[jason taylor]

Rutters:

Traveller's Almanacs especially for merchants. They can come in several forms. Some come in periodicals (famously the JTAS) from private interest groups of various kinds. Others from governments: it is common for consulates to sell collections of commercial and navigational intelligence as a service to merchants flagged on their world.

Most famously are the rich collections carried by various merchant houses. A common format is an illuminated codex-style carrier with sheaths for the dataholders of recorded debriefs of captains organized by date as well as space for side notes. If you did not know you might think you are looking at a religious manuscript.

It is common for a merchant house to maintain a regular service of analysts to refine the information for previous debriefs and issue them to captains bound for given regions.

The information contained in a rutter issued will likely include such things as contacts, resources of a given area, secret stashes of emergency wealth in whatever form, bank account codes, deposit boxes, etc, as well as navigational information and survival guides for a given system. Also might include political intelligence as well as economic as this can be relevant to operations. The head of a merchant house if forced to flee (say from a war or revolution at home), can often use the information within to revive corporate power.

The rutter of an extinct Merchant House is a priceless work of art and kept in museums. They are certainly unfencible and anyone who intends to steal one must work on commission.

A Great MegaCorp like the Tukeras might maintain an entire library of rutters at it's home office.

An adventure with this might involve using one to track down accounts. It could also be a MacGuffin a bounty hunter is hired to find. Or an Imperial investigator looking for unsavory goings on might be trying to find it and decipher the meaning. Or on the flipside if the PCs are looking to avoid Imperial Entanglements they might try to hide it.