Several years ago, Avalanche Press Ltd re-released the game Imperium in a new edition called Imperium Third Millennium. Imperium was originally published by the Conflict Games Company (which became part of GDW) and presents the period and battles described in the recent GURPS Traveller supplement Interstellar Wars when Terra was fighting for survival against the Vilani First Imperium.

The main rules remained unchanged, but some of the conflict rules were 'updated'. The graphic look of the game was also modernised.

However, Avalanche have announced that the remaining Imperium Third Millennium stock will be destroyed after 4th July 2006 to create space for new games. They are clearing the remaining stock at $7.50 a box (75% off). With the strong pound/dollar exchange rate, this may well make a good saving, even with the $25 shipping to Europe.

Our eBay webshop, AncientTomesUK, is now restocked with 101 Corporations and Power Projection: Escort after they have now been reprinted. If you are a BITS member, don't forget to contact Richard via the eBay messaging system to give him your details. He will verify these and then apply your discount when he invoices.

Dom (BITS Webmaster)

A convention report from Nick: unfortunately no camera as that was my job and it got forgotten when I pulled out.
__

BITS was represented at Salute! 2006, although with Dom suddenly taken ill, only Andy and I were there. I arrived later than I meant to and had to take off early, so Andy had to do all the hard work of setting up and taking down, as well as relieving Keith on the trade stand, while I just ran some demo games.

Salute being a wargames convention, we were only running Power Projection, rather than our usual RPG sessions. We stuck to the tried and tested format of running small quick games and trying to persuade anybody who stood still near the table to grab a ship and have a go. A lack of wine gums prevented us from
running the Mooney Asteroid Belt (AKA 'Battle of the Maynard Belt') introductory scenario, but luckily it turns out that free sweets aren’t the only reason people play the game.

For the most part, we stuck to the lightweight ships from Power Projection:Escort, most of the games being straight-up small ship engagements between familiar Imperial and Zhodani forces. There was a sneak preview of some of the material from the upcoming Power Projection:Reinforcements book, with some Sword Worlds ships making an appearance, as well as the Convoy Raid scenario and a couple of optional rules.

For such a small BITS presence we had quite a lot of interest, with demo games running almost constantly and often two at once. Two or three people asked me if this was the same Traveller they’d played twenty years ago, and we had a couple of very enthusiastic kids at the end who played three demos back to back and were getting pretty mean at the whole starship command thing by the time I had to head off.

I just wish we had miniatures as cool as the Cloudships of Mars ones.

Nick

This evening, I finally pulled the plug on the old BITS website files which were on my personal ISP's space. This means that any attempt to use the old http://www.asbf58.dsl.pipex.com/BITS_website/ path will now fail. We're totally committed to the new look, and hope you like it.

Dom