Customer Reviews

Starship Operator's Manual, Vol. 1 (Megatraveller)

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This book, like so much of what Digest Group published for MegaTraveller, is just stuffed to the bulkheads with the kind of details and ideas that can really bring important elements of a role playing game to life.

The standard rule books tend to paint very general pictures of starships and starship travel in very broad strokes - there's only so much room in a supplement, and only so many supplements you can produce in a year.

The pages available to starships in the main rule books tend to get used up on game mechanics stuff that - while very important to game play - doesn't do much to add flavor.

By concentrating an entire supplement on all things starship, DG was able to delve into the kinds of things the characters would know, would have to learn, and would live or die by... The kinds of things players should know, if they're going to be doing that 16-year Imperial Navy veteran or life-long merchant character decent justice.

Just how does a jump drive work? How about the M-Drives? And not the 'the engine converts fuel into energy' kind of hard-rules description you get from the main books... How does it -work-? Like the kinds of things you'd learn about cars in Driver's Ed, and by riding with your friends and family an such, and watching your mom or dad maintain it and work on it when it breaks down.

What do the various crew positions really do all day, and all week? What kinds of rules and laws and customs have arisen around spacefaring culture?

This is a 'rules supplement' you'll be happy to read cover to cover.

And, given the modern price of this out-of-print gem, and how badly worn my copies have gotten by continuous reading by myself and my players, I wish I'd had the prescience to photo-copy and archive the original on day one. :-)

I bought this book back when it first came out. It was one of my best Traveller purchases ever! There were 100 things I wanted to know about the starships and how they functioned. Things you had to gleen from 1,001 other books in snippets. For me this is the book that sold me on continuing to play Traveller for the remainder of my life.

Also if you love sci-fi and starships... this is definately a sweet read, and not as wordy as something with the Star Trek label.