed with the artwork; while much of it computer generated, it’s pretty good. Mongoose should give these artists some work.

Initial Impressions

I was quite happy with the book as I originally purchased it – and then they put out an updated version with even more goodies in it. This is exactly the kind of support I was hoping we’d see from "third-party" sources. New careers are always fun, and expanded event tables are great stuff.

On Closer Inspection

We get expanded mishap and event tables for the non-military careers from the Core Book, except for the Scouts because those will be forthcoming from Mongoose. All the new event tables are "d66" format, with a lot more potential events. They can be used in place of or in conjunction with the originals. There are two new Life and Unusual Events tables to really add some spice to your characters background. Then we get into the new careers and specialties: Adventurer (explorer, treasure seeker, hunter), Bounty Hunter (skip tracer, repossessor, support), Clergy (missionary, monastic, preacher), Colonist (farmer, miner, settler), Corporate Citizen (finance, legal, administration), Militant Religious (warrior, monk, zealot), Space Patrol (operations, trooper, technical) and Worker (technician, service, labourer). The Corporate Citizen, Colonist and Worker careers take the specialties from the core book’s Citizen and expand them into full careers of their own. My personal favorite is the Space Patrol; space cops! Traditionally in OTU this job has been done by the Navy, which never made a lot of sense to me. There is now officially a Imperial Interstellar Space Patrol in my campaign.

And then we get FORTY pre-generated characters; one from each assignment of the new careers and 16 multi-career characters that also use some of the core book careers. I will go on record right now; I would purchase a book of nothing but these! What a great resource for referees! They can be used as NPCs or as PCs and they are great! Notes are included on the new skill specialty Social Science (theology).

Summary

Buy this PDF. Its simply that good. New careers, and those pregens..this is great stuff. And the presence of the "1" in the title implies that there will be more, and if so I will be all over that like a Hiver on corn dogs!