FarFuture now taking pre-orders for Traveller 5

Marc Miller has just announced that T5 will initially be released as a CD-ROM version with approximately 1000 pages of content (!) around 31st January 2008.



The price is $35 (there will be a print edition with less material later on) and there is a PDF with more details here. The main Traveller-5 web-page is here. Pre-orders get a number of freebies now.

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TravCon08 Registration open to BITS Members


BITS is proud to announce TravCon08 UK is now open to registration from BITS members. This is the rebirth of the convention we used to run at Hebden Bridge, but this time down south near Sawtry. Details can be found in the BITS members area of the website.

We will open the registration to everyone shortly.

UPDATE (3/12/07): The minor glitch on the electronic registration page is now corrected.
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Dragonmeet 2007 is Today!

Dragonmeet website

We are pleased to remind you that we are attending Dragonmeet 2007 at Kensington Town Hall today (1st December) from 10.00am.

We have the usual trade stand full of new and second hand Traveller merchandise, dice, figures and other fine products manned by BITS Director Andy Lilly. Usual BITS member discounts apply at the show.

The BITS Demo Crew are also be present running a series of new adventures including the Angels Share scenarios (In Search of Angels, The Rock and Ice Work) in both morning and afternoon slots. Throughout the day we will have exclusive previews of the new Traveller Starship miniatures by Ad Astra and will be running demo games of our Power Projection: Fleet starship combat game.

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New BITS Newsletter Available.

BITS Newsletter


BITS
Members can find the latest edition of the newsletter available in the Member's section.

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Dragonmeet 2007 - Yes, we'll be there!

Dragonmeet website

We are pleased to announce we will be attending Dragonmeet 2007 at Kensington Town Hall on 1st December from 10.00am.

We will have the usual trade stand full of new and second hand Traveller merchandise, dice, figures and other fine products manned by BITS Director Andy Lilly. Usual BITS member discounts apply at the show.

The BITS Demo Crew will also be present running a series of new adventures including the Angels Share scenarios (In Search of Angels, The Rock and Ice Work) in both morning and afternoon slots. Throughout the day we will have exclusive previews of the new Traveller Starship miniatures by Ad Astra and will be running demo games of our Power Projection: Fleet starship combat game.

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Newsletter - Final Call for Submissions

This is a final call for articles for submission to the next BITS
newsletter due to be released October 2007.

Articles should be submitted by email in plain text, RTF, MS Word
(10pt Arial) or Open Office (10pt Arial). Formatting should be as
plain as possible.

We are especially looking for artwork to grace the pages of the new
look Newsletter so if anyone wishes to submit artwork as well please
email:

richardtalbotuk@yahoo.co.uk

or alternatively

bits@bits.org.uk.

We are unable to reimburse authors/artists for newsletter articles/art
but full credit will be given. Consideration is being given to a best
article prize so watch this space.

Thanks and anyone with queries feel free to drop me a line.

Richard Talbot
BITS Newsletter Editor
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GenCon UK is nearly here!


BITS will be attending GenCon UK 2007 between August 30th and September 2nd at Reading University (http://www.genconuk.com/).

BITS Director Andy Lilly will be bravely manning the trade stand with a wide range of Traveller merchandise including our own range of Little White Books, with our most recent release Cold Dark Grave by Dom Mooney and Universe software and a good selection of new and second hand gaming products.

On the gaming front Richard Talbot, Neil McGurk and Peter Trevor will be running a range of 3 new Traveller RPG adventures during the 3 timed slots at 9am, 2pm and 8pm.

We will also have a demo table of Traveller: Power Projection Fleet and Escort with games timed during the day at 9.00am and 2.00pm.

All our slots are now bookable via the GenCon website and cost two gaming tickets per game.

BITS are also looking for a brave volunteer to help run some of the sessions so if you are attending GenCon or just even thinking about it, drop an email to richardtalbotuk at yahoo.co.uk or bits at bits.org.uk (or use the contact form on the site here) and let us know! GenCon do provide some benefits for GM's depending on how many slots they run so check out their website for more information.

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TravCon 08 is coming...

TravCon 08 is a Traveller roleplaying game convention held near Sawtry (between Peterborough and Huntingdon on the A1M), currently planned to take place on the weekend of 14-16 March 2008. We have accommodation and playing space for 25-30 attendees for a great weekend of Traveller roleplaying (all are welcome, but initially BITS members will be given booking preference).

The hotel is comfortable, with en-suite facilities in all rooms, has ground floor rooms for a limited number of disabled attendees and a couple of conference rooms for gaming. The hotel provides breakfast; lunch and dinner venues include an adjacent Indian restaurant, small snack shop, or take-away from nearby Sawtry.

To help people plan their days and to give everyone a chance to play in several games, we will be organizing the weekend into a morning, afternoon and evening gaming sessions, with the opportunity to play BITS scenarios or to bring your own adventures to run (preferably having notified us so that we can advertise games to the attendees well in advance of the con). We also intend to run fun competitions of both Power Projection starship battles, and At Close Quarters miniatures skirmishes, there will be the BITS trade stand and a Bring & Buy (for any roleplaying stuff you want to try to sell to other attendees) and more fun stuff as we get it organised.

We’ve organised a deal with the hotel which gets attendees an ensuite room, Friday night to Sunday afternoon, B&B, including full con entry, for just £99 for BITS members.

Watch out for further details as they appear here on the web site.
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Traveller: Universe now available directly from BITS



Peter Trevor's Traveller: Universe can now be purchased directly from BITS via our webshop on eBay.

Full details about Universe can be found here.

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New BITS Newsletter Available



BITS Members can find the latest edition of the newsletter available in the Member's section.

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Mongoose to Publish Traveller [Updated]

BREAKING NEWS
The UK's Mongoose Publishing are going to be the new publishers of Traveller.

Mongoose Press Release in full:

Traveller Returns!
After a near 10-year gap in which only reprints of the Traveller game system have been available, Mongoose Publishing becomes the centralised resource for Traveller titles with the publication of their core rule book Traveller: Science-Fiction Adventures in the Far Future, in February 2008. On this foundation, Mongoose will produce a supporting line of supplements, adventures, and sourcebooks detailing the official and original Traveller universe of the far future.

The materials published by Mongoose will be placed in and part of the canonical Traveller universe.

It is our aim to halt the fragmentation of the Traveller game, and reintroduce one solid system (based on Classic Traveller), with one source for the official Traveller universe.

But that is not all. . .

Mongoose Publishing Science Fiction RPGs
Mongoose will also be using Traveller in its licensed science-fiction properties (each featuring a Traveller logo).

We have pioneered this concept already with Runequest, publishing a rules set and supporting adventures and sourcebooks, then using the Runequest rules as the basis for other alternative fantasy role-playing settings, such as Hawkmoon, Elric and Lankhmar.

The first licensed setting to be produced using the Traveller rules set (and available in early 2008) will be Starship Troopers, a welcome return to bug-blasting action across the galaxy! Hot on its heels will be Strontium Dogs, based on the hit 2000AD comic strip. After that, who knows. . ?

To the greatest extent possible, we intend that there be a transportability of characters, concepts, and even equipment between the various systems. So, it will be perfectly possible for your Strontium Dog Bounty Hunter to land on a planet in his Scout/Courier, only to find him battling for his life against waves of Warrior Bugs – with no conversion needed between the games!

All games and settings will therefore be able to utilise the core supplements, such as High Guard, Mercenary, and 760 Patrons, while retaining their own character.

Open Gaming License
Once the rules for Traveller appear, we plan to make them available under the Open Gaming License (OGL). At the same time, we will issue a Traveller Logo License (TLL) which makes the Traveller logo and titling available to licensees.

Far Future will Publish T5
Far Future is proceeding with plans to produce the long-heralded Traveller5, initially as an extensive CD ROM package (estimated at 1000 pages) by the end of 2007, and a distilled 350-page Traveller5 Core Rules book in the first half of 2008.

T5 will be a superset of the Mongoose Traveller rules, providing detailed coverage of rules, concepts and history not available elsewhere. There will be cross-compatibility between Traveller and Traveller5, allowing you to use rules and supplements from each.

Traveller will be faithful to Classic Traveller, with an upgraded task and combat system. Traveller5 will be a superset of those rules, providing greater detail and more insight into resolving situations in Traveller.


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Power Projection Events, Maryland, USA

Mystic Station Designs are running another set of Power Projection demos at Balticon 41 over 25-28th May 2007. It's a great opportunity to get to know the game.

More details on the PowerProjection.net website.
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BITS at Salute this weekend - 21st April 2007

BITS will be at Salute Zero Seven this weekend, 21st April 2007.

One of the biggest wargaming conventions, doors open at ExCel 10am to 5pm. The show promises to be bigger and better than last year, with entry for £9 on the day.The first 4000 entrants get a couple of free LOTR miniatures, there's an absolute pile of gaming and miniatures demonstrations, participation games and traders, ranging from Ancients to Science Fiction.
 
BITS will be hosting participation games of Power Projection and At Close Quarters at our trade stand (TD041 against the West wall). We'll have copies of all our products (including Cold Dark Grave) as well as a huge pile of other second-hand and new Traveller books.
 
We will also be taking advance orders for the new Ad Astra Traveller starship miniatures which have been specially designed for Power Projection!
 
BITS members will get a special discount on our products (in addition to the usual 10%) for finding our stand at the show.

Details here.
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Cold Dark Grave and Power Projection: Escort now available in the USA

Mystic Station Designs have taken delivery of our new adventure "Cold Dark Grave", plus restock of Power Projection: Escort for the North American market. They have also got copies of pretty much everything we've written in the past.

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Review of 101 Patrons

Nigel Swan has reviewed one of our older books, 101 Patrons, on RPG.net.


You can read the review here. We love to know about reviews of products (bad or good), so please feel free to let us know if you see any, or produce a review yourself. RPG.net have also reviewed GDW's MegaTraveller Rebellion Sourcebook and the Classic Traveller Double Adventure Chamax Plague/Horde recently.

If you'd like us to post links to reviews to Traveller products other than the BITS ones here in the future, just let us know through the comments.

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Ad Astra now taking orders...

Ten Ships...
Ad Astra Games have announced that they are taking pre-orders for the first two miniatures fleet boxes for Power Projection, plus they now have the US edition of Power Projection: Fleet available to order.

More details on the Power Projection website.

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Freelance Traveller website issues

Jeff Zeitlin at Freelance Traveller posted the following to the TML:

As if the breakdown of the laptop with the master copy of the Freelance Traveller website wasn't enough (no loss of information, just some
maintenance software has to be changed, which is what's causing the hiatus there), the system running the Freelance Traveller Forums has
*also* failed.

We believe that we can recover the information, but aren't certain yet. We'll be working on that this week, and will try to
be back quickly. If we have to reconstruct, we have archives of the newsgroups in Unix mbox format through 2/11/07; unfortunately, we don't
have backups of user data, so users will have to recreate their accounts in the event of reconstruction rather than recovery.

The breakdown also affects the IRC "'bots" from #Traveller on Undernet and #Lonestar on Psionics (Brubek and the bridge); we expect to have those back up quickly; it's just a matter of locating some of the older versions of the code for them. More information to follow as it becomes available; please spread the word.


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Limited Number of copies of 'Cold Dark Grave' available from our Webshop

We've put all the unsold copies from the initial run of 'Cold Dark Grave' up at our webshop on eBay. If you fancy a Classic Era Traveller adventure, it may be just your cup of tea! This was only a small volume run, so will not be in retail until the second print run is completed, which will be at least a month.

If you do happen to buy a copy and like it, please feel free to review it at one of the online RPG sites like RPG.net.

Here's the quick description I posted in the comments when I first announced the release:
Cold Dark Grave is set in Yres, in the Regina subsector, one of the two systems involved in the last battle of the Fourth Frontier War. The characters all work for a belt mining company which is struggling through the post Fifth Frontier War depression. A job offer they can't afford to ignore comes along and events ensure.

This is a predominantly space based adventure set in the Classic Era. The scenario has been one of our most popular at cons over the last two years.


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'Cold Dark Grave' released [updated]

Cold Dark Grave
The latest book from BITS was released at Conception 2007 this weekend. The photo above is by Neil Ford (thanks Neil!), and shows some of the physical copies we received in time for the show. News on distribution and availability to follow. 'Cold Dark Grave' is an adventure set in the Spinward Marches after the Fifth Frontier War.

UPDATE: The copies shown here are the initial smaller run we do before the main release, so we only have a limited number as yet. I'll update here as soon as I have more.
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Traveller Miniatures coming from Ad Astra Games

Following our announcement earlier in the week about Ad Astra Games licence to publish Power Projection, we are very pleased to bring you a preview of the Traveller miniatures range they are going to be releasing.
.Traveller Warships
The ships pictured here are the Plankwell Class Dreadnought, the Azhanti High Lightning, a Chrysathemum class Destroyer, and two Zhodani ships (a Zhdavldlitz class Light Cruiser and a Zhdiak class Light Destroyer). If you're interested in the chat about these new models, have a look at Ad Astra Games' forums.
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Power Projection to be printed in the USA

Power Projection Fleet cover

BITS are proud to announce closer ties with yet another game publisher. Following on from our collaboration with Jon Tuffley at Ground Zero Games to produce our much-applauded Traveller starship combat system Power Projection, we are now beginning printing of the Power Projection: Fleet rules through Ken Burnside at Ad Astra Games in the USA.

We continue to have stock of the original UK printings of both Power Projection: Escort and Fleet, but this agreement allows us to produce and distribute the updated version of Fleet more easily in the USA. We will continue to stock and distribute the original UK printing to distributors, mail order customers and at conventions, but will replace these with the US-printed version over time.

We will only be printing Fleet at Ad Astra; though Escort is a useful, and fun, lead-in to Power Projection, the economics of printing meant it wasn't worth producing Escort in the USA: for our first out-source to Ad Astra we wanted to focus on the complete rules set in Fleet and see how it went.

We intend to collaborate further with Ken and his team at Ad Astra on future projects, just as we continue to work very closely with Jon at Ground Zero Games with our upcoming Power Projection: Reinforcements book.

Andy Lilly
http://www.bitsuk.net/
http://www.powerprojection.net/

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Power Projection site updated

I've updated the Power Projection website to a new, more modern format in line with the BITS site, and added a free PDF download of an Escort class ship.

Saberwolf SSD

This is a conversion of the Traveller T20 Saberwolf Block 1 Fleet Destroyer into a Power Projection SSD. If you want the full details on the ship (the blurb and High Guard style stats and picture), you'll need to buy the excellent Traveller's Aide #7: Fighting Ships from RPGNow or QLI directly.

Have fun blowing things up!
Dom

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Delays in Responding due to New Arrival

I may be a little slow in responding to emails to BITS and sending them on to the relevant person, as I became a Dad on Tuesday with the arrival of my first child, a son. Ping me again if you don't hear anything for a week or two.

Dom (BITS Webmaster)
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Classic Traveller CD ROM arrives in UK

Just in case anyone was doubting it existed, I can confirm that the Classic Traveller CD ROM exists and my copy arrived here in the UK yesterday. The content looks good, and is not just a re-scan of the reprints. The Little Black Books are presented as individual pages and the colour is all there. There are a few examples where the scan isn't perfect (some light grey lost on the hex map for Twilight's Peak, for an example) but this is an awesome resource.

The text if fully searchable, and the index page is better than then MegaTraveller one if you prefer using that to navigate. There are three editions of Traveller on the CD ROM - Starter Edition, the 1981 Little Black Books and The Traveller Book. Everything else that GDW published is here as well.

For its cost, I cannot do anything but recommend it. I'll try and get a short review done for the next BITS newsletter.

Dom (BITS Webmaster)
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Classic Traveller CD ROM Now Shipping

An update from Marc Miller, received today:

Classic Traveller CD Case

We are shipping (by mail in the US; by air letter post to destinations outside the US) the Classic Traveller CDROM today (Jan 3) and tomorrow (Jan 4). I want to thank you for your patience on this; we’re proud of the content and we think you will like it.
 
The JTAS CDROM (if you ordered that one) will ship by Jan 31. More CDROMs are in the works…
 
Marc Miller
Far Future Enterprises

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