Freelance Traveller

Mar/Apr 2021	Department	Article Title	Author
	From the Editor		Jeff Zeitlin
	Featured Article
	Doing It My Way	Pirates of the Spinward Main	Neil Lucock
	Critics’ Corner	See How They Run	Jeff Zeitlin
		The Legend of the Sky Raiders	Ewan Quibell
		Cepheus Journal	Jeff Zeitlin
		A Fistful of Credits	Ewan Quibell
	In A Store Near You	Buckling Your Swash: High-Tech for Hand-to-Hand Combat	Jo Jaquinta
	Columns	Confessions of a Newbie Referee: #49: Words of Affirmation	Timothy Collinson
	The Prep Room	Cardboard Figures	Ewan Quibell
		What Is Cepheus Störtebeker?	P-O Bergstedt
		Finding Your Way Around the Starport: Bars and Brothels	Benedikt Schwarz
	Doing It My Way	Buying Used Starships	David Billinghurst
		Fury Tank Battle	Ewan Quibell
	Active Measures	Spaceship Classification Societies as Traveller Patrons	Chris Barlow
		The Edge of Helium	Timothy Collinson
	Raconteurs’ Rest	Power Play	Roger Barr

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

From the Editor

In looking over the past more than ten years of Freelance Traveller magazine, and even longer as a website, it occurs to me that the focus has been almost exclusively the ‘crunchy space opera’ genre that Traveller was originally written for. The submission guidelines as they presently stand encourage that sort of focus in submissions. However, in the past few years, we’ve see Traveller-compatible rules applied to other genres—Independence Games has applied them to “action movies” and Westerns; Michael Brown has applied them to “film noir” and post-apocalyptic survival, P-O Bergstedt (of Zhodani Base) is applying them to post-medieval sea piracy campaigns (see “Cepheus Störtebeker” in this issue), and Terra/Sol Games and Steve Attwood (Alegis Downport) have applied them to fantasy—and those are only the ones I know about and can bring to mind as I write this.

I’m willing to support any and all of these genres, if people write and submit material for them. On the other hand, you, my readers, may prefer to keep the focus as it is—and I’m OK with that, too. But even if Freelance Traveller stays with ‘crunchy space opera’, those other genres are worth supporting, and to that end, a group of Traveller/Cepheus Engine fans have started a new fanzine, which I’ve reviewed in this issue, and which you should add to your reading list: Cepheus Journal. Their editorial team explicitly credits Freelance Traveller as an inspiration toward their efforts, and from what I’ve seen so far, their quality is at least equal to what I hope you feel about mine. I hope that none of their staff will ever feel embarrassed about being associated with it—certainly, I wouldn’t, and in fact I’ve gotten a couple of submissions where the author (erroneously) thought I was associated with Cepheus Journal.