Freelance Traveller

reviewed by Peter Trevor

Traveller Core Route Maps (Clifford Lineham)

(http://www.geocities.com/traveller_core_route)

 

The site describes itself as ...

"The intent of this site is to provide maps for the Core Route. No histories / descriptions are going to be written. No cultures other than Zhodani, and a few Droyne, will be named on the maps. Over 160 sectors will be created before this project is completed."

... and it keeps true to this 'mission objective'. The HTML is elementary, and there are few on-page graphics. Some of the pages have very large tables that on a 56K modem can take a few minutes to load (even without graphics). But what you get is a resource!

Most of the site is a catalogue of the 160+ sectors on the way to the galactic core. Many have downloadable SAR format files, the sector archive file type of Jim Vassilakos' "Galactic" software. (If you don't have this DOS program then get it now, it might not have the system generation functionality of "Heaven&Earth" but it is a fast sector/subsector viewer and campaign note taker.) Rather than downloading each sector individually, you can instead choose to download the 97 currently mapped sectors (in SAR format) of the 'core path' as a single 1.1Mb ZIP file. There are also 12 other sectors from various sources available.

On other pages you will find a table of sectors with subsector names given where known. And a map of the Milky Way galaxy at 8 parsecs a pixel! (This 4.4Mb Jpeg can be downloaded as an 800Kb ZIP file.)

In summary: if you're either a Traveller astrogation freak or you are running a campaign based on the Zhodani Core Expeditions then this site is for you! Accept no substitute.

Improvements: the main list is wide and if your browser window isn't large enough it word wraps and becomes confusing. I had my browser maximised to 1152 x 864 and it seemed that much smaller would have problems. It would be better to have horizontal scrolling or a different layout. I haven't had a chance to install corepath.zip yet so I don't fully know what's in the SAR files (that'll have to wait for the weekend) ... but someone should develop a few adventures to run along the way.