8-400: First Survey is a supplement published under license by Imperium Games in 1996 for Game Designers Workshop 's science fiction role-playing game Traveller . First Survey is a 112-page softcover book designed by Duane Maxwell, Steve Miller, and David Wise, with illustrations by Steve Bryant and Bryan Gibson, and cover art by Chris Foss. The book has two computer-generated lists — one for
16-450: A new, fourth edition of the game titled Marc Miller's Traveller , commonly abbreviated T4 . Sweetpea advanced Imperium Games seed money to launch in exchange for equity and media rights. Lester W. Smith and Timothy Brown , former employees of original Traveller publisher Game Designers' Workshop (GDW), came to work for Imperium Games. Don Perrin also designed role playing products for Traveller . Larry Elmore created most of
24-410: A perfectly adequate list of planets all by his lonesome." He concluded by giving the book a very poor rating of only 2 stars out of 6. In his 2014 book Designers & Dragons , Shannon Appelcline commented that " First Survey (1996), the final book copyrighted 1996, was probably the worst (and ugliest) book published for the game system. It contained 112 pages of computer-generated statistics for all
32-511: The gamemaster , and the other for the players — that contain data on over 10,000 planets in the Traveller universe. The data included each planet's name, its location, type of government, level of law, and its terrain type. Due to a programming error, the data on type of government and law level was incorrect. In the January 1998 edition of Dragon (Issue #243), Rick Swan was not impressed with
40-424: The black-and-white artwork for Marc Miller's Traveller . Chris Foss created much of the color concept art for the new edition of Traveller , produced 12 pages of artwork for the edition's first supplement, Starships , and illustrated a number of covers for the line. When Sweetpea Entertainment bought out the stock of the many creators who had worked on T4 and took over some of the day-to-day operations of
48-474: The planet — were all identical." Imperium Games Imperium Games was an American game company that produced role-playing games and game supplements. Marc W. Miller partnered with Sweetpea Entertainment to license his science-fiction property Traveller in exchange for funding to get Imperium Games running in February 1996, as a new publisher solely dedicated to Traveller material, beginning with
56-401: The supplied data on each planet, calling it "sparse to the point of non-existence." He conceded that the sparseness was intentional, so that gamemasters could fill in the details for their own Traveller campaigns. But Swan objected to the entire concept of the book, pointing out the relatively high cost of the book ($ 23 in 1998), and saying "any experienced gamemaster ought to be able to cook up
64-501: The worlds of the Imperium in Milieu 0, laid out in unattractive row after row. There were two copies of all the stats: one for players, and one for the gamemaster, making the book that much more redundant. Worse, due to an error in programming, every single planet's Universal World Profile (UWP) was wrong . The fifth and sixth digits of each UWP — which represented the government and law level of
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