Thursday, September 21, 2006

2 Traveller items

I meant to post this stuff yesterday but the computer ate my homework. In a previous post I mentioned the forthcoming Classic Traveller CD-ROM. Yesterday I finally found the some hard info on this Far Future Enterprises webpage:
Ships November 1-
Classic Traveller. the canon for Classic Traveller-- the original texts of all of the Little Black Books in the ground-breaking and award-winning science-fiction role-playing game. Each image and text PDF contains original page images and searchable text. All files are printable in whole or in part.

The Traveller Book.
The Traveller Adventure.
Books 0 through 8.
Supplements 1 through 13.
Adventures 0 through 13.
Double Adventures 1 through 6.
Games 0 through 6.
Modules 1 through 5.
Aliens 1 through 8.
Special Supplements 1 through 3.

Plus: The Official Guide to Traveller - an overview of the Classic Traveller game system and its components, and the History of the Imperium - an overview of the background for Classic Traveller

That's a metric assload of Traveller for 35 bucks plus shipping and handling. I already own a bunch of that stuff, but $35 is a good price even for just the eight or nine items I don't have sitting on my gameshelf. The link above has a button for pre-ordering this puppy as well as December's offering, a compilation CD-ROM of everything from The Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society. I own exactly one issue of JTAS, so that's an even better bargain for me.

The other Traveller news I have for you is the announcement of a new edition. And I'm not talking about Marc Miller's T5 project. Avenger Enterprises, one of the new generation of third party Traveller publishers, is working on a project they are calling Avenger Classic Traveller, or ACT. What publicly available info is out there can be found at this ACT Forum. From what I can tell this game will be one of those Classic-Traveller-plus-chrome sort of projects, with an eye for backwards compatibility with older CT publications.

Nearly every Classic Traveller fan on the internet seems to have their own 'CT+' version of chargen, combat, ship construction, and/or task resolution. Lately the Classic Traveller section of Citizens of the Imperium has been nothing but stuff like that. But this is the first I've heard of someone actually planning to professionally published their own tweaks to the old game. Like T5, the playtest for ACT is a closed affair and theoretically you can only get the manuscript by signing on as a playtester. While I'd like more info on both games I don't have time to playtest and frankly I'd prefer to buy a polished product. What little I have heard about T5 are mostly unsubstantiated rumors, which makes me loathe to pass it on.

4 comments:

  1. "a metric assload" Man! You ain't never had hemorrhoids or you'd NEVER make a statement that size and magnitude!

    Great news that Traveller is alive and well and coming out again in yet another incarnation, but IMHO, no tweaking needed or necessary. It's "classic" because it was "right" from the git-go, ya know?

    And, no, I don't need another version, thank you anyway, Mark Miller, wherever you are in Illinois.

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  2. "Great news that Traveller is alive and well and coming out again in yet another incarnation, but IMHO, no tweaking needed or necessary. It's "classic" because it was "right" from the git-go, ya know?"

    I totally appreciate this opinion. I want a shiny new edition of Traveller so I can better pitch the game to the non-grognard. Some people just do not like the idea of playing musty old out-of-print games.

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  3. Anonymous11:31 AM

    I heard the MT CD-ROM was poor -- "not a quality product", or so it was described. Bad scans or something. I'll reserve my unrestrained jones for this CT CD-ROM until after someone looks at it and says, "It's good!"

    But when that happens...

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  4. Anonymous11:11 PM

    I keep telling myself, check jeff's blog...

    I'm doing pt duties for both ACT and T5, they are pretty interesting, and I'm contributing to the CT CD-ROM, so I'm hoping it's better than the MT CD-ROM.

    The problem with the MT CD-ROM was that many pdfs available on the web of old MT materials were actually better quality than what was officially released.

    OUCH!

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