Freelance Traveller

March 2010	Department	Article Title	Author
	From the Editor		Jeff Zeitlin
	Fifth Imperium	#6, 7: 76 Plotlets, Parts 3 and 4: Planetside	Shannon Appelcline
	In A Store Near You	The Gun Shop: Squad Automatic Weapon	Scott Diamond
	Kurishdam	The Club Room: The Veloth	George M. Sibley
	Doing It My Way	Abbreviated Combat Resolution	Matt Adams
		Principles of Adventure Design	Mark Graybill
	Critics' Corner	Reign of Discordia - Traveller Edition	"kafka"
		Mongoose Traveller - The Third Imperium: Alien Module 2: Vargr	Doc Kinne
		100 Sci-Fi Adventure Seeds	Jeff Zeitlin

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The articles listed and linked above are also linked in their appropriate sections of our website.

From the Editor

It doesn’t take much to make a great plenty.

As paradoxical as that sounds, it accurately describes what we’ve found in collecting and assembling submissions for the magazine. In this issue, a mere eight articles have, once again, put us over the twenty-page mark—and we’re getting a good, continuing supply of new material.

And we’re not alone. There are at least two other fanzines—Frontier Report, and the venerable Signal GK—that are, in some sense, “alive”. Frontier Report puts out new material, as we do. Signal GK is currently in the process of converting their original print run from paper to PDF—and there’s been the suggestion that perhaps after that conversion is done, there will be a new Signal GK, with new material. We eagerly await developments; the community is proving big enough and active enough to support multiple fanzines.

Traveller is just as lively on the “pro” front, too. In addition to principal license holder Mongoose Publishing, there are several companies that are publishing good-quality supplements for Traveller, and not only for the Mongoose version—support for older versions of Traveller seems to be undergoing a renaissance as well. Just off the top of the editor’s head, there’s Samardan Press, Spica Publishing, Studio 2, Terra/Sol Games, Comstar Games/Avenger Enterprises, MilkyFish, and two previous licensees, Quiklink Interactive and Steve Jackson Games (both of whom, sadly, seem to be winding down their Traveller production). That the “pro” front is so lively is a compliment to the community, as it says that the community is perceived as being active and interested enough to support these commercial efforts. (We apologise if we’ve missed anyone in the lists above—which is itself a sign of the high level of activity in the community!)

Finally, all of this activity, taken in toto, is a compliment to Traveller itself, and to the people whose vision of a SF RPG led to each successive release of the game. The interest has been maintained for over thirty years, now. We hope to be a part of that interest and that community for at least the next thirty.