Freelance Traveller

August 2011	Department	Article Title	Author
	From the Editor		Jeff Zeitlin
	Critics’ Corner	Off the Table: Retief: Envoy to New Worlds	Shannon Appelcline
		Off the Table: Dorsai!	Shannon Appelcline
		LBB9: Library Data	“kafka”
		The Third Imperium: Tripwire	Jeff Zeitlin
	Raconteurs’ Rest	Drop Out (Part 7)	Ken Murphy
		TravCon 11-Conference Report	Timothy Collinson
	Fifth Imperium	#20: Genre-ic Plot Seeds, Part Five: The Scientific SF Genres	Shannon Appelcline
	Up Close and Personal	Klaus Bögel Andor	Narciso Maeso
	In A Store Near You	The Gun Shop: PW-S34 “Crowdpleaser”	Colin Campbell
		The Showroom: Lisse-class Cargo Submarine	Richard Perks
		TL12+ AutoDoc	Scott Diamond
		Robotic Wardrobe	Ed Swaneck
	Active Measures	Ghost Ship	J.E. Geoffrey
		Filch	Michael Brown
	Kurishdam	At Home We Do It Like This: Slice of Life: Smoking in the Twilight Sector	Mike Cross

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From the Editor

I am constantly amazed at the level of creativity of the Traveller community. Hardly a day goes by without one forum or another having a new or updated thread with a starship, NPC, tool, weapon, campaign area, world, et cetera at center stage. While certain names or handles do tend to appear more often than others, it’s not unusual to see new names attached to some of these shared efforts. I applaud these efforts, and urge that they continue.

I do note, however, that many of these efforts are best described as ‘incomplete’. Often, all that the creator posts is the final product, with little or no discussion about how it can be fit into a campaign, or what problem it was intended to solve. This is less important with ‘local color’ items, such as discussions of customs, or incidental purchases (such as things like Major Strong’s Iron Rations, which appeared last issue)—but for starships, weapons, animals, and so on, it can become important. The sort of additional background information that comes in such discussion is what distinguishes your carnivore-chaser from all the other carnivore-chasers out there, or allows a party of PCs to evaluate whether your take on a 200-ton merchant is a better or more interesting choice than a ‘stock’ Empress Marava, or whatever. It also lets other players and referees decide whether your work can be incorporated into their campaign without doing violence to either your concept or theirs.

Thus, I once again exhort everyone to really go that extra step, and think about your creation, and its place in the universe, and then to share your thoughts on it. And to look at others’ creations with the same eye, and discuss them. Such discussions can—and I can say from experience, often do—open up new lines of thought, and provide new areas to do some basic study about, and ‘cross-pollinate’ the imaginations of everyone involved. And that’s good for the community, because it results in the next generation of creations being even better.