Free to Download: Signs and Portents 80

Mongoose have published their free to download ezine Signs and Portents. We’re up to issue 80.

I’ve taken two book excerpts out from the freebie as well as a chunk of text about The Sword Worlders in Mongoose’s Traveller (the latter follows the magazine embed). Enjoy!

This first quote comes from the LBB1 Mercenary book from Traveller.

Traveller: LBB1 Mercenary
Price: $14.99
Format: Softback (108 pages)

The Little Black Books return! Harking back to the original release of Traveller in the 70’s, the Little Black Books from Mongoose bring the latest version of Traveller to your gaming table in a handy and collectible pocket size.

Mercenary is a detailed expansion for the Traveller game, and the first in the line of Core Supplements. With advanced options for Soldier and Marine characters, any player with an interest in infantry combat will find something of value in this manual.

With new weapons and tactics, career options, and the lucrative mercenary ticket system, Mercenary puts ground combat front and centre.

Our second snippet from Signs and Portents is the preview blurb for the Judge Dredd RPG supplement: Cursed Earth.

Judge Dredd: Cursed Earth
Price: $24.99
Format: Hardback (128 pages)

If you thought the streets of Mega-City One were bad, wait until you take a walk outside the city. . .

The Cursed Earth is a blasted, irradiated wasteland filled with mutants, desperadoes and renegades eking out an existence in the most hellish place on the planet. Stretching across the old continental United States, the Cursed Earth separates the three great Mega-Cities of America, and it is a foolish citizen who makes any journey across its wastes.

Still, judges often have cause to venture out into danger, to pursue renegade perps, stall mutant invasions or even just to introduce rookies to the Cursed Earth in order to fulfil their training requirements in the legendary Hotdog Run.

This is a complete guide to the Cursed Earth, depicting the inhabitants, hazards and other dangers that beset all travellers across the wasteland.

Traveller: The Sword Worlders

By Shannon Appelcline

The sector-wide biosphere of the Spinward Marches is one of the most varied in all of Charted Space. Not only do all three of the major races of Humaniti have plentiful presence here, in this sector that lies between the Aslan and the Vargr but there are also numerous Minor Races found across this sector.

Many of these peoples are discussed briefly in The Third Imperium. This article – which discusses the Sword Worlders of the Spinward Marches – is the first of several that will provide you with all the crunchy bits needed to play the aliens of the Marches in your own Traveller game.

About the Sword Worlders
The Sword Worlders are humans who primarily live in the Sword World subsector of the Spinward Marches. Their Confederation spans over a dozen star systems, and is thus one of the more notable minor states in the sector. Sword Worlders are generally militant, conservative and hot-headed. This has landed them in numerous interstellar disagreements during the 15 centuries that their civilisation has existed.

History
The Sword Worlders are Solomani who fled the Rim in the fifth century before the Third Imperium, after they landed on the losing side of a civil war. Their original troop transport, the Gram, carried a mixture of Scandinavian and German troops; two cultures which would greatly influence the worlds that they would come to settle.

To get far away from all conflict the Gram, with several other cruisers, undertook an epic voyage that eventually brought them to a new planet in a new sector of space. They settled on their new home in –399, naming it Gram after their ship. From there, they settled numerous other planets in the subsector.

The rest of the universe caught up with the Sword Worlders in the third century before the Third Imperium, when they met both the Zhodani (–292) and the Darrians (–265). The Sword Worlders formed their first interstellar government, the Sacnoth Dominate, in –186. However, due to the generally adversarial and prickly nature of the Sword Worlders, many interstellar governments have risen and fallen over the centuries. The most recent, the Sword World Confederation, was created in 852.

The Sword Worlders met the Third Imperium in 53, when scouts contacted them. Over the next few centuries, the Sword Worlders’ interactions with the three interstellar governments now expanding out into the Marches – the Darrians, the Imperium and the Zhodani – would determine their destiny for almost 1,000 years.

The Sword Worlds’ antagonism toward the Darrians (and to a lesser extent the Third Imperium itself) began as early as the third century of the Third Imperium. Just as the then-current Sword Worlds government broke down, the Third Imperium was extending trade into the area. Because the Sword Worlds were once again squabbling with each other, the Darrian Confederation was better able to take advantage of this opportunity. The Sword Worlders felt that the Darrians had stolen trade routes that rightfully belonged to them – and that the Third Imperium had given them away. Antagonism toward the Third Imperium only multiplied a few centuries later when the Imperium began incorporating parts of the Vilis subsector, including Vilis (Svavasorm) and Garda-Vilis (Danuuz), which had been settled by Sword Worlders several centuries before.

These antagonisms grew into warfare over the subsequent centuries. The Sword Worlds used the First Frontier War (589–604) as an excuse to take the Entropic Worlds in the Querion Subsector from the Darrians. They openly joined with Zhodani and Vargr in the Outworld Coalition in the Second Frontier War (615–622), when they tried but failed to retake parts of the Vilis Subsector. The Sword Worlds remained aloof from the Third Frontier War but in the short Fourth Frontier War (1082–1084), they once more took the conflict as an excuse to take the Entropic Worlds (which had been lost in the intervening centuries).

The most recent event of note in the Sword Worlds was the 1098 dissolution of the government of Joyeuse, the former capital of the Confederation, into civil war. The balkanisation and warfare on the planet is emblematic of the problems of the Sword Worlds as a whole.

Culture
The Sword Worlders are primarily Solomani of German and Nordic heritage. Though they do not share the ideas of racial superiority that define modern-day Solomani – and, in fact, do not define themselves as Solomani at all – their culture has been greatly influenced by their Nordic roots. This has resulted in a society that prides itself on honour, obedience and militantism.

There is also notable difference in the culture between the two sexes.

Male Sword Worlders are fiercely independent, able to take offense at any slight and are rarely ready to back down. They take on the dangerous roles in society, as soldiers, belters and miners. They live their lives in a courageous manner, though not stupidly. If women in the Sword Worlds want to take on male roles, they must act as men do.

Female Sword Worlders are protected and cared for. They are the people that keep the hearthfires burning, giving the males a place to return to. As such, they are inevitably cloistered – except among other women. Here they come into their full roles as planners and politicians, ultimately those making the decisions for their men, whether the men know it or not.

The Sword Worlders’ long-running antagonism with the Darrians and the Third Imperium is largely because ‘they took what is ours’, whether it be trade contracts or worlds. However, the Sword Worlders also dislike the Darrians’ philosophies of inactive peace and they get their backs straight up at the idea of the Third Imperium telling its client worlds what to do.