Various

[ Loren Wiseman says no aliens supplements planned ]
I also see this in Challenge. Is it because GDW expect to lose interest
in the game before they could complete the series? ;-) The aliens stuff
is unfortunately key to this kind of game. If you started with
Megatraveller then for a long time you were sold short in 2 key areas -
aliens and robotics. Please don't do the same with TNE. Right from the
beginnings of Traveller the demand has been for background material,
but most of the plan in Loren's note says wargames, hardware and more
wargames. Now I guess that that is what some key people in GDW enjoy
doing and what they are best at. but don't lose sight of the other
stuff.

Speaking of Challenge, I just acquired 69. I liked much of the
Traveller material, however, some peeves:
- - continued practice of printing gushing letters that wholeheartedly
endorse the party line. Or maybe that's all the letters they get.
- - about half the MT material I already paid for when I bought Survival
Margin.
- - suddenly we are padding it with a 3 page movie review column. Why?
Aren't there movie review magazines for this kind of thing? And this is
a magazine that has gone bimonthly!

[ Matt Goldman, in response to Loren, says that most of the material to
be published from now on will be post-virus ]
Yes, but GDW can continue to support their pre-virus customer base and
I'm encouraged by the TNE book itself - the subsector data includes
both pre and post virus stats. The only place I have seen any lapse in
this policy is in the Antares data in Challenge 69, which only provides
Hard Times stats (hands up everyone playing Hard Times based campaigns.
Now hands up everyone enjoying them). By the way, compare the space
taken up by subsector data in TNE with that in Challenge.

Most background material should hopefully still include pre virus
information as historical data. Hopefully the lesson was learnt with
the Diaspora supplement - which, stats apart, only detailed the current
(Hard Times) situation and provided zero real background color, and was
as a result awful.

Mark