The Fifty-Year Mayday: This Is Free Trader Beowulf

Shannon Appelcline has cultivated a bit of a career as an RPG historian, producing material which is less academic than Jon Peterson’s Playing At the World, The Elusive Shift, or Game Wizards whilst casting a wider net than Ben Riggs’ Slaying the Dragon. His magnum opus is the Designers & Dragons series, whose core release constitutes a bunch of potted histories of different game companies, arranged by the year they entered the RPG industry; I reviewed the four-volume edition here a while back. As well as looking to push the series forwards with a volume on companies of the 2010s and a collection of “lost histories” of companies that didn’t make the cut on the first go-around, Appelcline has branched out into a number of side projects under the wider banner. One of these is This Is Free Trader Beowulf from 2024. Taking its name from the iconic mayday message that graced the original Traveller boxed set nearly fifty years ago in 1977 (sorry, gang, I think the Beowulf is toast), this is…