Traveller 2300 - Tools for Colonial Living

GDW's Traveller was by far the best-known of the science fiction roleplaying games. However, it was set far into the future, leaving a potential opening for a "near future" SF RPG and GDW launched "Traveller 2300" in 1986 to try to fill this gap.

The result was confusing. Despite using "Traveller" as part of the name to cash in on brand recognition, there was no relationship between the games. Traveller 2300 used a new rule set, and a background derived by extending the chronology created for GDW's Twilight 2000 game into the future, after humanity had recovered from WWIII and explored a small section of the universe - roughly a subsector, in classic traveller terms.

The games' universe had some excellent features (the Kafers in particular were some of my favourite aliens) but it also had some notably bad ones (including an extremely abrupt left turn to bring in lots of cyberpunk elements in the last published sourcebook, presumably attempting to cash in on newly trendy cyberpunk games and which meshed very poorly with the setting). The key point, however, was that it doesn't appear to have sold especially well.

Mongoose have now revived the setting as 2300AD, but using the standard Traveller rule set - effectively creating another traveller universe in the same way they have done with several licensed sourcebooks such as Hammer's Slammers.

While this compatibility means that equipment of appropriate tech level from any traveller equipment guide can be used, Traveller 2300 had always used specific equipment (eg your rifle is an AS-89, rather than the generic "Gauss rifle" of other Traveller lines and Mongoose has produced "Tools for Frontier Living" as a 160 page setting-specific equipment guide.

The obvious comparison is with the 52 page equipment guide produced for the original Traveller 2300. Oddly, despite being longer, the new volume doesn't include several sections present in the original, including Kafer equipment and combat walkers, which will presumably be published elsewhere.

So what does it use that space for? Well, the format isn't particularly "dense", for one thing; while I suspect that most copies sold will be PDFs where length doesn't really matter, editing it into a tighter format could have presented the same data in rather less space. It also spends probably too much time specifying things that aren't likely to change the story, and which GMs can probably come up with cost for themselves very easily - formal clothes, for example.

Overall, it's fair to say that it contains everything you'd expect, but nothing that makes you think "Oooh, that's a neat idea I hadn't thought of". While workmanlike, it doesn't do the job as well as the equivalent books for the latest versions of WFRP ("The Old World Armoury") or RuneQuest ("Weapons & Equipment") both of which include essays and notes which really help bring the game worlds to life as well as just showcasing extra equipment.

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