First Encounters/Journals

Journals

The journals are a major feature of Frontier: First Encounters, with their lively style and obvious biases. Three of them are essentially the mouthpieces of the major powers, wheras the other two are a trashy tabloid and a scholarly journal. When read carefully, you amy glean important facts about the hard-coded missions, and even see your own name mentioned in dispatches as you complete them.

Frontier News

The organ of the Alliance, this offers relatively unbiased news and can be considered relatively authoratative. Since the Alliance is (in and of itself) a minor player in FFE, it covers the various (mis)deeds of the Federation and Empire relatively even-handedly.

Federal Times

The mouthpiece of the Federation, this is written in a rather po-faced style and only really becomes animated when denouncing the Empire. Read with considerable suspcion when it pupports to tell the truth about either itself or the Empire.

Imperial Herald

Written in an incredibly florid and biased style, the Herald is almost pure Imperial Propaganda. This should not, however, be seen as a condemnation. To the contrary, the Herald is immensely entertaining. See, however, the caveat for the Federal Times, above.

Universal Scientist

The sober voice of pure science, the U.S. is still interesting reading, as it tries to maintain neutrality and report only the facts and the provable theories about the universe, the societies in it and the people who populate it. Occasionally you will find tidbits about current events, but this is only by accident.

Random Intergalactic Gossip

The voice of the common man. At least, if you translate "common" into "crass", "sensationalist" and "badly spelld". Resolutely tabloid, personal and sensationalist, the R.I.G. (as it prefers to be known) respects no boundaries and believes that the lowest common denominator is still far too highbrow. Having said all this, the R.I.G. often reveals that which other journals are too compromised to publish. Along with the "Desperately seeking" personals.

Links

• Dream-Ware - This excellent site has a searchable database of all the hardcoded journal entries.