Traveller Supplement 3: Fighting Ships (Traveller Sci-Fi Roleplaying)

This book is what I expected, schematics and deck plans of space ships. It provides a decent cross section of ship sizes and roles so you can quickly get something (fairly) appropriate for a game.Unfortunately it's not very creative nor are the deck plans elegant or exciting. I know the rules for ship building from the core rules were used and that means putting in enough fuel space for the engines and jump rating. However it also leads to large areas of ship shaded out with "Fuel" printed on it, crammed into every spare space on the deck. It's almost as if the rooms and systems of the ship were put inside a giant fuel tank, which doesn't seem like a very clever or safe way to build a war ship.Something as simple as stating "all decks from X to Y= Fuel" would have looked better and saved space for decks with usable rooms. A better idea would have been to put huge cylinders into the ships as actual fuel tanks, that are armoured and separate from other important components like crew quarters. Instead of just putting fuel on the other side of the bulkhead.Perhaps this shows a flaw in the ship design system in the core rules and a few ship plans should have been made using them earlier on. Total customisability might not have been as good as building ships from pre-set components of different sizes. Either way involves maths and juggling things to fit.If your copy of the book is costing more than $10 you might be better spending it on a download of FTL and using the ships there for inspiration.

Oh where to start......Ok, the art work is pathetic. I could done better and I am no artist. Most of the book is wasted with deck plans. There are only like 12-15 ships in the book. The descriptions are very short and nearly useless. Save your cash!!!! If I could give this 0 stars I would.

I own this book, and have owned it since the early 1980's. I referenced this work and found it a great boon to running my role-playing games (okay the new language is pen & paper for over the table role-playing games). The point is, the book has a few ships to cover any situation you may need to run your game. Art? Black and White sketches. I am no artist, but I know they used black board and scrapped away to reveal the white under this canvas. I think it provides a sense depth. It gave a history of the ship and what its purpose or design is for. I don't remember any deck plans? Save perhaps for some ships boats or the like at the back? I would have to find my copy. I have not run a game for many years now; pathetic excuse I know! The other guy put Traveller down and that is just plane wrong as Traveller was second to Advanced Dungeon and Dragons in the 1980's! If you plan to run a Traveller game, you have two choices. Buy all these used books, and you will need most of them or all if you can find them. Choice two, to buy the new book from Mark Miller (the author and brilliant man who's game this is) traveller5.net. Either way, you won't go wrong. But I plan to buy the new book he just came out with. I learned about it at kickstarter and followed the whole thing and learned where his new site was. One last thing. Traveller can be any science fiction back drop you may want to make it. Star Wars is typical; but I know a person who ran a Battlestar Galactica game too. I used it to form the outer core for the Greyhawk Campaign I ran for twenty years, and made it kind of like the Marvel Universe (with Galactus running around and so forth). It provided no limits to the characters to play in, and my players loved it! Alas, I am still looking for the Traveller book that had all the star maps with the traveller star map poster.

I also have this book. My copy is the original Game Designers Workshop (GDW) copy that I purchased back in the early 1980's. My copy is entitled Supplement 9. Even at my age I still have the almost complete set of books. Books 1-8 includeing the starter box set (books 1-3). Supplements 1-12 and I think there was a Supplement 13 of the originals. Double Adventures 1-6, (missing Double Adventure 5). Adventurs 1-11 (missing Adventure 10). I enjoyed playing this game better than Dungeons & Dragons. I also have the actual board games of Fifth Frontier War: Battles for the Solomani Rim, and Ahzanti High Lighting. The only books that I did not collect were the Travellers Aid Society Journals. These adventures were fun to play during my off duty hours back in my US Army days.

Great addition to the traveller line