Another great bundle of 2300 AD products that i was able to find. Really happy I was able to get this as it helped me flesh out my worlds in the game I was creating.

This bundle was great, as it gave me many of the 2300 AD adventures that I owned before all wrapped up into a convenient package. I'm glad I was able to find this.

Great toolbox for playing Traveller -- and you really need to approach it as a toolbox, there are so many layers of complexity that you really do not need to use if you don't want to. I personally prefer Classic Traveller or Cepheus Engine, or Mongoose 2e, but I think this is well worth it for a wider range of ideas and tools for any Traveller game.

My only serious annoyance with this is the lack of bookmarks. Any PDF longer than a few dozen pages, particularly any that will be a necessary reference to play, absolutely 100% needs to be bookmarked. No exceptions. I'd rate this 4 stars but for this egregious failure in usability.

If you like Traveller, or pulpy old-school 2d6 sci-fi, this is an awesome purchase. If you're willing to do some rewriting, it can work for Stars Without Number or whatever - and the reason is because the Keiths were awesome authors with a great sense of story and a greater sense of adventure. King Richard I didn't like (the deck plans are dated and sadly lame) but everything else was amazing. Sky Raiders is Raiders of the Lost Ark! The Ordeal adventure is an astronauts-against-a-hostile-world scenario. There are risks and mysteries and enigmas and betrayals! Entertaing to read, fun to play.

Absolutely terrible. Contains a couple of dreadful B movie plotlines that in no stretch of the imagination belongs in the Twilight: 2000 universe.

Origninally posted here: https://theotherside.timsbrannan.com/2022/05/review-t5-traveller5-core-rules-3-book.html

We are entering a strange time now. There are now two editions of Traveller on the market, the Mongoose version and now, in 2015, a new version from Far Future Enterprises, the inheritor of Game Designers' Workshop intellectual properties. This one is designed to be a new edition of the Traveller 4 edition and thus an "unbroken line" from Classic Traveller. I have the Traveller 5.09 version I grabbed from Far Future Enterprises and the 5.10 version from DriveThruRPG. For the purposes of this review, I am going to be considering the 5.10 version.

T5 Traveller5 Core Rules 3-Book Set

As with Classic Traveller, this version is split up into three books. They are not little, and the covers are not included, but they do have the same names. So that is fine.

Each book has a comprehensive table of contents of all three books.

Book 1: Characters and Combat

PDF. 208 pages, black & white and color interior art.

Starting out this has a different feel than other versions. We start with the the typical "What is a Roleplaying Game" bits and "What is Traveller" under the Traveller is a Role-Playing Game section with an example of play. What follows is a bit on the Galaxy (weird to see how little of it is charted in Traveller), A Brief History of the Universe, and The Foundations of the Universe. The feel here is one of situating the characters in the Traveller Universe first as opposed to having the character operating in the universe as Classic Traveller does. Thematically (not rule-wise) this makes it a bit closer to MegaTraveller.

Traveller Uses Dice takes us back to the real world. There seems to be some new dice mechanics being introduced here in the form of "Flux Rolls." We get bits on Money, Ranges, and Humanity. I have to admit I admit I am not liking the organization so far. The topics seem to come at random.

Ok. We finally get to a chapter Characters are the Central Focus of Traveller, but not till page 46.

Characters still have the same six basic characteristics/abilities but there are an additional two added, Psions (Psi) and Sanity. Then there are another eight that are also used that are combinations of the regular six. I can't help but feel that something that was elegant is not needlessly complicated.

Eleven pages later we get to Characters and Careers. This covers the careers that we see in many versions of Traveller. I do like the art on the various medals a character can get while in the service, nice touch. The careers are comparable to previous versions. Each carrier gets a single page of detail which is nice really, print it out and staple it to your character sheet card. There are also many tables for backgrounds.

There is a new section on Genetics. There are some lists and diagrams for family trees (genetic trees) but I am not seeing the in-game application to this yet. I guess if your character is genetically modified this would be good. Sections on Chimeras, Synthetic Lifeforms, and Clones follow.

Tasks are next and deal with how you do things in Traveller. We are back to a Roll Under task resolution. A few pages discussing how tasks are determined with an example of three character with low, medium and high dexterity.

Skills is introduced with a Master Skill list, though "Massive Skill List" would also be appropriate. There are a lot of skills here. Skills and their descriptions take up the next 40 pages.

Equipment is given the acronym QREBS for Quality, Reliability, Ease, Bulk/Burden, and Safety.

We jump back to character focus with Intuitions, Personals, and The Senses.

We get to the second half of the title 2/3 of the way into the book. Combat. Up first is Personal Combat. This covers all sorts of types of combat, conditions, environment, movement, and more. There is even an example of combat between two groups of five combatants. This is good, because I still have no real good notion of how combat works in this system. This follows by a list of weapons.

Dice is next and covers all the rolls for 1D to 10D and the Flux die. Look I have a Master's degree in Stats, I like math, I like numbers. But this feels needlessly complicated to me.

The book ends in an Index (but hyperlinks and the PDF is not bookmarked).

Book 2: Starships

PDF. 304 pages, black & white and color interior art.

One of the things I love about Traveller has been their starship-building rules. It's like character building and I don't feel bad about min-maxing or even meta-gaming it.

We start out with the basic anatomy of a stellar hex grid. Ok, that is useful. This introduced us to the section on Star Systems. We get some brief overviews of systems and some helpful charts and tables to describe them. This is followed by Star Ports (places to go in the system) where the adventures usually begin.

Starships are next and cover all sorts of starships. The same sorts of details are here as in other versions of Traveller. I would need the rules side by side to see the differences, but it feels more like Traveller T4 than anything. Lots of color art for the various types of ships are a nice touch. Our old friend the Beowulf-class Free Trader is present.

Starship Design and Construction covers how to build and pay for these ships. All of this is recorded on the Ship Card, like a character sheet for ships. This is a feature that goes back to the beginning.

Maneuvering is next, or how your ship is a ship and not a space station. This includes interplanetary travel. Jump covers interstellar travel.

Plenty of sections on how Power, Sensors, Weapons, Defenses, Fuel, and Space Combat work. Far more detail than I recall in any version of Traveller so far.

Trade and Commerce Between the Stars section is next. Traveller is built on the reality that goods and people need to move between the starts and there is an economy based on that.

Technology and Tech Levels are discussed in detail. Followed by Lifespans of intelligent species (why wasn't this in Book 1?), Interstellar Communities, Computers, and Robots.

This book was a bit better organized than Book 1, up till the end that is.

Book 3: Worlds and Adventures

PDF. 304 pages, black & white and color interior art.

This covers Worlds and Systems. It seems that some of the System material from Book2 would have been better here.

If Book 1 creates characters, and Book 2 creates Starships, then Book 3 creates worlds and systems. Again pretty detailed with charts and graphs galore. This covers the first 94 pages or so.

Makers or building things run the next 80 odd pages. Seems like this should have been in book 2.

Special Circumstances are next for the next 70 pages. This includes Psionics. This covers psionic characters and their powers. This also covers the Zhodani.

There is an interesting sub-section on Sophonts, or intelligent non-humans. Again, this would have been better served in Book 1 I think, but I do see why it is here.

We don't get to Adventuring until page 270 and then it is only 10 pages. Very underserved in my mind.

Each book ends with book specific Appendicies and Indexes.

--

So. 816 pages of PDF rules for Traveller 5.10. (FYI my Traveller 5.09 weighs in at 760 pages).

What do I know? Well. This version of Traveller is an interesting view of divergent evolution. In 2015 to 2019 (and still) there are two in print, live versions of Traveller out there. Traveller 5 and Mongoose Traveller. Both have the same ancestor, Classic Traveller, but each went on a different path.

We also live in a world now where ALL versions of Traveller are easily available in PDF, Print, and POD versions.

Given all of this, I just can't see myself playing Traveller 5. There is a LOT here I can see myself using though. I do not regret buying it at all. Far from it. I think my goal here is to grab anything I can find that is useful that is still roughly compatible with the Classic Traveller Core.

My issues with Traveller 5 are largely from the organization of the material and the over-complication of the rules. I am not a fan of roll-under systems, but I can get over that for the right game.

I give Far Future Enterprises credit for trying to expand the game in a new direction, it's just a direction I am interested in going in these days. At nearly $45 for three (four if you count the "Read me" pdf, which I don't) PDFs and no POD option is a bit rich for most people's blood.

Still, I am a perpetual sucker for the sunk cost fallacy, so I am always looking for an excuse to use all my books.

Originally posted here: https://theotherside.timsbrannan.com/2022/05/review-2300-ad-traveller-2300-1986.html

Traveller, in its first 10 years, stayed pretty consistent and took me about two weeks to work through. The next 20 years are going to be much faster.

I am going to start off with one today I only know very little about. Traveller: 2300 also known as 2300 AD.

Before getting into any books or research here is what I do know. This was supposed to be the start of a new line for GDW. It dealt with the earliest time in the Traveller Universe, specifically 2300 AD on Earth. There was a tie-in with their Twilight 2000 game line. In 1986 I was very deep into AD&D to exclusion of all else save for college prep.

So this one is 100% new for me.

2300 AD or Traveller: 2300

Ok. Let's do this one right from the start. This is not really a Traveller game. While I am sure many people worked it out so it could be the past of Traveller, my very, very limited understanding of the history of Traveller's Imperium suggests that likely isn't. But I am sure people with better knowledge than me can say for sure. Since I have a sci-fi game set more or less in the 2300s I figure why not pick this up to see what it is like.

For this review, I am only considering the PDF available from DriveThruRPG. I thought I had bought it from FFE years ago, but I can't find my copy.

PDF. 131 pages. Color cover, black & white interior art. The scan is OCRed and bookmarked. The scan of the cover is rough, but the interior looks better.

The Introduction reads like many RPG books. "This is an RPG", "here are some expectations." And so on.

Player's Manual

History covers the history of this setting with the horrible nuclear war in 2000. I must have been sleeping. I am kidding of course, RPGs are great fun but they have not been great at predicting the future really. Now I have no way of telling, but I think this is basically the same history as GDW's other game Twilight 2000. It certainly feels the same. I never played the game myself. This history section covers the fall and rise of humankind as they venture out into space by the year 2300. Wars and geo-political rivalries are also covered and how they still affect the day-to-day lives of humans on Earth and in Space. The flows into the next section.

Political Geography talks about Earth and beyond of 2300. America is split up (ok that one is not so far-fetched) with Texas as its own republic (which seems to be a reoccurring theme in a lot of things I am reading right now) and other "American" nations. Mexico is split up. Europe ie, well Europe. I think the authors overestimate the older rivalries a little. Germany reunited long before 2000 in a largely peaceful integration and the European Union has been going pretty strong if you ignore Brexit.

In space we colonies at L-4 and L-5 (LaGrange Points), Mercury (not likely, but I'll go with it), Mars, the Asteroids (much more likely), the moons of Jupiter, and just beyond Saturn. No mention of Lunar colonies at all here.

The chapter on Technology is interesting. By 1986 we had seen nearly 10 years of Moore's Law in effect for computers, so the authors of this game give computers a bit more power. I would argue it is not really enough still, but getting there. There is a bit about AIs and psychosis that feels like something I just read in Robert A. Heinlein's Friday. There is some detail on transportation and medical sciences as well.

Colonies cover the fifty-five colonies on twenty-nine inhabitable worlds. Since these colonies are largely extensions of Earth-based interests they are classified by which "Arm" they are in (American, Chinese, French) or which "Finger" of the Arm (Canadian and Latin for America or the French Frontiers). This is followed by Foundations that provide services for citizens after the collapse of the governments in 2000.

Twenty pages in we finally get to Character Generation. If you didn't know this was "not Traveller" before then you learn it here. There are four physical attributes: Size, Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, and four psychological ones: Determination, Intelligence, Eloquence, and Education. You roll a 4d6-4 (generating a score between 0 and 20) and you can re-roll one physical and one psychological attribute. Strength and Dexterity are altered by homeworld and gravity type.

Like Classic Traveller you have skills that can be determined by Background and Career. But no hint of dying in Character Gen (is this even Traveller then???).

This all takes us right to Skills and Careers.

The "Shopping sections" Equipment, Weapons, Vehicles, and Armor follow. Weapons cover all sorts of guns (as expected) and a few laser-based ones. Vehicles does not cover starships. The currency of choice is the French Livres (Lv).

We get some star charts and tables of the nations of the systems.

Referee's Manual

While this is all one file, it was obviously once a boxed set with separate books. Pages 54 to 105 cover what was the separate Referee's Manual. I will also point out that the Bookmarks in my PDF stop working well at this point. There are bookmarks, but they don't always go where they should and are indented oddly.

What would have been the back cover of the Referee's Manual has some really great insight. It credits Marc W. Miller (Traveller) and Frank Chadwick (Twilight: 2000) as two of the "big name" designers of 2300. The implication here is that 2300 was something of an in-house game combining elements of Traveller and Twilight:2k. As a designer myself, I find that fascinating. Maybe, just maybe, more fascinating than the actual game! Internally they called it The Game. And it sounds like that played it out from 2000 to 2300 in turns of 5 or 10 years to get us where we were then.

Life on the Frontier covers the implied setting of the Traveller 2300 game.

Tasks and Combat are largely the same sorts of sections, with combat a special case of task resolution. Clue #2 that this is not your father's Traveller: 1d10 for task resolution and not a 2d6. Here you need to roll higher than a 7 with every 4 points above or below that as a target number difficulty. You add your plusses from skills to your roll and if needed an attribute divided by 4 (+0 to +5) range.

Both Tasks and Combat have charts of successes and failures and what you do with each.

Star Travel finally gets off of the Earth and out into the colonies. The stutterwarp is travel mode of choice to get to distant stars. There are limitations. The drives of these ships can travel great distances but have to jettison their spent radioactive fuel in the gravity well of a system. This process takes some time. So there is a limiting factor on how far a ship can practically travel. There is some detail on tinkering with your starship, but not at the level I have come to associate with Traveller. Space Combat follows right after this. What is nice about this one is there are some photos of ships on a space hex-grid.

Ship Listing is the "shopping list" of Starships. It lacks the "used cars" feel of Classic Traveller.

World Generation is next. It covers quite a lot of detail to be honest. More than I expected.

NPCs are next, followed by World Mapping and Animal Encounters.

There are some star maps, star charts, and some blank forms for Star Data, World Data, and Colony/Outpost Data.

Also included is a sample adventure, The Tricolor's Shadow. It has maps, adventure ideas and two scenarios to run.

Two alien species are introduced in the end, The Kafers and The Pentapods. They are presented as NPCs only, not as playable species.

--

Traveller 2300 is not a bad game to be honest, it just isn't really Traveller is it? I would be better with it IF I could try to figure out a way to make it work with more up-to-date history. But by that point, I could instead use it as a guide and run a Classic Traveller game and limit it to this time period and location.

There is another issue with playing this sort of game. Traveller 2300 suffers from our collective inability to really predict the future. That is no slight on the designers, that is just human nature. Compare the tech in this game to that of The Expanse RPG. Both cover humanity's first step to the solar system and beyond. Both cover roughly similar time periods (2300 vs. 2359) and both can play the same sorts of games. In Traveller 2300 you have the stutterwarp to get to extra-solar planets and int he expanse has the ring gates. The differences lie in the subtle predictions. Computers are much more powerful in the Expanse, but FTL tech is non-existent (save for the ring gate). Traveller 2300 has FTL (in a limited fashion by design). Compare both to say Star Trek of the same period, neither has anything at all like the Ambassador Class Enterprise-C.

Still this is a good game for a grittier version of Traveller, if you don't mind the system change, or for an advanced version of Twilight 2000.

Originally posted here: https://theotherside.timsbrannan.com/2022/05/review-classic-basic-traveller.html

It's May and I want to spend the entire month talking about Sci-Fi RPGs, and most of this month talking about Traveller. Traveller has a long and storied history in both the RPG world and for me personally. It is the second (or the third, more on that) RPG I ever owned after D&D.

I say second but my memory is foggy and it could have been Traveller or it could have been Chill. I think for my horror cred I like to claim it was Chill, but in the early 80s, I was all about Science Fiction. So really it was most likely to be Traveller. I picked up the Traveller Book and tried to teach to it to myself, but my groups were very D&D focused and no one wanted to play it. The groups that did play it were all older than I was and they did not want some "D&D kid" in their "Serious Sci-Fi" groups. I was able to more traction on Star Frontiers a few years later. Must have been the TSR bias of the time. I do wish I still had my original Traveller Book though. I did manage to score an Original Traveller boxed set of the "Little Black Books" so I guess that is even better.

Today I am going to review Traveller and start at the very beginning. There is just no way I could through everything for Traveller. I'd need more than a month, I'd need a whole new blog, so instead, I was going to going to concentrate on some core products to get people into the game and a few choice ones that have meaning to me.

I will admit right up front that I am no Traveller expert. So it is very, very likely I will miss a few a things. Just let me, and others, know in the comments.

Classic Traveller

For this review, I am going to be referring to my 1977 Game Designers' Workshop edition of the boxed set of Traveller. I am also joining to be comparing them the PDFs of the Classic Traveller Facsimile Edition from Game Designers' Workshop / Far Future Enterprises on DriveThruRPG.

Side Note: Far Future Enterprises bought the rights to various GDW games a while back and published this pdf as far back as 2001. They own the rights to republish Traveller, 2300 AD, Twilight: 2000, and Dark Conspiracy. They also work with Mongoose and other publishers of Traveller material. But more on that in future posts. Suffice to say that from my point of view they have been carrying the torch of Traveller high since 2000. Among other things they publish a full CD-ROM of Traveller material that I would love to grab someday.

The Boxed Set

The Traveller Boxed Set from GDW was released in 1977. GDW was located in Normal, IL which is along what I learned was a trail the lead from Lake Geneva, WI, and Chicago, IL all the way down to the University of Illinois in Urbana, IL, Illinois State in Normal, IL down to Southern Illinois Univerity in Carbondale, IL. Tim Kask was an SIU grad, GDW was in Normal, Mayfair would later be founded in Skokie just outside of Chicago, and Judges Guild was founded in Decatur, IL. I basically grew up surrounded by the growing Table Top RPG scene.

Much like Dungeons & Dragons of the time, Traveller came in a digest-sized box with three books. Instead of there being "3 Little Brown Books" there are "3 Little Black Books." Also, like D&D future printings would combine these books though in different ways.

PDF Note: The Classic Traveller Facsimile Edition also includes a preface for the whole set of books and gives a brief history of their publications. This is a great value-add for the PDF. According to it what I am reviewing today is "Basic Traveller" and published in 1981. Basic Revised was published in 1981 and the Traveller Book (my first purchase) was in 1982.

Book 1: Characters and Combat

This is the character generation book and maybe one of the most famous bit of RPG lore ever. Yes. In Traveller you can die in Character creation!

I should also point out that very, very often in my conversations with people over the years that Character Creation for Travelller was very much in line with what we would call "Session 0" today. Everyone worked on their character, developed a back story (yes in 1977) and then got together. Even the starting character example is a 42-year-old with a pension (and a cutlass it seems). Trust me, at 42 I already had backstory (and a wife, kids, a mortgage, bills...)

Character creation is largely a random affair, but not wholly so. There are choices to be made along the way. How a character acquires skills and expertise largely depends on which service they were in and how they got there. You can enlist or you can be drafted. At this point, all characters were assumed to have served in some form of the service. Citizens don't mortgage their pension on a beat second-hand starship to go galavanting across known space.

As you work through character creation you can go for a few terms of service. This gives you more skill, more experience, more credits, and makes you older. As in real life, there are benefits and detriments to age.

Skills are detailed next. This is going to come up again and again, but let's talk about it here first. The Computers of Traveller are the computers of 1977. Not very advanced and require special expertise to use them. Today of course I am writing this post in one window, monitoring email and chat in another, watching the weather in another, and reading the PDF in yet another. I have dozens of active programs running that I am paying attention to and who knows how many more running in the background. I am not going to apply 21st-century biases though to these rules. Let's just leave them as-is for now and see how future versions of this game treat it. For me I am going to assume there are computers (with a lower case c) that do all the work we think of today and anyone can use and then there are specialized Computers (with an upper case C) that do specialized work, like today's supercomputers.

Side Note: The best super-computer of 1977 was the 80mhz, 64 bit Cray-1. It cost $8M and was capable of 160 MFLOPS. For comparison, my three-year-old smartphone runs at 130ghz and is capable of 658 GFLOPS. Newer phones are more than double that. 4000x's the power at 1/10,000th of the cost. And I can put it into my pocket.

After your terms of service are figured out along with your skills then comes the time to learn combat. Combat always gets more ink than say hacking a computer since there are so many things going on and a failure usually means death. Also, as an aside, there are a lot of bladed weapons in Traveller. I attribute this to two different elements. The first and obvious is Star Wars, though Traveller obviously draws more from Dune than Star Wars which only came out in May of 77. The other and likely more important source is D&D. For the obvious reasons. The end effect is that officers in Traveller often carry swords in my mind.

Combat gives us our basic roll for the game and the introduction of the Traveller basic mechanic. The PDF is a little clearer on this than my print book. Roll 2d6 and beat a roll of 8. This is modified by various skills and experiences.

Wounds affect the character's Strength, Dexterity, and Endurance. The more wounds you get, the worse those stats are. D&D would not do this in earnest until 4th Edition.

PDF Notes: My copy is dedicated "To Mary Beth" and the PDF (and I think the Traveller Book) are dedicated "To Darlene." There are other minor differences as well. The PDF for example has a "Personal Data and History" aka a Character Sheet on page 28 (36 for the PDF).

Book 2: Starships

This is what makes Traveller, well, Traveller. There are two types of travel dealt with here, Interplanetary (worlds within the same star system) and Interstellar (different star systems). Also if you are afraid of math this book is going to give you a bad day.

The main focus of this book in my mind is buying a starship and keeping it running. Starships are expensive and in Traveller, those expenses are more keenly felt than say keeping up a castle in D&D. If your castle runs out of food you can leave to go buy some. In a starship, in space, your options are more limited. In space, no one can hear your stomach grumble.

I have no idea if the economies of Traveller work. I mean is 2 tons of fuel really worth the year's salary of a gunner? No idea. I am going to handwave that and say it works.

There is also a lot on Starship construction here too. Before I could get anyone to play I would write up sheets of starships and their costs based on what I thought was cool. Kinda wish I had a couple of those. The only one I can remember was the FTL Lucifer. It was designed to be small, but fast. It would later make it's way into Star Frontiers, but that is another tale.

We get some details on starship combat and some basic world data.

Book 2 also covers experience and various drugs. I get the feeling these were put here to pad out Book 2 so all three books were the same size; 44 pages.

PDF Notes: The PDF has more art, in particular how to orbit a planet and the necessary equations made more clear. Like Book 1 for Characters, this volume has sheets for ships. The PDF also adds a Trade and Commerce section.

Book 3: Worlds and Adventures

This book covers worlds. And if there was one thing I did more than creating starships that never traveled to other worlds, it was to create worlds that starships would never travel to. World creation was fun.

This book also covers various personal equipment and various encounter types.

Note at this point there are no aliens, no Imperiums, and really nothing other than the most basic adventuring outline. Very much like OD&D in that respect. I like the psionic system in Traveller and maybe I should explore the differences between it and the one in Eldritch Wizardry for D&D.

The last part of this book covers Psionics. Maybe one of the reasons I like to draw a pretty hard line between Magic and Psionics is that one is for Fantasy (and D&D) and the other is for Sci-Fi (and Traveller).

PDF Notes: The PDF again has more art (vehicles) as well as hex maps for working out star systems.

Final Notes

How does one review a classic like Traveller? How does one compare an RPG from 1977 to the standards of 2022? It's not easy under normal circumstances, but with Traveller it is easier. Why? Because so much of this game was ahead of its time you could brush it off, get some d6s and play it out of the box as is today. More so than OD&D is I think.

But both games are classics, no, Classics. With that capital C. It is no wonder that now, 45 years later, Traveller is still the goto science-fiction game.

As I move through the editions and versions I'll also talk about all the other materials that have been used with Traveller (board games for example) and how these "3LBBs" expanded to cover an entire universe.

This is a surprizing bundle. You get a good scan of the DC1 rule book, but you also get the PC Booster Kit for DC1! PC Booster Kit (GDW 2112). The only way to purchase the PC Booster Kit seems to be through buying the core rulebook, which is offered at a very advantageous price in the bundle. The bundle also contains two stories for DC3 that are unavailable anywhere else, Getting three unobtainable books in one bundle not only fulfilled my expectations, but exceeded them by far. The scans are overall really good.

NOTE! I am reviewing my experience as a buyer of the Cutting Edge Dark Conspiracy Bundle, not the game qualities of the individual books.

TLDR: I do not typically like "infantry" science fiction but I loved it and want more!

I'm an old 2300AD fan from the original release of the game so I have read many of the background books which feed this story. This is important to understand my review because a good deal of the interest and tension of the story centers on the mystery of humanity's opponents in their first truly interstellar war. I came into this book knowing the main "secret" it was revealing to me.

Pete Rogan STILL managed to engage, hold, and increase my interest as the story progressed.

I'm a 22 year naval veteran and his military characters felt like people I'd served with. He brought out aspects of the setting that I hadn't considered and did so without multi-page expository dumps. The plot's tension was well maintained and split between internal and external sources so I never knew what which way the story was going to turn. This is relatively rare for me as I often find plots predictable. It was really fun!

If you love 2300AD read the book for a fun window into a favorite setting that has way too little fiction for my taste.

if you're new to 2300AD read it as a nice introduction.

If you just like military SF read it for a relatively unique take on an enemy whose experience of consciousness is different than ours...quite literally in many ways.

If you just love SF: this isnt "war porn." In addition to the above, plus a healthy glimpse of a truly alien world, it's also a realistic take at the drives, motivations, and issues of human beings in a pretty difficult environment.

needs to be updated to show the releases that have been released since 2017 - i.e. East Africa, Pacific Northwest, Romania, Korea, Rooks Gambit and the two gun books plus the three fanzines - its a comprehensive list but it needs to be updated

I've had the POD scan for a while, and I finally took a chance on the hardcopy because my original is on its last legs. The quality of this POD is excellent. If you have an original to compare it to, you will notice that the pencil drawings are just a little fuzzy, and the map symbols on pages 228-229 and 232-233 are light because of the red ink used on the original. But these are minor details - the overall quality of this reprint is just as good as the book I've had on my bookshelf since 1993. Well done. (And as an added bonus, I received it only two weeks after I ordered it.)

Faithful recreation of the LBBs that incorporates the errata is an easy way, incredibly useful for a classic traveller campaign. Hopefully the next LWB that will be the classic books retypeset with formatting done better do as well as this one!

Excellent updating of the classic system. Organization very clear and helpful. Highest recommendation for both veterans and new players!

A good Eastern European sourcebook for Twilight:2000 which suffers, in my opinion, not so much from writing but from the Version 2.0 timeline. It would not be too difficult to draw out material for an original Twilight:2000 1.0 campaign from this sourcebook. The Adventure seed for the 8th ID (Mech) is very good as are the stats for Warsaw Pact vehicles.