Freelance Traveller

October 2013	Department	Article Title	Author
	From the Editor		Jeff Zeitlin
	Featured Article
	Kurishdam	Lecture Hall and Library: Jump Destinations: Tanna-Sheru, Alkaiden System	Ken Pick
	Critics' Corner	Mongoose Traveller Adventure 3: Trillion Credit Squadron	“kafka”
		Aliens of the Rim	Rob Prior
		Other People’s Toys: Derelict Starships	Jeff Zeitlin
		Denizens II: Biaxial System	Jeff Zeitlin
	Active Measures	The Bellona Intrigue	Michael Brown
		Getting Off the Ground: The Color of Monks’ Robes	Dwayne Walstron
	Up Close and Personal	Shuchithra	Jeff Zeitlin
	Raconteurs' Rest	Drop Out [Part 25]	Ken Murphy
	Doing It My Way	The Ship’s Locker: Limiting Without Specifying	Michael Wakefield
		A System for Character Improvement	Ken Bearden
	Kurishdam	Art and Entertainment: Beam Dancing	Jeff Zeitlin
	Confessions of a Newbie Referee	#4: The Game That Wasn’t	Timothy Collinson
	In A Store Near You	Cargo Lifter	Ewan Quibell
		The Showroom: Holmes-class Air/Raft	Ewan Quibell
		The Showroom: Luderitz-class Undersea Mining Trawler	Ewan Quibell

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

From the Editor

Last month, I summarized how Traveller makes it possible to play non-combat scenarios, and closed by suggesting that the type of SF that influenced Traveller was at least partly responsible for that. Rather than looking at specific works, such as Piper’s Terro-Human Future History or Tubb’s Dumarest series, I think it would be more appropriate to look at what I want to call, for lack of a better term, the ‘shape’ of SF leading up to the time that Traveller was first published.

The late 1950s and early 1960s were a period of transition, from what is now viewed as ‘classic pulp’ to what has come to be called New Wave. The characteristics of New Wave SF that are relevant to Traveller’s development are principally a focus not on archetypical characters such as the Scientist, the Inventor, or the Adventurer, but on ordinary people, often caught up in extraordinary situations. It was also a time where exploration of social norms and changes to them were beginning to become prominent, and technology (to include ‘mental powers’, a.k.a. psionics) was less an end in itself than a tool for exploring those changes.

Conflict in pulp SF often meant fighting it out with weapons—man vs. man, man vs. alien, or man vs. alien beast. The New Wave moved away from that, as often as not making the conflict into man vs. himself, or vs. his better nature—conflicts of ethics or honor, of understanding oneself or one’s fellow, rather than merely matching wills. It represented in some senses a maturation of the genre, but it also opened up the field to the kind of stories that play to the strengths of Traveller and of other role-playing games. (More next month.)