Freelance Traveller

Tancred

reviewed by Paul Anuni

This article originally appeared in the September/October 2025 issue.

Tancred. Dave Sering.
Judges Guild (defunct, no website found)
PDF, 51 pp.
Available on FFE Apocrypha 2 CD-ROM

Tancred is one of the early products for Traveller, written in 1980. It presents a world, including some of the people that might be encountered, and some possible scenarios for incorporating into a campaign that might find itself visiting the world.

The introductory material is an overview of the planet, describing the basics of the economy and political situation. That information, all on one page, is enough for a creative referee to come up with several ideas for getting player-characters involved. The author goes on to complicate things even more, however, in some referee-only (at the time, the publisher referred to the referee as the ‘judge’) material, opening up even more space for the creative referee – and we’re only on page 3. Mr Sering then provides a half-page of campaign suggestions, and briefly notes that he was inspired by some ‘interesting aspects of 18th & 19th century Terran history’.

A page is given over to a description of the world’s capital and largest city, and the political situation there. Again, the information offered provides a creative referee with opportunity. For the referee who might be at a loss for getting things started, the next four pages consist of tables for random encounters within a city, both individual and group, and a bunch of rumors that the PCs might hear. The encounters are set up in the early role-playing cliché of the local bar/tavern. These are followed by two-thirds of a page summarizing other cities on Tancred, and then eight pages of encounters, including human, animal, and natural events (each of which is explained).

The world’s starport is the focus of the next six pages, including a schematic, profiles of important people managing the starport, and its defenses, with profiles of important people involved therewith.

This is interrupted (after the fourth page) by a wide-scale schematic map of the capital, showing the relationships between the various areas, and some of the major streets. The next two pages are a standard Traveller flattened-icosahedral map of the world, showing the general topography and the locations of the cities. This map includes a linear schematic of the Tancred system, showing planetary orbital distances in millions of kilometres and millions of miles, both. The next page provides schematic overview maps of the lesser cities, showing major streets and the location of the respective ‘downtowns’.

Eight-and-a quarter pages follow describing military forces on-world (including civil guard and rebel forces). These may be useful in the scenarios that follow, four of them.

Tancred proper isn’t the only possible place for adventure; one of the moons of one of the gas giants is the site of a scout base and X-boat station and starship fueling station, and there’s a mining station in the rings of the gas giant, prospecting for rare earths. No specific scenarios are presented here, only the bare minimum for a creative referee to build on.

Judges Guild had built up four sectors under license, but these were later de-canonized. Tancred is in Outreaumer Subsector of their version of Ley Sector, and you get a page presenting a subsector map, a listing of the worlds, and a brief textual description of the subsector.

Finally, there is a page that presents some vehicles and crew-served weapons and vehicles, suitable for use in a Striker-style scenario where military action may need to be gamed out. This page is actually two pages, front and back; if you print them thus and then cut them out, the vehicles display their outside top-down aspect on one side, and their interior on the other.

Overall, I’d rate this as useful today, and exceptional for its original publication time; you’re getting useful setting material rather than a railroad-y adventure. I’m not aware of it being available separately at present, but it’s definitely one of the contributors to the value of the Apocrypha 2 CD-ROM from FarFuture.