Freelance Traveller

Encyclopaedia of Dagudashaag

reviewed by Jeff Zeitlin

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

Encyclopaedia of Dagudashaag. Multiple authors.
Signal GK Productions via Far Future Enterprises
2 PDFs, 382pp and 46pp.
PWYW (US$3.00)

Anyone who has spend any amount of time with Traveller will know what “Library Data” is. This product is Library Data writ very large, all focused on Dagudashaag sector in the Third Imperium.

The origin of this product lies in the Signal GK fanzine of many years ago; over the course of its life, it detailed the entirety of Dagudashaag Sector for the Classic Traveller and MegaTraveller periods.

There are two files in this product; the first is the Encyclopaedia itself. Describing the Encyclopaedia as “Library Data writ very large” pretty much says implicitly almost everything you need to know – it is sorted alphabetically, with mostly summary information about each entry’s topic, but providing some detail where appropriate. The authors/editors inserted a ‘conceit’; although this is a plain-vanilla, no-special-features-or-capabilities PDF file, the introductory material says that the “CyJac ’13” virus is embedded, and that this virus is specifically designed to interact with the Encyclopedia. (I must emphasize that if you’ve received this file from a legitimate source, there is no virus or any other kind of potentially undesirable code.) The “action” of this notional virus is to occasionally insert some additional information or “snarky” comments into specific entries in the Encyclopaedia; the reader is likely to find or come up with some ideas for using the information – both the “official” entry and CyJac ’13’s addition – in an adventure.

The second file is For Your Eyes Only, a referee-only supplement to the Encyclopaedia. This file is structured the same way as the main Encyclopaedia, as Library Data entries – but the entries here tell you things about the main Encyclopaedia’s entries that a Referee might not want the players to know while running an adventure using the seeds that are scattered through the main Encyclopaedia’s entries. This file also contains references to articles in the original Signal GK magazine (which is available for download, and a link provided in the introductory material), and additional, perhaps less-obvious, adventure hooks. It’s not “infected” by CyJac ’13, though.

Both files are formatted to the international A4 paper size, but the great majority of the pages of the main Encyclopaedia will lose nothing if printed without resizing on US Letter paper; some of the introductory material and the front cover will have some graphics chopped. The For Your Eyes Only supplement will lose the title at the top of the page and the page number at the bottom, but the entries will be intact.

As a Pay-What-You-Want product, it is by definition worth what you pay for it; it is quite conceivable that the suggested US$3.00 would be considered undervalued.