What happened to the Traveller News Service Generator?

I stumbled across documentation for this at a dubious website called 'The Trove' which seems to host material taken from the Internet Archive along with games currently under release.

I tried a Google search for the program itself as it looked quite useful, but all I could find was a thread on this board announcing it's existence.

Did anyone save a copy of the program as I think it's a really good idea, particularly if it could be linked to the Traveller Map in some way.

Here is a link to a thread I found announcing it's existence (The link in board goes to another part of RPGpub and requires registration to download.)


However a poster on that thread reveals that it was an implementation of hand-rolled generator posted on the Freelance Traveller page. An newer automated implementation would be a great boon to referees/GMs as the original implementation dates from 2004.

Hey, mate. I did a quick port of the Freelance Traveller article (Traveller News Service random news generator) to Perchance. I also linked back to the source article. Feel free to click away. You're right. This is a good one that I would love to expand on!

I was just running the program through it's paces and it generated a story that simply said 'Hi'. Forgot to take a screenshot of it. I mentioned the program on the Traveller mailing list and got a piece of feedback that could lead to something for next update. Some way of using the data from Traveller Map to localise the stories by subsector.

Later: I ran through a number of stories and this time got one that simply said 'hi there'. Screen shot is attached. Hope this helps with the debugging.