We're really pleased to announce that Cold Dark Grave is now available here at DriveThruRPG as a PDF.

Being a Belter...
...is a risky line of work at the best of times.

Ernsteyn Industrial Materials is a family-run asteroid mining operation which has hit hard times.

The sharks are closing in...
...and there's not much a small company can do when one ship is grounded needing expensive repairs and your other Seeker might as well stay in dock because suddenly the decent mining grants aren't coming your way.

There's a job (isn't there always?)...
...which could save the company. It's a simple salvage operation and the patron is well known to EIM, but surely there must be a catch (isn't there always...)?

Cold Dark Grave was first published as the BITS tournament adventure From a Cold Dark Grave for Gen Con UK 2005, making it perfect for a one-shot adventure as it includes pregenerated characters. This edition expands the original adventure but it is still easily usable as a one shot; alternatively, it could be included in an existing campaign. The adventure includes details on the Yres system in the Regina subsector of the Spinward Marches.

Written for Mongoose Traveller, suitable for all Traveller rulesets through the included BITS Generic Task System and BITS Generic NPC System.

This third printing has been modified as necessary to update it for Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition, and to space some bits out a bit more nicely. The second printing had a few minor corrections due to too many late nights working on the first printing (which was only printed, stapled and cropped on the afternoon of taking it down to Conception 2007 where it was launched for sale).

Please do check out the rest of our BITS products here.


Foot notes:
1) TravCon UK 2025 folks, we will resolve PDFs for you once we have 'Delta 3 is Down is out'.
2) We can't release this in print without using the Traveller Compatible license which will remove the canon material from the book. Our apologies, but that's a limit of the TAS licence we've been asked to use.

If you read the entry on TravCon 2025, you may have noticed that the reports mentioned that we published a very limited run of a Double Adventure version of our scenarios Cold Dark Grave and Delta 3 is Down. These have been converted to the latest edition of Mongoose Traveller. We're in the final stages of getting them ready to release, and we'll share more when that happens.

TravCon UK went well and much Traveller-fun was had by all.

Here are some of the write ups we've seen around the internet.

The November/December Issue of Freelance Traveller has multiple write ups in the magazine, including TravCon UK and TravellerCON USA.

One of those articles was taken from Dom Mooney's blog post on the weekend in Alconbury.

Mongoose demonstrated their new Traveller-based SF game, Pioneer, which was recently crowd-funded, to very positive reviews.

TravCon UK will take place from 3rd to 5th October 2025 in Alconbury Cambridgeshire, and registration is now open. This is a primarily a residential convention focused entirely on Traveller and Cepheus Engine roleplaying games.

The event includes four scheduled game sessions across the weekend, held at Alconbury Memorial Hall, with nearby hotel accommodation available (6 minutes by car) (two nights with continental breakfast). Attendees will have access to a range of Traveller-themed tabletop games, a bring-and-buy table, and convention materials.

TravCon is known for its welcoming and relaxed atmosphere, attracting both new and experienced players. After a successful return in 2024, we look forward to offering another enjoyable event in 2025.

If you would like to attend, please contact Andy Lilly at travcon @bits.org.uk to request a booking form. Places are limited and will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

TravCon UK hasn't happened since the pandemic hit, but it was back in October 2024. This was a trial to see if there interest in the convention going forward, so only a limited number of folks got invites for the weekend. Although accommodation was at Redwings like in previous years, the main gaming was held a few miles away at Alconbury Village Hall. As well as the games and bring and buy sale, we were privileged to have Matthew Sprange and Isabella Treccani-Chinelli attend and share some of Mongoose Publishings plans for Traveller now that the ownership rights have transferred from Marc Miller.

There's a great write up from Timothy Collinson at Freelance Traveller.

Dom Mooney also posted a write up on his blog.

Plans are now underway for TravCon UK 2025, which will be held in the second half of the year.

While you wait for the announcement of the next TravCon date, you may be interested in North Star, the UK's only tabletop roleplaying convention dedicated to science fiction roleplaying games. Organised by several BITS members, and very much Traveller friendly, North Star is now in its eighth iteration and will be held on 10th/11th May 2025. The website is here: https://northstarcon.org.uk
Information from the organisers:

Come and play out amazing stories amongst the stars for a full weekend of tabletop Science Fiction RPGs. Avoid Imperial entanglements, set phasers to stun, survive the dark between the stars, or join the crew of the Free Trader Beowulf; whatever path you choose, enjoy some time away in other worlds and new realities for a full weekend.

The gathering will have a number of gaming slots over the weekend, all run at The Garrison Hotel in Sheffield, UK.

The hyperspace coordinates are programmed in, so join us on a voyage to adventure! Your passage to this specialist TTRPG SF gaming can be booked from our Registration page.

The thumming heart of our gaming are the games that our attendees will bring to run! There will be five slots of full on SF RPGs over the weekend. Tell us about the game you want to run via our Games page.

The Galaxy Calls.

BITS are very pleased to announce that the Power Projection: Fleet has been released as a PDF, making our fusion of Traveller and Full Thrust starship combat available once more.

Purchase from DriveThruRPG.

The intention of all the BITS supplements is to provide quick-to-access resources for the harassed Traveller Referee, fleshing out the worlds and people that your adventurers encounter, with plenty of ideas for adventure sessions, sub-plots and red herrings. The 101 Series has been out of print for some time and have never - legitimately - been available as PDFs before.

For a dose of extra seasonal jolliness, you can pick up the all the 101 Series supplements released to PDF in one reduced-price bundle, saving 20%!

We plan to release the remainder of the BITS back catalogue (such as our adventure books and Power Projection) over the coming months. Check back here or follow @BITS_Traveller on Twitter to be kept up-to-date on our plans

Buy the reduced price bundle of ten 101 Books (does not include At Close Quarters)
Buy 101 Lifeforms
Buy 101 Patrons
Buy 101 Plots
Buy 101 Rendezvous
Buy 101 Religions
Buy 101 Travellers
Buy At Close Quarters



These PDFs are the original BITS products and so you’ll find the older ones don’t mention Mongoose or even GURPS Traveller (we released the first 101’s just after Imperium Games launched T4!) In addition, Mongoose are pulling together the 101’s into larger books: 101 Cargos, 101 Starcrews and 101 Travellers form the core of the first of these, Supplement 13: Starport Encounters.

101 Governments and 101 Corporations are now available for purchase and download. These are excellent resources for the harassed Referee, with plenty of ideas that can spark an adventure session off. They have been out of print for some time and have never - legitimately - been available as PDFs before.

We plan to release all the 101 Books in this format, along with most of the remaining back catalogue such as At Close Quarters and Power Projection over the coming months. Check back here or follow @BITS_Traveller on Twitter to be kept up-to-date on our plans

Buy 101 Corporations
Buy 101 Governments

101 Cargos and 101 Starcrews are now available for purchase and download. These represent the first and last 101 Books released and are excellent resources for the harassed Referee. They have been out of print for some time and have never - legitimately - been available as PDFs before.

We plan to release all the 101 Books in this format, along with most of the remaining back catalogue such as At Close Quarters and Power Projection over the coming months. Check back here or follow @BITS_Traveller on Twitter to be kept up-to-date on our plans.

Buy 101 Cargos
Buy 101 Starcrews

Dragonmeet 2009 happened, in its original London configuration, over the last weekend of November. As usual, it was held in Kensington Town Hall, which has good facilities. BITS were there, as we have been since the convention was re-launched, with the trade stand, a demo of At Close Quarters, and a number a scenarios for Traveller including the latest instalment of the Angel’s Share campaign which has nearly reached a conclusion.

The Ad Astra in all her Glory

The trade hall was busy, but noticeably emptied when the seminars were on, and the At Close Quarters game grabbed a lot of attention thanks to Nick Bradbeer’s latest masterpiece model, an Ad Astra liner. This was built from foam board, and looked excellent. Scaled for 15mm, it was perfect for an exciting skirmish game.

Battle commences!

We had a number of worried people looking at the notices of reduced prices and ‘last ever’ for some of the 101 Books and other products, but they went away reassured when we explained that this was tied to a planned PDF release of our back catalogue in 2010. We’ll also hopefully have the first volume of Angel’s Share ready for a full release in the New Year, possibly followed by some smaller adventures, and – if the playtesting works out – something for Power Projection.

The adventures we ran went well, and seemed to be popular, with both Simon Bell and Dave Elrick GMing. Andy and myself manned the trade stall, which was constantly in demand, even in the quiet times.

From a personal perspective, this was my first return to Dragonmeet after a 3 year break for a variety of reasons, and I was really glad to be back. It’s one of my favourite cons, and has quite a frenetic pace, which is unsurprising as it starts at 10:00 and ends around 19:00! The trade hall was buzzing, and there were lots of new and shiny things to look at such as pre-release copies of the Doctor Who Roleplaying Game on the Cubicle 7 stand, the proof copies of Triple Ace Games’ core Hellfrost books for Savage Worlds and the Collective Endeavour’s latest game, Umlaut, in which get to be a rock band.

I was also quite pleased to finally see the Power Projection miniatures by Ad Astra Games and a real (non-PDF) copy of the Power Projection: Fleet book in its US guise. Mongoose Publishing also had a huge stand with lots of Traveller front and centre, both for our much loved setting and for the 2000AD settings such as Judge Dredd and Strontium Dogs.

Finally, it was great just to catch up with the rest of the BITS team, including the people like Simon and Robin who I’ve only met by email. The fires of my enthusiasm for Traveller are well and truly relit, and now I must properly finish my adventure for release in 2010! And I'm happy to report that Andy escaped from the clutches of the Cybermen by the end of the convention.

Dom, BITS Webmaster

All friends now!

The booking forms for the UK's best Traveller RPG convention are now available here. There are discounts to the price if you book before 11th December 2009.

We have updated the BITS Task System to include Mongoose Traveller, and you can download it in our Archive Pages. The BITS Task System provides equivalencies between different editions of Traveller, allowing you to use materials for different editions in your game with ease.

We are pleased to announce we will be attending Conception 2009 on January 28th to 1st February 2009

More details on the convention: http://www.conceptionuk.org/

As with previous years, we will be running a series of RPG tables using the new Mongoose Traveller ruleset. Our RPG adventures will be based around the continuing saga of the trader ship Angel’s Share in a linked series of adventures set in the Spinward Marches as well as other adventures written by our ever aging stable of crack (ed) GM's.

More details of slot times and general convention details located at http://www.conceptionuk.org/

Thanks

The BITS Team
Supporting Traveller in all forms since 1996

You can order your BITS Traveller products here.

Thanks!

If you haven't heard, Mongoose Traveller is available this week from all good stores! This is the core volume around which Marc Miller's Traveller 5 is being built.

You can find details and previews here, on the Mongoose Website.

We would be delighted to have reviews for the BITS newsletter, and would also encourage to send your reviews of this (and BITS products, obviously) to sites like RPG.net.

BITS Members can find the latest edition of the newsletter available in the Member's section.

The price is $35 (there will be a print edition with less material later on) and there is a PDF with more details here. The main Traveller-5 web-page is here. Pre-orders get a number of freebies now.

We are pleased to remind you that we are attending Dragonmeet 2007 at Kensington Town Hall today (1st December) from 10.00am.

We have the usual trade stand full of new and second hand Traveller merchandise, dice, figures and other fine products manned by BITS Director Andy Lilly. Usual BITS member discounts apply at the show.

The BITS Demo Crew are also be present running a series of new adventures including the Angels Share scenarios (In Search of Angels, The Rock and Ice Work) in both morning and afternoon slots. Throughout the day we will have exclusive previews of the new Traveller Starship miniatures by Ad Astra and will be running demo games of our Power Projection: Fleet starship combat game.

BITS Members can find the latest edition of the newsletter available in the Member's section.

We are pleased to announce we will be attending Dragonmeet 2007 at Kensington Town Hall on 1st December from 10.00am.

We will have the usual trade stand full of new and second hand Traveller merchandise, dice, figures and other fine products manned by BITS Director Andy Lilly. Usual BITS member discounts apply at the show.

The BITS Demo Crew will also be present running a series of new adventures including the Angels Share scenarios (In Search of Angels, The Rock and Ice Work) in both morning and afternoon slots. Throughout the day we will have exclusive previews of the new Traveller Starship miniatures by Ad Astra and will be running demo games of our Power Projection: Fleet starship combat game.

BITS will be attending GenCon UK 2007 between August 30th and September 2nd at Reading University (http://www.genconuk.com/).

BITS Director Andy Lilly will be bravely manning the trade stand with a wide range of Traveller merchandise including our own range of Little White Books, with our most recent release Cold Dark Grave by Dom Mooney and Universe software and a good selection of new and second hand gaming products.

On the gaming front Richard Talbot, Neil McGurk and Peter Trevor will be running a range of 3 new Traveller RPG adventures during the 3 timed slots at 9am, 2pm and 8pm.

We will also have a demo table of Traveller: Power Projection Fleet and Escort with games timed during the day at 9.00am and 2.00pm.

All our slots are now bookable via the GenCon website and cost two gaming tickets per game.

BITS are also looking for a brave volunteer to help run some of the sessions so if you are attending GenCon or just even thinking about it, drop an email to richardtalbotuk at yahoo.co.uk or bits at bits.org.uk (or use the contact form on the site here) and let us know! GenCon do provide some benefits for GM's depending on how many slots they run so check out their website for more information.

Peter Trevor's Traveller: Universe can now be purchased directly from BITS via our webshop on eBay.

Full details about Universe can be found here.

BITS Members can find the latest edition of the newsletter available in the Member's section.

You can read the review here. We love to know about reviews of products (bad or good), so please feel free to let us know if you see any, or produce a review yourself. RPG.net have also reviewed GDW's MegaTraveller Rebellion Sourcebook and the Classic Traveller Double Adventure Chamax Plague/Horde recently.

If you'd like us to post links to reviews to Traveller products other than the BITS ones here in the future, just let us know through the comments.

BITS are proud to announce closer ties with yet another game publisher. Following on from our collaboration with Jon Tuffley at Ground Zero Games to produce our much-applauded Traveller starship combat system Power Projection, we are now beginning printing of the Power Projection: Fleet rules through Ken Burnside at Ad Astra Games in the USA.

We continue to have stock of the original UK printings of both Power Projection: Escort and Fleet, but this agreement allows us to produce and distribute the updated version of Fleet more easily in the USA. We will continue to stock and distribute the original UK printing to distributors, mail order customers and at conventions, but will replace these with the US-printed version over time.

We will only be printing Fleet at Ad Astra; though Escort is a useful, and fun, lead-in to Power Projection, the economics of printing meant it wasn't worth producing Escort in the USA: for our first out-source to Ad Astra we wanted to focus on the complete rules set in Fleet and see how it went.

We intend to collaborate further with Ken and his team at Ad Astra on future projects, just as we continue to work very closely with Jon at Ground Zero Games with our upcoming Power Projection: Reinforcements book.

Andy Lilly
http://www.bitsuk.net/
http://www.powerprojection.net/

This is a conversion of the Traveller T20 Saberwolf Block 1 Fleet Destroyer into a Power Projection SSD. If you want the full details on the ship (the blurb and High Guard style stats and picture), you'll need to buy the excellent Traveller's Aide #7: Fighting Ships from RPGNow or QLI directly.

Have fun blowing things up!
Dom

We are shipping (by mail in the US; by air letter post to destinations outside the US) the Classic Traveller CDROM today (Jan 3) and tomorrow (Jan 4). I want to thank you for your patience on this; we’re proud of the content and we think you will like it.
 
The JTAS CDROM (if you ordered that one) will ship by Jan 31. More CDROMs are in the works…
 
Marc Miller
Far Future Enterprises

Comstar Games have just launched their own online store, and are running a 40% price reduction promotion for a limited time. Now, Comstar publish Avenger Enterprise's Traveller 1248 range, and this is included in the promo. The PDF versions of the first two releases are around $9 each (less than a fiver) at the moment. If you're not sure about 1248 as a setting, it's a good time to check it out. And if you've already got the paper version, you can get colour maps and the opportunity for better quality printouts than the print books contain by getting a copy. We don't know when this promo ends, but thought we'd mention it in case you haven't seen it already.

There is also a new supplement for Traveller 1248 with Small Merchant Ships in.

Updated 27 December 2006: The initial 40% off sale has ended now, but there is still a 25% discount on PDFs and 15% on print material in an 'End of Year Sale'.

Jesse DeGraff, Andrew Boulton, and Wayne Peters have teamed together and released a 2007 Calendar for Traveller, which can be purchased from Lulu. $2.50 from every sale goes to Children's Charities, according to the website info, although it isn't specific which charities. If anyone has more info, feel free to let us know.

In the UK they are retailing for around £17 each, and should be generally available. You can also get them as PDFs from DriveThruRPG for $15 each.

The first book gives an overview and history of the whole of Charted Space 46 years after the Traveller: The New Era setting, space that is very different, but in some ways feels more like the Imperium of old. There is also a small campaign setting in the book. The second book gives details on the four sectors of space that are occupied by the Fourth Imperium, plus details on the various institutions (especially the military) which may be found there.

BITS Members: we are hoping to have a review of this in the next newsletter in the near future. If anyone has a copy and wants to review it, please contact us.

We're happy to announce to BITS members that the latest issue of the BITS newsletter, the Autumn issue, is now available for download through the secure Member's section of the site. All members were emailed a username and password yesterday. If you're a member, and haven't seen this email (from the YahooGroup), please let us know via the contact form and we'll try and sort things out.

Dom (BITS Webmaster)

It was modelled by Nick Bradbeer, and shows the ship before any textures or details are added.

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)

Salute is only 12 days away now, and we're getting ready for some games of Power Projection, and meeting up with the Traveller Wargaming fans. Sadly, Power Projection: Reinforcements isn't ready, but please come and say 'hello' and enjoy a game with us! Details of this London based convention can be found by clicking on the links.

Just to reassure all our avid followers out there, the "little white books" of Traveller are still in production, with 101 Starcrews being our latest Traveller supplement. However, as each of us on the team grows that little bit older, our time for Traveller becomes necessarily constrained by personal commitments to our partners, children, jobs, etc. Of course, should any of us ever win the lottery, we'd be able to give up our jobs and do this full time. Alternatively, if any of you out there have a few million pounds to spare, please get in touch.
 
Once again, welcome to our site - I hope you find it useful (please send us your comments). We hope to keep it regularly updated with information on our latest work, including new products and our planned attendance at conventions.
 
Andy (Chief BITS Disorganiser)