It's RPGaDay season again. Here's a link to the blog post with the current year's prompts.
Today's prompt is Renew.
Energy seems to beget energy. Since I rediscovered - renewed - my passion for Traveller, all of a sudden I find myself full of energy for roleplaying projects more generally. I've probably been more engaged on gaming this year than I have for quite some time.
I've two projects that have been niggling me for quite some time, and now they're coming together nicely.
The first relates to material that I produced for BITS in the past; while some of this has been available in PDF, several of the books that I'm most proud of have never made it past the original editions that we were selling at conventions and through a couple of retailers and publishers (Leisure Games and Steve Jackson Games mainly). I've been working with Andy to get these back in print as PDF and POD, and they should be out before the end of the year. After that, I'll be helping to get some of the others converted to POD as well. However, this isn't quite as simple as it sounds as we will publish under the TAS programme.
We need to do conversions into Mongoose Traveller 2, amend the legal parts and trade dress and then format them for print, which is reasonably complex as most of the books were originally created at A4 rather than A5 in Microsoft Word. Some where done in Quark, adds a further complication as the version of Quark that BITS has doesn't play nice with InDesign or Affinity. Fortunately, Affinity can manipulate PDFs very well if you have the fonts. That needs to be done manually, as the PDF from Quark strips the font names and replaces them with something like 'CIDFont+F1'. The covers are another challenge, but mostly less so. I can open a PDF and get to the elements on those so I am confident that they can be recreated easily (except for title dress, which is a shaped and extruded font that even Andy can't remember how he did it).
So it is very much a project to renew.
The second project relates to a Traveller adventure that I wrote about two decades ago for the first Furnace. That has been run multiple times by me and others (it's probably the most tested scenario we ever wrote, with perhaps runs in three figures by me and others at conventions). Completing it has been on my round-to-it list for a long time, but kids, life etc. have always got in the way. I'm exploring a route to bring this one to print via TAS in collaboration with another Traveller publisher that I really respect. Hopefully, that will see the light of day earlier this year or at the start of next year. Have just converted two other scenarios to Mongoose Traveller 2e, I'm pretty confident that I can do that part quickly.
So this year has definitely been one where I renewed my energy for Traveller and gaming in general. I'm even running a Traveller campaign for the first time in a long time!
17 August 2025
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