Freelance Traveller
- The Star Kingdom of Swan (Antony Farrell)
- http://www.skaran.net
This is a moderately large site named after a non-canon TNE-rules campaign that forms part of the site. The front page is designed for a large screen, a large initial graphic and a sideways table of links will cause small screens to have horizontal scrolling. Apart from that this site wont win any prizes for its HTML: text is presented in a variety of colours on a black and white speckled 'star' background. Some of the headings are underlined and confusingly look like they are links (until you hover the mouse cursor over them). However, as for content ...
The section titled "The Campaign" details the non-canon TNE-rules campaign universe from which the site gets its name. It is based on the original Solomani Rim sector dot map but with the stats changed. 75% of the sector is unknown or unaligned, with the remaining 25% split between 6 pocket empires of from 4 to 11 systems each. The TL is 9 to 12.
"Star Systems & Worlds" provides subsector stats for 3 subsectors and expanded detail of 5 systems (for the campaign). Some of these systems have a mainworld map and a temperature worksheet. While the maps look well drawn the scans don't do them justice ... they are small and have poor contrast (on-map labelling is not as clear as it could be). The temperature worksheets are not HTML tables (or preformatted text) but are low resolution scanned images!
"Starships & Spacecraft" provides a range of 39 TNE ships of TL7 to 11. Sizes range from 20 dtons to 50K dtons.
"Vehicles & Equipment" provides a further 9 TNE vehicles (TL5 -11), 8 TNE smallarms (TL9 - 11), and 1 TNE TAC missile (TL10).
"Stargate" describes an interesting quirk to this game universe. FTL travel is based either on conventional jump-2 technology, or on a network of discovered ancient stargates.
The section titles "Banners Sector" details an alternative canon TNE campaign set (obviously in the Banners sector). It shows the changes from 1117 to 1201.
"MegaTraveller Equipment" is an extensive archive of MT designed vehicles. The author is quite prolific here. Vehicles range from TL5 to 14, 2 dtons to 85K dtons, and in function from tracked tank to monitor.
In summary: In addition to providing an alternative campaign to GDW's canon, this is a useful resource of MT and TNE vehicles/ships and provides some info on the Solomani Rim's rimward side.
Improvements: Taking content and presentation separately ...
For content the "Star Kingdom of Swan" setting is intriguing but the campaign specific content is still low. More worlds need to be detailed, key personalities highlighted, etc to bring this campaign to life. I look forward to seeing more.
Presentation needs work. The world map scans could be improved (made slightly larger and have their contrast enhanced to improve legibility. Using scanned images of tables (temperature worksheets) is slack ... they should be replaced by proper HTML tables. And more thought needs to be put into the overall colour scheme (though, admittedly, the sector dot maps do look good).