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*Freelance Traveller

The Electronic Fan-Supported Traveller® Resource

March 2011

March 2011 Department Article Title Author
From the Editor   Jeff Zeitlin
Critics Corner Mongoose Traveller The Third Imperium - Sector Fleet kafka
Mongoose Traveller The Third Imperium - Crowded Hours Jeff Zeitlin
Raconteurs Rest Drop Out (Part 1) Ken Murphy
Up Close and Personal Yohan Gleiser Ken Murphy
In A Store Near You The Showroom: TL-1 Buggy

Ewan Quibell

The Gun Shop: Sternmetal Polymer One-Shot Scott Diamond
Active Measures Smoke Test Bill Cameron
The Green Dagger Michael Brown
Multimedia Gallery contributions by Per-Olof Bergstedt and Ian Stead  
Doing It My Way Character Detailing Rules: Its In The Cards: Character Motivation for Traveller Jeff Zeitlin
The Thick Plotzes (compiled by the Freelance Traveller staff)  

Download this issue: ANSI A (US Letter) format or ISO A4 format

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

From the Editor

The time has come, the editor said, to ask for many things… for ships, and rules, and adventures, and aliens, and things.

OK, so that’s not the way Lewis Carrol wrote it. Nevertheless, it pretty much scans the same, and it does express an important thought: Freelance Traveller needs contributions. We’ve had a long run of excellent unpublished items, but the inflow has slowed down, and the well is running dry.

This issue contains two reprinted articles—“Smoke Test”, an adventure by Bill Cameron, and “The Thick Plotzes”, a compilation over many years of ideas for throwing a monkey wrench into the works—and, quite frankly, that’s more reprinting than we’d like to see. Yes, we’re willing to reprint articles already on the website—we do have well over a decade’s worth—but resorting to that too often suggests that the magazine is no longer viable—and neither we nor you (based on your feedback) really seem to believe that.

So, we’re reminding you that Freelance Traveller survives on contributions from you, our readers. We’re also reminding you that just because you don’t think you can write doesn’t mean you really can’t, and the editor’s job is to help you beat your article—or article framework—into something publishable, by working with you, proposing partial rewrites, and taking care of the drudgework like adding the little curly quotes and correcting the spelling goofs that even the best spell checkers can’t catch. But the editor can’t do his job without you doing yours—writing the basic article, and responding to the editor’s inquiries and suggestions.

We monitor the various Traveller forums; we see interesting ideas discussed there, and occasionally we suggest that they be turned into articles. Sometimes, we don’t get follow-through. That makes us sad, because it means that potentially excellent articles aren’t getting written.

Please, step up to the plate and write! We can’t put out the magazine without your help!