Freelance Traveller

March 2013	Department	Article Title	Author
	From the Editor		Jeff Zeitlin
	Featured Article
	Kurishdam	At Home, We Do It Like This: Slice of Life: The 30th Century Internet	Mike Cross
	Critics’ Corner	Technical Manual 1: Reprieve-class Escape Pod	Timothy Collinson
		Mongoose Traveller: The Third Imperium: Sector Fleet	“kafka”
		One-Act Adventures: Vengeance by Proxy	Jeff Zeitlin
		Orbital	“kafka”
	Up Close and Personal	Tulagai Slandon and Gamma Banner	Richard Morey
	In A Store Near You	The Showroom: Kiracu-class TL11 Large Planetary Missile Defence Submarine	Richard Perks
		The Showroom: Muller-class Passenger Hovercraft	Ewan Quibell
		Combat Exoskeleton III	Ewan Quibell
	Less Dangerous Game	Spindizzy	Scott Diamond
	Raconteurs’ Rest	Funny Fish: For Luck (Part 1)	Andrea Vallance
	Active Measures	Getting Off The Ground: New Bermuda	J.E. Geoffrey
		Getting Off The Ground: Corp World	Joel Callahan

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

From the Editor

Thirty-five years. That’s how long Traveller has been out in one form or another, and that is, therefore, how long there has been a Traveller community creating and sharing material to use with the game.

You can look at that collection of material and see a major part of the evolution of both science fiction/space opera and of role-playing games. You can see how both have gotten more sophisticated, more ‘three-dimensional’. But you can also see that Traveller started out with a certain ‘evolutionary advantage’ over its contemporaries—most of the contemporaries were strictly ‘hack-and-slash’, with no real thought for the wider setting—the world existed primarily for the characters to go out, hunt down monsters, kill them, and steal their stuff. Your goal was to do it as much as possible, and get Experience that would allow you to Level Up, and become a tougher character.

Traveller was different—your character had (the skeleton of) a real history, and skills to match, and a world that was more than a backdrop for your characters. Traveller encouraged you to ‘connect’ with your character, and with your character’s world. It wasn’t about Getting Experience and Leveling Up, it was about Doing Things, and not all such Things were violence-oriented.

Traveller was also, in a sense, the English language of role-playing games—its community did not hesitate to adopt (and adapt) ideas from any and all sub-genres of science fiction, and make those ideas part of the game.

That’s the kind of thing that makes a game special—the fact that everyone makes it their own, but with enough commonality for it to remain a shared experience. And I think it’s because Traveller was special in that way that it’s proven to have such staying power. So, let’s go forward to the next thirty-five!