Review: Fighting Fantasy Book 4: Starship Traveller

Not to be confused with the roleplaying game, Traveller, released in 1977, six years before this book. This one was written by Steve Jackson and was the first of about half a dozen or so occasions in which Fighting Fantasy stepped away from the world of Titan (as it eventually became known) and into science fiction.

The science fiction Fighting Fantasy books are interesting because there was never any real attempt to tie them together into a single setting, in the way that the fantasy books were. Each one stands alone, with its own sci-fi influences and tropes that distinguish it from the others. Robot Commando, for example, is full of mecha and dinosaurs while Space Assassin is military space opera, Sky Lord is heavily influenced by drugs, and this one is a Star Trek homage.

Coincidentally, the book actually replicates the core conceit of Star Trek: Voyager, twelve years before Voyager was released, in that your ship has been catapulted to a far-off area of space and you’re trying to find your way home.

– First up, there’s a long list of names in the acknowledgements at the front of the book, followed by ‘…may they live long and prosper’. Wearing their influences on their sleeves there.

– Some of the acknowledged names will be familiar to nerds of a certain pedigree: Bryan A is presumably Bryan Ansell, and Jervis J can only be Jervis Johnson, and then there’s Alan M and Rick P, who could be Alan Merritt and Rick Priestley. The original generation of Games Workshop writers.

– There’s a lot of new rules in Starship Traveller, so much so that the regular combat rules are excised from the introduction to the book and placed into paragraphs 341 (ship-to-ship combat), 342 (hand-to-hand fighting) and 343 (phaser combat). Why those numbers? Because Starship Traveller only has 340 paragraphs of story, which probably (I haven’t checked) makes it the shortest Fighting Fantasy game book of the original Puffin run.

– Ship-to-ship combat is quite quirky. The attack side of it is, as with most of the shooting rulesets in Fighting Fantasy (they never settled on a single set of rules for ranged combat) similar to Skill tests, in that you’re rolling equal to or under your Weapon Strength in order to hit, but then you roll again, against the opponent’s Shields, in order to determine the amount of damage caused to the target’s Shields stat. This leads to a death spiral as failing that Shields roll causes more damage to be suffered, making it harder to pass the Shields roll next time you’re hit, until eventually you become a cheap pyrotechnic special effect in front of a matte painting of stars. This is an interesting system, with the Shields roll making it slightly more complex than the usual combat rules and I find myself wondering if the core combat rules of the game might have benefited from something similar to represent armour or defensive abilities.

– But then again, one of the reasons Fighting Fantasy has been so successful was because of the simplicity of its core mechanics, particularly compared to RPG and tabletop wargames rulesets of the same era.

– The hand-to-hand combat rules are the same as usual, but with an extra paragraph to advise how to allocate opponents to different members of your crew. Yes, in Starship Traveller, you play not just the captain of the ship, but the bridge crew and security officers as well. Star Trek is, after all, about an ensemble cast of multicultural professionals working together smoothly to get Kirk into that green lady’s bed.

– Phasers. Wow. Phaser combat is lethal. Unless they’re set to stun, in which case it’s not. You pick before the combat begins whether you’re shooting to kill or stun, and each participant has to roll equal to or under their Skill to see if they hit. If they hit, it’s goodnight Vienna for the target. Unlike in hand-to-hand combat, opponents will randomly target members of your crew, so even if you, the player, manage to kill/stun your target, one or more of the enemy could still take you down.

– All opponents set their weapons to kill, in which case your adventure can be over very, very quickly. Fortunately, your side always fires first. Unfortunately, in both hand-to-hand and phaser combat, your non-combatant officers (Science, Medical and Engineering) suffer a -3 penalty to their Skill.

– I don’t think I’ve actually played this book before, as in, bothering to roll dice rather than just treating it as a diceless Choose Your Own Adventure book. I’m intrigued to see how brutal this combat system gets, and if my starship changes its core cast quicker than The Walking Dead.

– My Captain (who I shall christen Tiberius Sheridan) just rolled Skill 7. I’m going to die.

– I might just promote an existing bridge crew member to be a replacement captain if I do, since I’m playing the entire command crew. I mean, how many captains has the Discovery gone through over the course of its series?

– My Security Officer (Lieutenant Ivanova) has Skill 11. She’s definitely beaming down on any planets I visit.

– My two security guards are nothing to sneeze at either. Ensign Camisa Roja has Skill 11, Stamina 19, although Ensign Ulaan Tsamts is a little bit less awesome with Skill 9, Stamina 15.

– The Starship Traveller isn’t so bad, with Weapons Strength 12 (the highest it can be) and a mid-range Shields score of 16.

– Oh my god. Those of you who can speak Spanish and Mongolian might have noticed the attempt at humour in the names of those two security guards up there. It turns out that the real life Red Shirts were followers of Italian historical figure, Giuseppe Garibaldi. The name of the chief of security on Babylon 5, who was in charge of that show’s ‘red shirts’ – Michael Garibaldi.

– The story (or episode one of the TV show Starship Traveller, if you prefer) starts with some technobabble. Excellent. Suffice to say, your ship gets sucked into the Seltsian Void, a black hole.

– I can’t read the word ‘Seltsian’ without thinking of Alka-Seltzer.

– Once my various bridge officers have relayed damage reports, my Science Officer, Mr Spork, gives me a choice of three solar systems to travel to. Two of them bear life, one doesn’t, which at least gives more context than the forking paths/tunnels of previous Fighting Fantasy books.

– Yes, Mr Spork is a lame joke, but can you seriously tell me this isn’t the sort of name a character in a Mel Brooks parody film would have?

– I notice that the three planets are oriented straight ahead, to port and to starboard. Two-dimensional space, taking the idea that there’s no up or down in space to extremes.

– I’ll go to one of the life-bearing worlds, because what’s the point in going to somewhere I know has no life?

– Our sensors pick up something several thousand kilometres ahead (bonus points to the book for being British but still using the metric system in 1983!), but we let it approach to within five kilometres. It’s at that point we manage to identify it as a Class D starcruiser. Well, that’s very close up to discover something that means absolutely nothing to me. Is Class D big, small, dangerous? Am I being confronted by a luxury cruise liner?

– No, it’s Commander M’k Tel of the Imperial Ganzig Confederation. We’re trespassing, apparently, and he demands we identify ourselves. From the illustration, he looks quite thuggish. We do a quick Google search on the Confederation, which is probably foolish, since we’re in a completely unknown area of space. It comes back with 0 results. M’k Tel is clearly a being of little patience, as he fires a warning shot across our nose.

– Not across our nose, but up it. Lose 2 Shields. Let’s identify ourselves, sharpish. He announces that we’re his prisoners and teleports across his First Officer, who insists on accessing our computer room. With no real idea of how dangerous this hostile ship might be, I oblige.

– He’s just inserted a modem into our ship’s computer. It appears the far side of the galaxy still uses dial-up. The Traveller is now at a -2 penalty to Weapon Strength and Shields if we have to fight the Ganzigites at any point. Hmm. I think acquiescing completely and utterly to every one of their demands might not be a strong negotiating position.

– I instruct Lieutenant Ivanova to overpower the Ganzigite First Officer. Oops. That went badly. She’s a little frazzled, but fine, and we’re still captives of the Imperial Ganzig Confederation.

– The text just told me that Ivanova lost points from ‘his’ Skill or Stamina. Even the original series of Star Trek had women on the bridge – not just Uhura, but Captain Pike’s first officer in the original pilot (played by Gene Roddenberry’s future wife, Majel Barrett, and more recently in Strange New Worlds by Rebecca Romijn). ‘His or her’ was a perfectly available phrase, even in 1983.

– The Imperial High Commander at the Ganzigite starbase is actually quite reasonable. He wants us out of his territory, in the interests of his own national security (the Traveller, as a powerful warship, is a destabilising presence), and gives us what little assistance he can… in exchange for a subroutine being put into our targeting computers that prevent us from ever firing on a Ganzigite ship. That -2 penalty doesn’t seem so bad now, but at least the Ganzigites aren’t overtly hostile.

– Turns out that we need to find another black hole at a particular time and location, but we don’t know what that time and location coordinates are; the Imperial High Commander suggests that people on neighbouring planets might know these coordinates. I suspect these coordinates might turn out to be three-digit numbers between 100 and 340…

– The next world we teleport down onto (I take Lieutenant Ivanova and Mr Spork with me) has all the signs of an advanced civilisation, but no signs of life. I’m calling it: deadly virus that wiped out the local population but left the cities intact.

– We meet an alien. Spork kills it, having supposedly seen the phaser it had in its hand, that neither myself or Ivanova spotted. We teleport the dead alien back to the Traveller. (Incidentally, it turns out my Medical Officer, by default, is female. If the book’s going to make decisions like that, why not provide names for these characters, rather than just their role?)

– Probably because when officers start dying in phaser combat, they get replaced by their subordinates, who would have different names. Though apparently the same gender.

– The alien corpse doesn’t reach the Traveller, although it definitely left. There’s something weird going on on this planet. Hallucinations of some kind, though clearly the Traveller managed to lock onto the alien to teleport it.

– Incidentally, the idea of sending a dead person back to the ship to see if anything can be done for them is something that shows up in Star Trek: The Next Generation, when Tasha Yar was killed. Despite the show going through all the usual motions of her definitely being stone-cold dead on the world the landing party were on, they immediately transported her back to the ship where Dr Crusher and her team worked on her to try and bring her back from the dead, in an impressive (though ultimately vain) demonstration of Federation technology. Of course, they didn’t do this every time someone died in the show. At other times, dead was dead.

– We never discover the cause of the weird hallucinations we’ve all been experiencing, because we find an automated library that tells us the potential location of a black hole that could assist with us getting home. Feeling giddy with excitement, we abandon episode 2 of Starship Traveller and beam back home. Somewhere, a scriptwriter weeps at how we avoided a thought-provoking and astounding revelation about the nature of humanity or something.

– And yes, the location is in a sector numbered between 100 and 340.

– Episode 3 of Starship Traveller begins. Hmm… maybe the show got cancelled mid-series, hence why there are only 340 paragraphs in the book, rather than the already traditional 400. Very meta. Hopefully we’ll be able to hash together an ending rather than leave the audience hanging.

– Oh, I spoke too soon. We’re still in the final scenes of episode 2. Our lab have managed to translate the newspaper we found on the planet. Turns out it’s… I’m not sure. Is it satire? This planet had groups following one of two philosophies, the Progressives and the Regressives, one of which was pro-science and technological advancement, and the other being the opposite, and a Cold War ensued. (Hint: if one side is pro-technology and the other side isn’t, and all else being equal, you know who’d win that Cold War if it turned hot.) For reasons not quite explained, the Progressives developed a hallucinogen that they could use to… make the Regressives all trippy? When they got exposed, they agreed to blast it all off into space where it couldn’t hurt anyone, because this planet never discovered incinerators. Unfortunately, the rocket exploded and scattered hallucinogen all over the planet, subjecting the entire population to hallucinations.

– The planet, incidentally, is called Prax. ‘Praxis’ means putting theoretical ideas into practice. Maybe that means something, maybe it’s just a cool sci-fi-sounding name.

– So where are the people now? Extinct? Evacuated? In hiding underground? I guess we’ll never know.

– The next world we come across, in episode 3, is technologically advanced, possibly more so than our own civilisation. I beam down onto its surface, accompanied by Medical Officer Dr ‘Kidneystones’ Molloy (I’m not sorry) and Security Officer Roja.

– We see this planet’s hat immediately, thanks to a helpful local who hurries us into his house before warning us that no one dies on this planet, but the population is kept stable by the PC’s, or Population Controllers, who go around murdering anyone up to certain quotas.

– Huh. The Population Controllers just entered the house without being invited and murdered the householder. These guys really are PC’s. Is this what it feels like to live in The Forest of Doom?

– Apparently, we’re under arrest. I disagree, because they just told us that the penalty for being outside after curfew is extermination. Set phasers to stun…

– Well, that was meant to be me trying out the phaser combat rules. Instead, the PC leader just absorbed Ensign Roja’s shot with his armour, and kills her in return.

– Mechanically, this was resolved by a single die roll to determine who fired the first shot. On a 6, it would have been me, and on 1-5, it’s another member of the landing party of my choice. Lucky I chose the redshirt, but surely, in a party of three, wouldn’t it make sense to have results of 5-6 be me?

– When an Officer or Guard dies, they get replaced by their assistant, who isn’t allowed to beam down onto planets, and has two fewer Skill points. So Rojas will be replaced by Ensign Laal Kameej (who has a still respectable Skill 9, Stamina 21). I wonder if I’ll actually be able to use a security guard aboard ship, or if it’s intended that it’s just the replacement Officers that can’t be part of a landing party.

– Apparently, we’re under arrest. That seems like a sensible thing to be, even though the penalty for being outside after curfew is extermination.

– This is the second time in three episodes that the crew of the Traveller has been captured by aliens. That sounds about par for the course.

– Wait… what the hell? Turns out that opening a communication channel to our ship induces a fugue state in the inhabitants of this world.

– Ah, they’re robots. I wonder if the entire population of this world is robotic, which is why they don’t die and the Population Controllers become necessary? We’ll never find out, because we beam out at the first opportunity, before we get disintegrated.

– I got a snazzy new helmet, which boosts my Skill to a massive 8.

– Episode 4 is set on a medium-sized blue-green planet. I’m taking Security Officer Lieutenant Ivanova, Security Ensign Tsamts, and Science Officer Mr Spork.

– We get captured for a third time… Did this happen as often as this in the original Star Trek?

– This planet, we learn from its primitive inhabitants, is called Chiba, and the weather is controlled by the ‘Rain Lord’, who is angry with them and is bringing them bad weather. This is presumably someone more technologically advanced than the bulk of the Chibans, so we offer to go and speak to the Rain Lord and sort their problem out.

– We promptly get captured for a fourth time. We should change our motto:

“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Traveller. Its 340-paragraph mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new crimes and new justice systems. To get arrested where no man has been arrested before!”

– It’s The Wizard of Oz, IN SPAAACE!!!

– Turns out the wizard’s weather control equipment has broken down. Luckily, Mr Spork isn’t dead, so he can help out as Science Officer. Spork passes his Skill test with a double-1, so we fix the machinery and return the Rain Lord to his position as false-yet-benevolent god for this primitive world. Not sure how that fits into the Prime Directives, but at least we find out what warp speed we need to be travelling at in order to translate through the black hole back to Earth.

– Episode 5 is set on a small grey world that registers as almost entirely lifeless. I send out a ‘recon plane’ to the sole sign of electronic activity, which turns out to be a crashed scout ship, of a type we’ve never seen before.

– We’re marooned on the far side of the galaxy. Everything is of a type we’ve never seen before…

– No sign of the pilot, so we assume they didn’t survive the crash, and the scout team come back. This isn’t at all foreboding. Contagion? Parasites?

– By the time the recon team get to the bridge for debriefing, three of the engineering team who helped dock the plane are dead.

– Seriously, we’re not calling it a shuttle?

– I realise now that I have no idea how large the Traveller’s crew is. Do those three engineers represent a sizeable chunk of my ship’s complement? Do I know their names? Have I met their kids? Are their kids on my ship?

– I quarantine the recon team, only for three more members of the engineering team to die. Fortunately, none of them are the Engineering Officer, Mr Doohan.

– Science Officer Spork has a bright idea. Or rather, he thinks he does, but he failed his Skill test and just suggests spraying antibiotics everywhere. (Seriously, Skill tests were in these earliest books, but were never referred to as such, while Testing Your Luck was right there from The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.) The contagion spreads from Engineering into the Medical Bay. With Spork’s failure, I have to quarantine Medical as well. Thanks, Spork.

– ‘Kidneystones’ Molloy dons an EVA suit and examines one of the corpses littering his Medical Bay. Turns out that there was poison gas in the atmosphere, some of which got aboard the recon plane on its return trip. I’m faced with a difficult dilemma: get Molloy to work on an antidote, or open the airlocks in the affected areas of the ship. Rather than kill half my crew, I ask Molloy to do the science.

– He passes the Skill test… and dies because the antidote hasn’t worked. Wait, what? *leaf through the book to read the other entry* Wow. Okay, there’s an error. If your Medical Officer passes their Skill test, they fail to discover an antidote and die. If they fail the test, they discover the antidote and save the day. Screw that, Molloy’s not dying, but becoming a medical genius instead. (A Skill 8 medical genius, admittedly, but he’s the most qualified physician in this half of the galaxy, if you only count Earth-trained doctors.)

– And that’s the end of Episode 5. Let’s assume there was loads of snappy dialogue and dramatic music to make up for the lack of anything happening other than extras dying. It was actually quite a neat sequence in the book, with the reliance on your Medical and Science Officers’ stats determining success, rather than your own. The captain might well get top billing in each episode, but this is an ensemble show.

– Episode 6 starts with what’s becoming a tradition: a choice of two or three planets to visit. From a Fighting Fantasy perspective, this constantly forking path is both good and bad. It means that every read-through can be very different, simply by making different choices of destination. But on the downside, it means that, if the book has a ‘one true way’ approach to getting to the final paragraph, there’s simply no point in half to two-thirds of the encounters in the book. I’ve come back to this issue in several of my previous reviews, but when the author doesn’t leave any suggestion as to whether a given choice is sensible or not, it removes any calculation from completing the game; you may as well just roll a die every time you’re offered a choice of route.

– I’ve currently got a location for a potential black hole, and a velocity at which to approach it. I don’t yet have the time for the black hole opening, and I’m starting to get concerned that I may have missed something.

– Anyway, back to Episode 6. One of my three planets is actually a fast-moving dot with life signs. That looks interesting. Oh, it’s the Imperial Ganzig Federation. I could do without meeting those guys ever again, due to not actually being able to fire my ship’s weapons at them.

– Commander M’k Mal is suspicious after I tell him about our encounter with his colleague, M’k Tel, and orders us to follow him to the nearest starbase. The alternative is to fight him, which we can’t do.

– In other words, Traveller or its crew have been captured for the fifth time in six episodes.

– M’k Mal leads us to a space station called Laur-Jamil. After a while, his ship departs without a word. We’ve been forgotten.

– We go exploring and meet a service robot. I ask it to take us to its leader… Oh my god. I’ve been meeting all kinds of aliens, but in this book, we are the aliens. Mind blown. Or something.

– The spaceport Controller is a chap by the name of D’Ouse-E, who psychically communicates with his mapping department, who provide me with the stardate of an expected instance of two universes touching, though he’s not sure which two. This could be that third bit of information I needed. Nice.

– Just in time, too, since the very next paragraph after we leave the station is about crew morale failing. The book asks if I’ve got the details I need. I think I have. I hope I have. But let’s check what happens if I haven’t.

– Depression, nervous disorders, suicides, and a desperate jump into a black hole. We don’t know why, but the Traveller never emerges. That was a bleak Game Over.

– Fortunately Episode 6 is taking place in a less depressing universe, I hope. Time for some maths to work out the ‘combination lock’ for this story. Subtract the time coordinates from the location coordinates, and cross your fingers.

– Balls. The ‘correct’ answer has just directed me to paragraph 339, which is the one where the ship never emerges from the black hole.

– In true science fiction TV show style, Starship Traveller has been cancelled mid-way through the first season. I thought we were Star Trek, but we were Firefly all along.

– Screw it. I played the game by the rules, made decisions that seemed to make sense at the time, and managed to locate a place, time and velocity for the black hole translation back to my side of the galaxy, and yet the book still had me fail. That arbitrariness might well be realistic, but it doesn’t really encourage me to replay it. I’ll replay it to discover new and interesting planets and aliens, not to work out which non-signposted forks in the road were the correct ones.

– Thanks to fan outcry, petitions and one or two dangerous obsessives going too far and sending death threats via Twitter, Starship Traveller’s final episode has been re-edited to include a final scene dropped from the original broadcast version.

– Paragraph 340. We get home. The end. The fans are overjoyed, and years later a sequence of spin-off series are made, each one hate-watched obsessively by people who claim to be ‘true Travellers’ but spend every episode picking holes in canon clashes or saying: “ ‘Kidneystones’ Molloy would never do that.” Or something.

– You know what? Although I didn’t follow the One True Path to get to the happy ending, and just cheated, I did manage to get through this entire book without a single combat. How much more authentically Star Trek can you get? I mean, there was that incident where the PC’s murdered one of my security guards, but that was a Tasha Yar shock rather than an actual fight.

– Speaking of One True Path, the next book is City of Thieves, where, if I remember correctly, you have to follow one specific route through a fantasy metropolis to find three ingredients and an arrow for killing the Big Bad. If you miss even one of these, you fail the quest. This is going to be fun…

– Finally, generating an ‘alternate cover’ for Starship Traveller through StarryAI proved quite tricky, with lots of false starts, but there were quite a few that are actually quite decent: