Free Trader Beowulf – the history of Traveller

In April 2025, to herald our Traveller Week sequence of revivals, we presented the new Free Trader Beowulf Special featuring This is Free Trader Beowulf, Shannon Appelcline‘s comprehensive “system history” of Traveller from Mongoose Publishing. From the author of Designers & Dragons, which told the story of the entire roleplaying industry, comes the detailed decades-long history of a single roleplaying game. This is Free Trader Beowulf tracks Traveller from its inspirations in the early ’70s to its initial publication and across seven distinct editions of its original 2d6 gaming system. It tells the stories of Traveller‘s major publishers, its many licensees, its Long Night, and how it rose again like a phoenix. This Free Trader Beowulf Special gave Travellers a great price on a non-watermarked, DRM-free .PDF ebook of the complete full-color 298-page This is Free Trader Beowulf.

This retrospective provided an appropriate kickoff for Traveller Week, a sequence of six Bundle of Holding revivals showcasing the many eras of Traveller. This week-long event centers on Traveller Day, celebrated each year on May 1 in recognition of the cover copy on the 1977 First Edition of Traveller: “This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone… Mayday, Mayday…”

This is Free Trader Beowulf “has been a really joyous project,” Shannon Appelcline wrote in an October 2023 blog post. “I started writing Designers & Dragons because I wanted to know what had happened to [Traveller licensee] Imperium Games; this year, I loved finding out the whole story of what happened to all of Traveller‘s publishers and all of its game systems as I worked through my Traveller history. On the way, I’ve also rediscovered my love for Traveller. I mean, it’s not like we broke up or anything. […] But writing this history made me remember that great setting I loved so much, and I’ve been picking up new volumes again and enjoying the stories of Charted Space once more.”