Freelance Traveller

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 We’ve had a long run of excellent unpublished items, but the inflow has slowed down, and the well is running dry.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!