''Starship Traveller'' is a single-player

adventure gamebook A gamebook is a work of printed fiction that allows the reader to participate in the story by making choices. The narrative branches along various paths, typically through the use of numbered paragraphs or pages. Each narrative typically does not ...

written by Steve Jackson and illustrated by Peter Andrew Jones. Originally published by

Puffin Books Puffin Books is a longstanding children's imprint of the British publishers Penguin Books. Since the 1960s, it has been among the largest publishers of children's books in the UK and much of the English-speaking world. The imprint now belongs t ...

in 1983, the title is the fourth gamebook in the ''

Fighting Fantasy ''Fighting Fantasy'' is a series of single-player role-playing gamebooks created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. The first volume in the series was published in paperback by Puffin in 1982. The series distinguished itself by mixing Choos ...

'' series. It was later republished by Wizard Books in 2002. A digital version developed by ''Tin Man Games'' is available for

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, and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

Rules

This adventure was the first ''Fighting Fantasy'' title with a

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...

setting. It was the first title to introduce rules for (phaser) gun combat and (ship-to-ship) spaceship combat, in addition to hand-to-hand combat. The player must also manage the statistics of multiple characters (Captain and crew) and the vessel itself. It is also possible to finish the adventure without having engaged in combat at all.

Story

''Starship Traveller'' is a science-fiction scenario in which the hero is the captain of the starship ''Traveller'' that has been sucked through a black hole, called the Selstian Void, into another universe; to find the necessary coordinates to travel back to the safety of Earth in their own universe, the captain and a landing party must beam down to various planets in search of clues.

Reception

Marcus L. Rowland reviewed ''Starship Traveller'' for the January 1984 issue of ''

White Dwarf A white dwarf is a stellar core remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. A white dwarf is very dense: its mass is comparable to the Sun's, while its volume is comparable to the Earth's. A white dwarf's faint luminosity comes fro ...

'', rating the title a 9 out of a possible 10. Rowland noted that this book was "apparently inspired by ''

Star Trek ''Star Trek'' is an American science fiction media franchise created by Gene Roddenberry, which began with the eponymous 1960s television series and quickly became a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon. The franchise has expanded into vari ...

''," and that possible events in the game include "capture for gladitorial games, plague,

summary execution A summary execution is an execution in which a person is accused of a crime and immediately killed without the benefit of a full and fair trial. Executions as the result of summary justice (such as a drumhead court-martial) are sometimes include ...

as an illegal alien, and mutiny".

In other media

A digital version developed by ''Tin Man Games'' is available for Android, iOS, Windows 10, MacOS, and Linux.

References

External links

''Fighting Fantasy'' Gamebooks
- the official website
''Wizard Books''
- the Publisher's site {{Fighting Fantasy 1983 fiction books Books by Steve Jackson (British game designer) Fighting Fantasy gamebooks Space opera gamebooks