Freelance Traveller

Jan/Feb 2025	Department	Article Title	Author
	From the Editor		Jeff Zeitlin
	Featured Article
	Other Roads	Traveller 1700 Gazetteer: Northern New England	Greg Caires
	Critics’ Corner	Disappearance on Aramat	Paul Anuni
		Architect of Worlds	Jeff Zeitlin
		21 Plots Planetside	Ewan Quibell
		Drama at the Starport	Jeff Zeitlin
	The Prep Room	Planetary System Types for Traveller	Ken Pick
		Privilege and Power: Using Nobility in Your World-Building and Plots	Johnn Four with Timothy Collinson
	Columns	Confessions of a Newbie Referee: #74: Immortality	Timothy Collinson
	Raconteurs Rest	The Astoundingly True Tale of José Fabuloso	Jo Jaquinta
	Multimedia Gallery	The Pirates of Drinax Graphic Stories #13: Treasure Ship Heist	Joe Adams
	The Lab Ship	Planetary Orbits in Binary Systems	Ken Pick
	Doing It My Way	Economy Passage	Jason Barnabas
	Active Measures	The Wardn Gambit	Bleddyn Wilson
	In A Store Near You	EF2 Emergency Flare Gun	Bo Wozniak

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

From the Editor

This issue marks the beginning of Freelance Traveller’s sixteenth year of publication. In addition to that, the website has material dating back as far as 1993, giving an archive of over thirty years’ depth. That’s well over half of Traveller’s lifetime, and there is still an active community generating new material, even for the earliest versions of Traveller, dating back to its first publication in 1977.

When I started the website originally, I envisioned a place where people could find interesting articles that might allow them to ‘do more’ with Traveller, and not as an “I love me and what I can do with Traveller” site—even at the beginning, I envisioned Freelance Traveller as a fan-supported site.

Every publisher of Traveller has tried to put out a support magazine, but the earliest attempts were ‘house organs’, and didn’t really ‘tap’ the fan community for material; they were mostly company developers writing additional material that would be considered more-or-less ‘official’. Later ‘house organs’ used more material generated by fans, but were still largely internal writers producing official additions. That, plus having to allocate company resources to producing the magazine instead of additional supplements (which would be more profitable) is probably what ‘doomed’ most of the Traveller ‘house organs’.

When I tried the experiment of “converting” Freelance Traveller to a PDF magazine in 2010, I had several
objectives:

First, I wanted to collect and redistribute material I felt was worthwhile, on a regular basis—something which I had been doing with scheduled updates to the website.

Second, I wanted to see if I could generate something that would look good on paper—perhaps better than on the website. This meant learning about things like document layout, typography, readability, and other related topics. I know far more about these topics than I did in 2010 when this experiment started, but there’s still much to learn, and Freelance Traveller cannot by any means be considered a professional-quality
publication. That’s not going to stop me from trying to learn more, and to figure out how to apply some other techniques that I’ve read about but haven’t (yet) used.

Third, I hoped for Freelance Traveller to be viewed as a publication that ‘filled the gap’ left by the demises of the various editions of Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society, or of the Traveller material published in Challenge or Signs and Portents. I’ve been told, by both Steve Jackson and Marc Miller themselves, that I’ve succeeded in this, and that’s a very good feeling. But it’s less important than…

Fourth, and ultimately most important, I wanted Freelance Traveller to be seen and respected as a Traveller resource by the community. Whether I’ve succeeded is up to you; while I can surmise an answer by your actions, in both submitting material and in downloading what I post, I have a peculiarly biased viewpoint, and I do not feel that I can or should trust my own perceptions on this.

I have said before, and I will continue to say, that as long as it continues to be interesting and fun, I will continue to publish Freelance Traveller. But I want it to remain a fan-supported resource, and for that to be the case, I need you, the community, to step up and write for publication. Some of you have said that you’re not good enough; I say that you can’t know until you try—and I will offer suggestions where I think your offering could benefit. The only way to become a writer is to write; the only way to know whether you’re improving is to let others see your writing, and comment on it. I’m here to help with that, because doing so also helps the community, and a vibrant and active community is what ultimately keeps Traveller alive.