Beginning with The Traveller Book in 1982, GDW began a shift away from digest-sized books and toward more traditional 8½" × 11" books for the game. I'm not entirely sure why the company chose to do this, but, whatever the reason, there were soon no more digest-sized books to be had. The Traveller Adventure, the various alien modules, and even the Starter and Deluxe editions of the game were all published as standard-sized books – a size every subsequent version of Traveller has used up to the present day.
Around the same time, GDW released new versions of Mayday and Snapshot that made use of the larger size. These were the versions I owned, though I've long since lost and replaced them with the earlier digest-sized versions, because I'm silly that way. These games paved the way for additional boxed sets for use with Traveller, like Tarsus, which appeared in 1983. Then, in 1984, BeltStrike appeared in the same format – two 12-page, staple-bound booklets, four 4-page adventure folders, a fold-out map of Koenig's Rock, and some perforated cards containing the write-ups for a dozen pregenerated characters. Like most Traveller products, there's not much in the way of art beyond David Dietrick's box art.
Like Tarsus before it, BeltStrike devotes itself to the description of a single star system in the Spinward Marches, in this case the Bowman Belt, a planetoid belt located in the same subsector as Tarsus, District 268. As its name suggests, District 268 has not yet been fully incorporated into the Third Imperium, but is instead a colonial territory being developed in preparation for eventual inclusion within the empire. This gives its worlds, including the Bowman Belt, a distinctly "frontier" feel to them – which is saying something, as the Spinward Marches sector itself is something of a backwater sector located on the fringes of the Imperium.
The first 12-page booklet is the Bowman System Reference Book. It lays out the basic facts of the Bowman system, as well as its major points of interest. There's also a map of both the entire system and of Bowman Prime (a gas giant) and its satellites, so referees and players alike have a good idea of where all the major astronomical bodies are located in relation to one another. Information about Bowman's history and place within the Marches takes up much of the booklet's page count, followed closely by library data and a key to Koenig's Rock, a planetoid settlement with a reputation for lawlessness and vice.
The second 12-page booklet is the Belter's Handbook. As its title suggests, it focuses on creating and playing belter (asteroid miner) characters. There's not only a full career for such characters (which had previously appeared in Supplement 4: Citizens of the Imperium), but also many practical details on asteroid mining, like the ins and outs of prospecting, claims and profits, encounters, and the effects of zero and low gravity. None of these details are exhaustive – the booklet is short, after all – but they're solid enough to provide the referee with sufficient guidance that he could pretty easily make use of them in his campaign.
Finally, there are the four adventure folders – really just two double-sided pages – each of which presents a different situation that might involve the player characters within the Bowman system. The first one, "Lodes of Adventures," is really just an introduction to the system and its sights. The second, "On the Rock," takes place on Koenig's Rock and its shady inhabitants. Adventure three, "Claimjumpers," deals with fending off rival belters. Finally, there's "Archeology," which allows the characters to find a high-tech base of an alien civilization that's been lost in the belt for centuries. Like everything else in BeltStrike, the adventures are more sketches than fully fleshed out scenarios. While this is fairly typical for Traveller, this might prove frustrating for inexperienced referees.
In my youth, I wasn't a big fan of BeltStrike for precisely this reason. I felt there was too little information to fully exploit its potential. After all, asteroid belts are inherently interesting locales in a sci-fi setting and I simply didn't think the Bowman Belt was interesting as I had hoped it would be. Now, I look on it a little more charitably. I made good use of it during my Riphaeus Sector campaign by repurposing bits and pieces of it in my own non-Third Imperium setting. Both Koenig's Rock and the ancient alien base made great additions to the continuing adventures of the characters as they made their way across the sector. It's far from the best thing GDW ever released for Traveller, but I'm still fond of it (and it inspired me when I took my own stab at presenting an asteroid system for gaming).
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