Journal of the Travellers Aid Society is a role-playing game magazine devoted to Traveller, commonly abbreviated JTAS. The first issue was published by GDW in 1979 and the last of the first run was #24 in 1985. It was superseded by the magazine Challenge, which took up its numbering scheme and ran from issue 25 onwards with a broader role-playing game focus.
The magazine was revived by Imperium Games after GDW folded, and JTAS 25 and 26 were published before that publisher folded itself.
After Steve Jackson Games licensed the Traveller setting, JTAS was revived once again as a weekly, then bi-weekly subscriber-supported web magazine in February, 2000. This incarnation of JTAS can be found at http://jtas.sjgames.com
The Traveller wiki has an article about the Journal, including a complete listing of all published issues.
The Journal of the Travellers Aid Society takes its name from the fictional Travellers' Aid Society (TAS) that was first mentioned in the original incarnation of the Traveller game published by Game Designers Workshop . In the original Traveller game, it was not too uncommon for characters to obtain membership in the TAS during character creation. The idea of the TAS is that it is an organization that exists to support what are basically 'transients,' or 'wanderers' around the galaxy. It does so by maintaining low-cost hostels at many of the large starports, and, most importantly, by maintaining its 'rating system,' which warns of the dangers inherent in visiting certain worlds. Under this system, a world which should be approached with caution is denoted an 'Amber Zone,' and a world that should not be approached at all is denoted a 'Red Zone.'
Famous quotes containing the words journal of, journal, travellers, aid and/or society:
“The obvious parallels between Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz have frequently been noted: in both there is the orphan hero who is raised on a farm by an aunt and uncle and yearns to escape to adventure. Obi-wan Kenobi resembles the Wizard; the loyal, plucky little robot R2D2 is Toto; C3PO is the Tin Man; and Chewbacca is the Cowardly Lion. Darth Vader replaces the Wicked Witch: this is a patriarchy rather than a matriarchy.”
—Andrew Gordon, U.S. educator, critic. “The Inescapable Family in American Science Fiction and Fantasy Films,” Journal of Popular Film and Television (Summer 1992)
“How truly does this journal contain my real and undisguised thoughts—I always write it according to the humour I am in, and if a stranger was to think it worth reading, how capricious—insolent & whimsical I must appear!—one moment flighty and half mad,—the next sad and melancholy. No matter! Its truth and simplicity are its sole recommendations.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,—why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,—that is to say, the Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom House.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“For this invention of yours will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, by causing them to neglect their memory, inasmuch as, from their confidence in writing, they will recollect by the external aid of foreign symbols, and not by the internal use of their own faculties. Your discovery, therefore, is a medicine not for memory, but for recollection,—for recalling to, not for keeping in mind.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)