Freelance Traveller

August 2013	Department	Article Title	Author
	From the Editor		Jeff Zeitlin
	Featured Article
	Active Measures	Benchmark	Guy Garnett
	Critics' Corner	Spinwärts-Marken	Timothy Collinson
		Starfarers Gazette #2	“kafka”
		Off the Table: Science Fiction Hobby Games: A First Survey	Jeff Zeitlin
		Attack Squadron: Roswell	“kafka”
	The Shipyard	Mongoose Traveller Designs: Murmansk-class Scout Support Tender	Scott Diamond
	Raconteurs' Rest	Drop Out [Part 24]	Ken Murphy
	Doing It My Way	Character Detailing Rules: Starting Early	Bo Wozniak
		Expanding the UWP: Governments	Jeff Zeitlin and Glenn Grant
	Confessions of a Newbie Referee	#2: Canon	Timothy Collinson
	Active Measures	The Sons of Rudurgu	Michael Brown
	Kurishdam	Games People Play: Sekhoma	Jeff Zeitlin
	In A Store Near You	The Showroom: Metzger- and Sintzernich-class Passenger Hovercraft	Ewan Quibell

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From the Editor

One of the strengths of Traveller has always been that there’s room for characters and adventures that don’t have or require combat skills. It is, perhaps, understandable that scenarios that are open to combat dominate—but that’s largely a matter of choice, rather than a near-necessity imposed by the system or setting, due to a lack of development in non-combat areas.
But, how do you encourage players to explore non-combat scenarios?

Traveller has an answer to that: Make the player think about their character’s mortality. Traveller, in its first incarnation, was unique in that it was possible for a character to die before the game even started. That was pretty quickly house-ruled, and recent editions retain pre-game death only as an option.

But that wasn’t the only way Traveller could get players to care about their characters. The entire character generation process was itself a way: Instead of simply rolling up a set of stats and maybe a couple of default skills, and sending the character out into the world, Traveller provided a character generation process. Characters had ‘prior careers’ in which Things Happened, and the Things that Happened could influence the player’s choices for the character’s subsequent development. Even the choice of prior careers offered the options, from the beginning—the character with the scientific bent could aim for the Scouts, the wheeler-dealer could go for the Merchants, and the Combat Monster could go for the Army or Marines. But regardless of what you chose, you, the player, were in a sense right there alongside your character—and there’s never been a better way to bond with a buddy—or a character—than to share danger with him.