I’m a big fan.

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I had heard that the original release of Traveller 5 was “more than a bit of a mess”. Chaotically organized, unedited, missing any sort of guides on how to run/play a game, filled with tables but missing simple things like equipment lists, showing no signs of familiarity with changes in both the industry and the audience, etc, etc. But that was years ago, and plenty of reviewers and forum-dwellers made all those flaws clear. So, along comes a new kickstarter campaign to reprint it with all those quite legitimate complaints taken care of, as Traveller 5.10.

Yeah, no. Reading through the recently-released PDF core books, I find no game here, just a construction kit that, with immense patience and energy, could be used to create a game and a universe to play in. Its 888 pages read like an unconscious parody of rules-heavy, table-driven RPG design, and, oddly enough, it ends up feeling kind of like Spawn of Spawn Of Fashan. As a bonus, if you’re nostalgic for early-Eighties game art, many of the included illustrations are actually from the early Eighties. Combined with the fact that neither the table of contents nor the index contain hyperlinks to the associated pages, I’m forced to conclude that nobody associated with this project is familiar with graphics or layout software released this century.

Mind you, in all those pages, there are no real examples of how to use any of this stuff; it’s just tables all the way down (and, no, still no equipment lists; but you can design every possible kind of hand-weapon from scratch and make your own!). No wonder everyone recommends Mongoose Traveller; despite its flaws, it’s actually intended to be played, not weighed.

Seriously, the table of contents for all three books is shorter than the table of charts in each book (124 in book 1, 125 in book 2, and 121 in book 3), but there are no printable pages of forms to make use of any of the supplied generators. Even the sample sector and sub-sector maps are just low-resolution JPEGs (MuPDF’s mutools extract is your friend here…).

For the previous release, they apparently did you the favor of extracting the relevant pages from the books to create a set of “forms”, which was better than nothing but not terribly useful. I’d hope that they’d do better this time, but there doesn’t seem to be any interest in supporting this as a game system.

By the way, how often do you actually need to know each character’s “species scent”?

Update

Just re-read the kickstarter, and it seems the Player’s Manual was promised as part of the original T5 kickstarter seven years ago, and is now promised as a free follow-up to this one, delivery date unknown.

Freebie!

Looks like the closest thing to a modern Classic Traveller is Cepheus Engine. This merges the free SRD from the first edition of Mongoose Traveller (which was deliberately designed to be compatible with existing CT content) with useful ideas from other editions like T20 and MegaTraveller, all wrapped up in an Open Gaming License.

Because it seems Mongoose screwed third-party publishers when they released version 2 of their Traveller, replacing the OGL with a profit-sharing scheme that takes 50% off the top.

So if you happened to find any good ideas in the T5 books, your best bet would be to incorporate them into a CE-based game, with additional content from whatever edition of Traveller books you can find.

Well, this explains a lot…

Which brings to Miller’s point that while he likes the challenge of game design, he doesn’t use the complex game designs he creates. He doesn’t use rules that have rules for everything. He instead uses the simple, straightforward, Referee-driven rules of Classic Traveller.

Well, technically, 着衣巨乳 means “clothed huge breasts”, but that counts as undercover, right? As long as they don’t have private dicks, I’m okay with it…

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One of the more entertaining random quotes in the DanMemo game:

In related news, the movie is coming to (some) theaters on July 23, and the second season debuts July 12th.

Every once in a while, this Sanag 10000mAh battery pack goes on sale on Amazon. I bought one before I went to Japan in April, and it worked great; smaller and lighter than my big Anker charger, faster and more powerful than my old Mophie (which, by the way, loses its charge annoyingly quickly, where the other two can sit on a shelf for at least a month and still be at 100%).

Wednesday evening, I was checking out a recent order, and found a lightning deal had just started, discounting the standard $26.99 price by $4.39, and then adding a 5% off coupon to bring the total, with free tax and shipping, down to $21.25.

So now I have two of them. Did I mention we’re planning to go back to Japan in November? 😁

(and, yes, it’s breaking my rule against buying things from randomly-named Chinese vendors, but this one has actually been around for a while now, and their reviews are actually about this item, not like the scammers who build up positive reviews on something innocuous and then swap it out so that the same listing now refers to a completely different product; “900 four-star reviews say this underwear fits perfectly, which is kind of odd for a bookcase”)

Last one of these for a while, but I had to do this one:

Last year, I struggled to find the name of one of the cute, wholesome girls in one of my cheesecake posts. It turned out to be the cute, wholesome cover of a porn flick featuring AV actress Azumi Kawashima(川島和津実), whose popularity lasted a lot longer than her brief career.

And, hey, she’s not even 40 yet!

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In an idle moment, I checked out the glass-half-empty that is the current anime season on Crunchyroll, and found a series where the weak pun in the title is being mistranslated as Are You Lost? (more sensibly, “Are We Shipwrecked?”).

The first 15-minute episode sets up the scenario quite simply: four busty high school girls are washed up on a deserted island after their student cruise goes wrong, and must survive with their convenient array of tropes. I watched it only a few hours ago, and already I can’t remember anything but their defining clichés and their bustlines.

I think the second season of DanMachi starts in two weeks; maybe that will suck less than the Sword Oratorio side series (aka “Is It Wrong To Make A Deranged Lesbian Fangirl The Protagonist In A Spinoff?”).