Freelance Traveller

September 2011	Department	Article Title	Author
	From the Editor		Jeff Zeitlin
	Critics’ Corner	Supplement 11: Animal Encounters	“kafka”
		System Book 1: Katringa	Timothy Collinson
		Off the Table: Retief's Peace	Shannon Appelcline
		Off the Table: Not in Our Stars	Shannon Appelcline
	Raconteurs’ Rest	Drop Out (Part 8)	Ken Murphy
	Doing It My Way	Food Availability and Traveller	Terry Gardner
	Fifth Imperium	#21: Setting a Campaign: Subsectors of the Marches, Part One	Shannon Appelcline
	Up Close and Personal	“Swede” Tormundson	Sam Swindell
		Torrey Luis d'Orander	Ken Murphy
	In A Store Near You	The Showroom: TL1 Covered Wagon	Ewan Quibell
		The Showroom: Archer-class Planetary Missile Defence Submarine	Richard Perks
		Portable Low Berth	Ewan Quibell
	Active Measures	Getting Off The Ground: Reliquary	Nick Walker
		Dragonhunters of Trane	J.E. Geoffrey
	Kurishdam	At Home, We Do It Like This: Slice of Life: Synth-Meat	Mike Cross
		Lecture Hall and Library: The 17th Disjuncture	David Drazul

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

Last month, I exhorted the creative community to make a little extra effort and share their thoughts on the how and why of their creations, and closed by saying that doing so would promote others to really think about their own work, and thus the next generation of creations would be that much better. That generated a couple of ‘Why?’ questions in email, so I’m going to continue on that topic this month.

The ‘cross-pollination’ I mentioned comes from the availability of a broader base of knowledge, and a mental process that I’ve never heard a name for, where two seemingly-unrelated pieces of information suddenly ‘fit together’ and clarify and enhance one’s understanding of both. Whatever it’s called, I’ve seen it happen on the various forums more than once, and I’d like to think it happens occasionally when someone is reading an article here on something that interests them, and all of a sudden realizes that the author’s interesting idea isn’t just interesting, it also solves a reader’s problem.

But knowledge doesn’t exist in isolation. Once you know something, you know it, and are going to be unwilling (or less willing) to accept something that doesn’t ‘fit’ with what you know (that, incidentally, was the problem that a lot of people had with TNE’s Virus—it flew too hard in the face of what was already general knowledge about computers and viruses). And it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the real world, a space-opera setting, or high fantasy with strong magic—you might be willing to ignore real-world knowledge that isn’t presumptively part of the game world, but once something is established as being part of the game world, you won’t be willing to accept contradictions of that. That in turn means that your own creations are going to be more ‘in tune’ with the game world, and so will your critiques of others’ creations. It’s a self-reinforcing process that ‘raises the bar’ almost without anyone noticing. It’s also a process that I think should be encouraged.