The Rim Expeditions are here...

[MongooseMatt]

The latest sourcebook for Traveller has just arrived on PDF and Pre-Order, and will be of special interest to anyone who enjoys exploring deep space or learning about life in the Solomani Sphere. The Rim Expeditions have arrived in your campaign...

You can grab your own copy here: https://www.mongoosepublishing.com/products/rim-expeditions



What lies beyond the Solomani Confederation?

Humans are great explorers, and the Solomani are the greatest of them all. Ever since the days of the Interstellar Wars the people of Terra have felt the call of the great Rimward Frontier, and they have answered. This outward urge has taken Solomani explorers right to the edge of the spiral arm… and beyond.

The Lubbock and Xuanzang Enclaves are little havens of civilisation out in the big black. Just keeping these forward exploration bases supported is adventure enough for many, but beyond them lies the unknown; the mysterious Rammak, the civilisation to reach and investigate the curious region known as the Spinner, and of course the long voyage out to Point Cetus – the most distant installation yet built by the Solomani people.

There are many challenges on the Rimward Frontier. Rival Aslan and Hiver exploration missions, strange alien species, and the mysterious Hordes advancing out of the Flous Nebula. The greatest danger may come from other humans, descended from Rule of Man and early Terran colony missions. Some are glad to greet their long-estranged kin; others are territorial and aggressive. Far from home, with no support likely for months or even years, the Travellers must face whatever comes their way. Who knows what wonders await just one jump plot away?

Includes a poster-sized map of the Kruse sector.

 

[ProfGrizzlyJon]

Universal Research Mechanic for the win! Now I need to revise all of my custom supplements (I run a lot of research heavy games)

 

[G'Naakbusters]

Looking through it now, very pleased as ever to have a new region explored.

I didn't realise this was essentially a full location sourcebook. I guess we're getting three this year, not two? I'm very happy with that, since these are my favourite of the books.

Lots of nice additions to the setting.

Very small detail, but I'm glad the Inyx get a passing mention. I like them, and I'm happy that Mongoose is incorporating them (or at least acknowledging them).

Ah, and the Valkyrie are mentioned too. Nice to see these pre-existing rimward races being recognised.

 

[Epabaa]

Lubbock Sector! Home to the storied Raider Nation, a strange but passionate enclave of Humaniti…

 

[ProfGrizzlyJon]

Hordes are explained in text, but do not include game mechanics or other rules. Is this available somewhere else? Or are we to create our own?

 

[alex_greene]

I'm getting this, but not till the 15th.

 

[Sigtrygg]

It is a really great book. There needs to be a happy dance emoji

Lots of great stuff.

I am so glad to see the Perseus expedition get a mention.

But.

I want more.

I want adventures, I want more details on the Perseus base ships, I want to know what the big bads out there are.

Speaking of ships wtf are the Solomani building at TL12 for? The Terrans were TL12 almost three thousand years ago. and had a TL14 fleet during the Rim war. They can be TL12 but with TL14 stage improvements.

By the way are the aliens mentioned in GURPS Traveller still canon?

 

[Condottiere]

Maybe ease of repair and maintenance?

 

[Sigtrygg]

That makes sense, but so does adding a few TL14 stage improvements.

It's a minor nit pick since I would make my own ships anyway.

I see a lot of potential for follow up JTAS articles, adventures and supplements. Much more potential than the Third Imperium.

 

[G'Naakbusters]

By the way are the aliens mentioned in GURPS Traveller still canon?

*Most* of them, so far as I can tell?

The Clotho-Addaxur confusion has been resolved with official word that both races officially exist, merely that the Clotho are not the Addaxur. That was the only real contradiction.

Most of the other new creations for GURPS -- J'sia, Evantha, Inyx, Devi, Drakarans, Lithkind -- seem to be accepted, be they official canon or not. They're featured on Traveller Map, and there's no reason not to use them that I can see.

This book has brief mentions of Inyx and Valkyrie. Very brief, but a nice detail for those like myself who enjoy the GURPS races and like to see them included, or at least acknowledged.

 

[Squishtopher10203]

Hello, I have bought this book and have noticed an oddity. I do not know whether it is a mistake, but it does not seem right to me.

Looking at the world listing for the Horden subsector on page 41 and the listings of the Kruse sector's worlds, and the accompanying map, I notice that every world that the Solomani control has a planet code ending in 67-D.

This seems to mean that all of those Solomani planets (since 67-D refers to government type law level and technology level respectively) have a captive government, a law level of 7, and a technology level of 13. This seems highly improbable in my opinion, even if these worlds are colonies.

This also applies to Hallstat which is outside Solomani space, but according to page 43 is under the control of the Solomani in all but name.

I again reiterate that I could be wrong in my misgivings so I welcome other member's input on this issue.

I thank you for your time.

Edit: After further reading, I have noticed that there seem to be three Solomani planets whose code does not end in 67-D: Nonchalance in the Eberhardt subsector (listed on page 62) has a code ending in C8-C, Franklin in the Luomala subsector (listed on page 88) has a code ending in 00-0, and Xuan Cang in the Moksadeva subsector of the Xuanzang sector (listed on page 108) has a code ending in 67-A. However, as far as I can tell all other Solomani planets has the same alpha-numerical ending to their codes.

It is not just Solomani planets that have suspiciously coincidental codes either. Other polities seem to have the same issue. For instance, of the Sovereignty controlled planets in the Neyzi subsector, listed on page 94, all but Insula Suverana has a code ending in 68-7 (Insula Suverana's code ends in F9-B).

I have noticed another problem in my brief peruse of the contents of this book. In the listing for the worlds of the Hagan subsector, on page 72, Whisper is said to have location 0406 (which is in the Adams subsector) and has no code listed. The map of the subsector on page 73 gives the planet the location of 2816 and the code C131545-9 which seems more likely, it fits with the Interstellar Republic controlling planets whose code ends with 45-9.

Again, I think you for your time (and I hope I was not too verbose with this forum post).

 

[Sigtrygg]

At last, an interstellar government that actually imposes rules on its planets...

 

[Vormaerin]

That was certainly my thought. I haven't done more than give that part of the book a glance so far. But it sounds like those are worlds under active colonization from the homeworlds and run appropriately.

 

[Ol'Weedy]

There's an 'eye' roughly 2x2 Sectors wide in the middle of the void, that the named rim-ward sectors (on Travllermap) brush up against... 4 half sectors surrounded by empty space that I've spent the better part of 6 months fleshing out (and extensively revisited since the World Builders HB came out).
I don't normally go for the source books, but now Mongoose are encroaching on MY territory, I might have to make an exception.

 

[CordwainerFish]

There's an 'eye' roughly 2x2 Sectors wide in the middle of the void, that the named rim-ward sectors (on Travllermap) brush up against... 4 half sectors surrounded by empty space that I've spent the better part of 6 months fleshing out (and extensively revisited since the World Builders HB came out).
I don't normally go for the source books, but now Mongoose are encroaching on MY territory, I might have to make an exception.

If you're thinking of the cluster two sectors rimward of Theta-2 Orionis, the book does mention it as a mystery but does not develop it.

 

[Ol'Weedy]

If you're thinking of the cluster two sectors rimward of Theta-2 Orionis, the book does mention it as a mystery but does not develop it.

That's the spot. Thought it was far enough away, and isolated enough to be a nice playground.

 

[GypsyComet]

That's the spot. Thought it was far enough away, and isolated enough to be a nice playground.

"Far enough" can be tricky, given some of the things we see in Marc's book. I suspect Ade Stewart's "Distant Fringe" is "far enough", but someone may prove me wrong at some point.

 

[apastuszak]

I just downloaded the Rim Expedition sample PDF from DriveThruRPG.com and it's suffering from the missing images problem that plagued the CSC 2023 update when I bought it.

Any app on MacOS and iOS that uses Apple's default PDF renderer (which is pretty much all of them) shows a lot of missing images, including the front cover.

Here is what the cover looks like in Apple Preview.



As you can see, the whole cover is missing and the top of the table of contents.

I know this is an Apple issue, since Adobe Reader and FoxIt PDF Reader displays these just fine on the Mac. But you did something to fix the CSC 2023 update to get it to work.

Can you apply that same magic to this file?

 

[apastuszak]

If you don't have access to a Mac, I will be happy to troubleshoot. As you can see from the DriveThru sample, you don't need to send me the whole file. Just dump the first 5 pages or so to PDF and I can load them up.

I spent a lot of time using a command-line tool called qpdf to try to see if I could find the issue and give you an easy solution. But I came up with nothing. Looking at my CSC 2023 update, I see that you're using Adobe InDesign 18.5 to layout the books. Apple Preview tells me that you're using a tool called iLovePDFs to make the PDFs. I don't know if you make the PDF in an InDesign export and the running it through iLovePDF to optimize it.

But I'd love to get a few pages exported out of InDesign to PDF to see if iLovePDF might be the issue.

I'm an IT Professional with a healthy obsession with graphic arts, so this has been really going down the rabbit hole for me.

 

[Timolution]

If you don't have access to a Mac, I will be happy to troubleshoot. As you can see from the DriveThru sample, you don't need to send me the whole file. Just dump the first 5 pages or so to PDF and I can load them up.

I spent a lot of time using a command-line tool called qpdf to try to see if I could find the issue and give you an easy solution. But I came up with nothing. Looking at my CSC 2023 update, I see that you're using Adobe InDesign 18.5 to layout the books. Apple Preview tells me that you're using a tool called iLovePDFs to make the PDFs. I don't know if you make the PDF in an InDesign export and the running it through iLovePDF to optimize it.

But I'd love to get a few pages exported out of InDesign to PDF to see if iLovePDF might be the issue.

I'm an IT Professional with a healthy obsession with graphic arts, so this has been really going down the rabbit hole for me.

See my thread on this issue yesterday.

The problem is that the missing images are jpeg2000 images with extensions that reference a CMYK colour profile. The native ImageIO pipeline in macOS/iOS doesn’t support this type of jp2/jpx image file (a long standing problem) and hence this carries forward into the native PDFKit renderer. So apps such as Preview or any other PDF renderer that uses PDFKit has this issue. Third party PDF renderers that use another rendering engine (example PSPDFKit) usually don’t exhibit this problem as these renderers usually have their own image rendering pipeline.

Now, as I said in my thread, you can question why Mongoose includes jpeg2000 images referencing a CMYK profile (usually reserved for prepress files) in a pdf meant for screen readers and maybe they might consider not doing this anymore in the future. Then again, when I extracted the raw images from the Rim Expeditions pdf using the pdfimages cli tool it turned out that the corpus is made up of a jumble of image formats (reason why some images do show, as they are normal jpgs or pngs), the reason or logic for which completely eludes me tbh…