Freelance
TravellerBeltstrike! Redux Design Notes
This article originally appeared in the May/June 2025 issue.
Editor’s Note: The Beltstrike Redux PDFs are bundled with the same-format Freelance Traveller PDFs in the respective download ZIP files.
Greg’s Comments
And, we’re back!
After last year’s surprise sleeper feel-good hit of the summer – Chamax Escape! – I felt the itch to create another solo game.
While hunting for inspiration, I stumbled across Oliver Darkshire, an edgy, hilarious author of one-page, 1d6-driven solo games, including such gems as Trapped in a Marriage with Henry VIII, Toxic Homosexual Workplace Romance, and D-List Superhero.
If, like me, you took too many English Literature courses at university (God, what a waste…), you might also find Oliver’s RPGs laugh-out-loud funny.
Even better, he generously offers a free game template for non-commercial use (which this is), asking only for proper credit (which we’ve dutifully provided).
Dangerously armed with a form fit for purpose, I set out in search of a subject.
Now, those of us of a certain age may remember that waaaaaaaay back in issue #3 of the original Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society, there was an article called “Mining the Asteroids” – a delightful little 2d6-driven, flowchart-based solo game.
Sure, you could play it with friends… if they played Traveller. But come on – who had those as a kid? Amirite?
Inspired, I began scribbling furiously. Once the form was filled with glorious nonsense, I presented it to my cocreator – known around my home as “The Squire” – with the same pride a cat shows when dropping a headless rat on the living room carpet in front of its owner.
His reaction was, predictably, similar.
As usual, I’d gotten the math horribly wrong (see English Literature comment above).
Enter Tom Price, to save the day. My sincere gratitude to him – and to all of you for indulging this madness.
Tom’s Comments
This was a fun project, looking at BeltStrike (I still have my own copy on my shelf–see the picture), doing the layout which, like drawing maps and deckplans, I find relaxing, and doing the probability distributions… (more on that later).
I was already familiar with some of Oliver Darkshire’s work (my favourite is Trapped in a Cabin with Lord Byron; after all, the idea of the “Summer of 1816” with Lord Byron, Percey Shelly, John Polidori and, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft is fascinating! They even did a Doctor Who episode about it – but I’m digressing…). I was not aware, however, that he offered a free game template for mad people like Greg and me…
Greg got in touch, and we did the usual ping-pong back and forth with various iterations of the layout, the language, and the dice scores. This one was a little easier that the Chamax Escape!, because each dice roll is a single linear probability distribution, with standard branching and event scores. We started with the possibility of all the scores going up and down, but the game took forever to run through – and in a game like this it is really important not to outstay your welcome!
Of course, work at the time was a little busy – we were designing a series of Wargaming courses and as nobody had ever done that before properly, based on an analysis of what we needed to cover, it was hard! Each course was only a week – so you can imagine the huge list of games we had to leave out… So spare time was at a premium.
Eventually we finished up with something that stayed true to Greg’s original vision, but also stayed true to the maths (you have a slightly better than even chance of winning) (although not all “failures” are objectively horrifying). I did put an outcome in the game that simply speeds up play, so if you want to fiddle with the way it is written, touch that one at your peril!
Enjoy.
Editor’s Note: The Beltstrike Redux PDFs are bundled with the same-format Freelance Traveller PDFs in the respective download ZIP files.