This makes it easy for someone who knows character creation, teach someone who doesn't. The way you track the different terms, while creating a character, is simple and effective.

There are very few Hiver ships in Traveller books, and what there are look just like human ships. The Hiver Explorer Type HX actually looks and feels alien. It uses a lot of rounded shapes both on the exterior illustrations and on the interior maps. The description is brief, outlining what is on the decks, and there are Traveller ship specs. At the back of the book there are some NPC crew cards. The core of this article are the maps. There is a selection of labelled, unlabelled, empty and cluttered versions of the deck plans. There are also detail plans and specs for a Hiver G-carrier, which is also nicely organic looking. I quite liked this ship. My only feedback is that I would have liked more detail on possible missions for the ship and where it could be encountered, but that is also completely up to the user.

I really enjoyed the exploration component of this book. It includes a lot of base locations in some detail, but also plenty of unexplored areas that players can be the first to uncover. I liked the ships that were included, they will be useful in other locations around the Solomani Confederation as well. I was very happy with this purchase.

I ran Stealth Train and it was the hardest I've laughed playing an RPG maybe ever. We were all rolling

This was an excellent addition to my Mongoose Traveller 2e Game. to make it work I set the adventure in the Fornice System, Mora Subsector, Spinward Marches, adjusted to law level to 9 and ran the adventure pretty much as written, incorporating a stopover that my players were making to have their ship refurbished.

We got about 4x 3 hours sessions out of it (players will be players, lol) and everyone enjoyed it.

Strongly recommended!

Very disappointingly, this title did not include an actual adventure.

The title does include five pictures and a detailed blueprint/schematic document. It does not include any plot content, nor is the overall download package equal to the page total advertised.

I sincerely hope this is an oversight and not a "bait and switch" sale. Either way, don't buy unless you REALLY want an overpriced ATV blueprint.

A great and useful supplement for my campaign! I love it but if I could make a nitpicky suggestion, the side cargo doors should line up with the second rank of cargo containers on the deck plans. Otherwise, they're kind of useless for container loading/unloading, and shifting. The external art doesn't even need to change.

There is a lot of ship in this supplement. Five different models, full deck plans, sample crews, adventure ideas and some great illustrations. If you're looking for a good mid-size ship for your PCs or a super detailed NPC ship, this is a great resource.

At first glance, my reasons for buying this book were tied to my questions about the fall of GDW, the saga behind DGP, and the underlying causes that led to the creation of MegaTraveller, The New Era, and Marc Miller’s Traveller (T4).

That said, this book provides a very detailed account of the successes and mishaps that made Traveller one of the most remarkable and enduring RPG franchises after D&D. However, while some passages felt a bit tedious—such as the sections on licenses, fanzines, and other fandom topics—I recognize they are necessary for understanding the creative process behind the monumental game that is Traveller.

Regarding the presentation, the choice of a landscape-oriented format is somewhat unusual but is more than compensated for by the sheer amount of content provided. Among the surprising facts I discovered, one was that Traveller was the result of a happy accident rather than a product of systematic worldbuilding. Another was the astonishing chain of events that led DGP’s IP to its current situation—something I hope will be resolved soon.

In this work, Shannon Appelcline provides an impressive amount of information, including the economic context of the time and several checklists that will delight even the most dedicated collectors. That said, I must admit a few points left me wanting more—for instance, I would have loved to learn how Marc Miller ended up buried under an avalanche of “Triplanetary.” Still, I made some delightful discoveries, such as realizing that Miller’s original vision for ending the Rebellion was closer to what I had hoped for than the post-apocalyptic take of “The New Era.”

In the end, This is Free Trader Beowulf not only answered my questions about a time when the lack of the internet meant many of GDW’s decisions seemed incomprehensible or lacked continuity, but I also thoroughly enjoyed it. I’d give it a 7.5 out of 10.

Enjoy.

I like the concept of this publication. The idea of fleshing out levels of membership and related benefits to TAS members is a good idea. I do think the benefits of the higher levels of membership are too rich. I will most likely start with this and cut it back to as I think this would upset game balance.

This review also appears in the January/February 2025 issue of Freelance Traveller magazine.

The subtitle on this folio is “A D66 ideas book”, and modulo a few pages of general explanatory information (for example, definitions of terms such as die-rolling notations and the two types of starport), the subtitle tells you the basics of what you’re going to get. Unlike other D66 tables, though, you don’t get just a single line of description or a short paragraph with a single outcome (although a few rolls are singular outcomes); you get up to four possible alternatives, and not everything is an ‘outcome’ of a situation – sometimes, all you get is the situation, and what happens next is entirely up to the referee. Or the players.

With a little work, an experienced – or, at least, imaginative – referee could actually convert most of these into “complete” Adventure Seeds, complete with six 1D-selectable denouements, and there’s no reason that many of them couldn’t be further developed from the ideas presented here into full long-form adventures.

The last two of the D66 ideas involve “mail calls”, where the PCs receive packages at the starport (this would be the equivalent of what the United States Postal Service calls “General Delivery”, other national postal services call “Poste Restante”, and isn’t a bad model for the typical OTU-compatible Traveller setting). Instead of just the one-to-four options that most of the others have, these have two simple options, and one option that suggests you roll a further 1D, on additional tables that suggest additional information about the package(s). The ‘simple’ table gives a quick description of the package and contents, e.g., “The covering letter of the package identifies the recipient as beneficiary of a recently deceased contact/former colleague/family member/old flame etc. The content is a memento of sentimental, rather than financial value.”. The ‘advanced’ table is really six tables, each of which answers a single question such as “Does the package have unusual characteristics?” or “Worrying coincidences: Not long after the package is received…”

Illustrations are used on the cover and to break up the table a little; all pictures are credited to authors and sites where the pictures are available via CC0 or CC-BY. Layout is clean, without lots of decoration to obscure the text, and the fonts chosen aren’t bad (although I wouldn’t have objected to a larger point size).

A note for those of you who like to take PDFs and print them out: This is formatted to A4; printing on US Letter paper risks cutting off the page numbers.

I’m not generally a fan of letting the dice choose ideas for me; I’d be more inclined to sit down with this, read through all the options, and choose-with-intent. That having been said, $4 for this isn’t out of line, and I’d like to see what the authors can do in expanding some of these into full adventures.

A good collection of small craft for Traveller, with some retreads from earlier editions but quite a few creative or unusual designs. Some of my favorites are:

The "flying billboard" Advertising Boat, which is just what it sounds like - an advertising billboard to use around highports.

The Transporter. Used to move cargo containers and other small craft around space stations. This is the kind of craft that you expect would be in use in a Traveller highport, but it hadn't been detailed until now.

The automated lifeboat. A tiny craft (5 tons) that can carry 16 people to safety, if it's reasonably close to somewhere safe (like a space station orbiting a habitable world).

The Traffic Control Router - basically an orbital airport control tower, powered by solar arrays with advanced sensors and communications gear.

The runabout. A very small but fast ship that can only carry four people - this is a kind of ship that hasn't really been seen in Traveller before either.

The Vargr Belt Racer - a reaction drive with a chair strapped on, capable of 16Gs of thrust, but for only about an hour. The ship on the cover is the Luxury Shuttle - basically a yacht with no interstellar capability.

There is a nice selection of 30-ton modules for the Modular Cutter as well. The most interesting is probably the "Relaxation Module", which comes with an advanced entertainment system, brewery, wet bar, and hot tub.

I'm going to have fun adding examples of these small craft to my next Traveller campaign.

Solid story, if a bit short. The protagonist has some abilities and modifications (like cybernetic behavioral inhibitors that prevent her from feeling pain or fear) that are not reflected in the published game stats for the Blacksand Widows, but it's not much of a stretch for them to have such modifications, considering what they are. The glimpse into the sisterhood is a fascinating one, and Arpi herself would make an interesting character in a Traveller game, either as an NPC or a PC.

Picked this up as a potential side adventure for my campaign and I am really enjoying it. It's easy to adapt - I'm shifting the scale of everything so that it all fits on a balkanized planet (Overnale - Spinward Marches 1937), and it's working seamlessly - Lua Nina becomes a backwater country, Milton is a resort town for vacationing Glisteners, starports become spaceports, and so on. (Actually, it might work better at this scale...) Really looking forward to running it once my players get done with their main business on Overnale - though I'm gonna set things up with an encounter with the Bwap talent agent when they arrive at the starport.

Was reading some of the author's vignettes in the traveller facebook group. He has an amazing grasp of how to illustrate differences in the cultural norms of the various major civilizations in the Imperium setting through awesome short stories that have a plethora of adventure hooks at the same time. Great resource for GM's simply for better characterization of Vargr, Zhodani or Aslan.