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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but not for all tastes,
By
This review is from: Far Trader: Profit and Pitfalls Among the Stars (GURPS Traveller) (Paperback)
When I first got hold of this book, I expected something similar to the original "Merchant Prince", a few essays on trade, enhanced character generation, a few ship listings and maybe an additional trade table or two for the buying and selling of cargo....what a difference 15+ years can make! Boy, was I surprised when I opened the covers of "Far Trader" and started to read. Detailed essays on finance and trade in the Imperium, an incredibly detailed - almost realistic - economic and trade system, and much more besides. The detail was somewhat overwhelming at first, and somewhat insulted my minimalist sensibilities as a twenty year traveller veteran. I want to play a merchant! I exclaimed, not read a book on economics! But then I started to look at the material closely - and it *is* good. The authors have started with the initial premise that interstellar trade *is* both viable and necessary and then built a "pseudo-realistic" trading and economic system on top of it. It's elegant, neat and eminently playable. All the usual stuff is there of course, starship plans, character templates for GURPS and a host of adventure seeds. Production values are fabulous, and the books have a nifty "sidebar" format where a wealth of additional information is presented. I'm going to give it 5 stars, its a great piece of work - I liked it, but I can imagine that it won't be for all tastes. Its not really a book you can "dip into" and start using with a cursory read - if you are going to have successful merchant characters you'll need to read and absorb a fair portion of this book. I'm afraid that the 40 page vignette books of the classic traveller period are long gone, replaced with detail, detail, detail. But with such quality of content, and production values like these I for one won't particularly mourn their passing.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Stars are Free...,
By
This review is from: Far Trader: Profit and Pitfalls Among the Stars (GURPS Traveller) (Paperback)
The first times I have watched Firefly I knew what I was watching. I was watching Far Trader.
One of the favorite settings in a Traveller campaign is as a the crew of a small wandering trader slipping through the tangled web of the Imperial bureaucracy and the Megacorporations to scrape a living along the frontiers. You are small but you are free, and the universe is yours so long as your wits and good fortune allow. Far Trader naturally gives a lot of information on running such a campaign. But it also tells of the general nature of Intersteller Trade. The book is quite meaty and uses information based on the details of the real-life distribution industry. When I was tour-guide at Oregon Maritime Museum, I was able to use tidbits I had learned from far-trader to help give information to the tourists. Which shows how "realistic" it was. Those who are not detailmongers like me, might find this book annoying. Even then, there is toward the end a relief from that with advice on how to conduct a campaign. If you like to imagine yourself a bold enterprenuer with a keen wit then this is a book for you. The stars are free and the universe belongs to you. But watch out. For as the book warns you: "Cutthroat competition is not just a colorful catch phrase".
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