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gridloreAnyone who has known me for more than five minutes knows of my near-life long association with the SF-RPG Traveller. I started playing the game when ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
isomeme brought it home from PacifiCon in 1977, and never quit. I love the game (in all its incarnations) and the setting. One of the survival goals I set while battling cancer was to write for the game. In 1996, in the wake of the death of Game Designers Workshop, a new edition of Traveller came out. Marc Miller's Traveller (better known among fans as T4) was published by Imperium Games and moved the default setting to the days of the Third Imperium's founding.
T4 was, in short, a hot mess. The problem was there was little or now editorial understanding of the game's conventions and unique attributes that had come to be associated with the name Traveller. There was also an ungodly rush to get product out the door, resulting in terrible editing and in at least two cases, the wrong draft being published. The absolute nadir of the line was First Survey, a sector book covering the area around the newly-born Imperium. Remember, the setting assumption was that this is all happening at the end of the Long Night, a near-two thousand year interruption of interstellar trade. The sector should have contained some scattered small states that had only recently redeveloped the jump drive, worlds with pre-spaceflight technologies, and many worlds where the population had died out due to the loss of trade or warfare. It should have been a howling wilderness waiting to be tamed. Instead we got what looked like a developed area of space with a ton of developed worlds. Even worse, the computer program used to generate world stats borked everything. The vast majority of the results given weren't possible under the rules, and every world's law level was exactly the same as the government code. So, 99, 88, 33, AA, CC, etc.
But among all the crap, there were a few diamonds. This was the first version of the game where members of the Traveller Mailing List got heavily involved in writing for the game. Some of the best material ever for Traveller was produced in that era. Pocket Empires, Psionic Institutes, and even with the typesetting that destroyed all the formulas, Fire, Fusion, and Steel 2. I can aslo say with pride that the terrible combat system prompted James Lindsay and myself to write At Close Quarters for BITS.
So, why this walk down memory lane? I was contacted yesterday by someone who has been tasked by Marc Miller to clean up all the errors in T4. He had been referred to me for information on Imperial Squadrons, the not-quite-the-Imperial-Navy sourcebook. I didn't write the book. That was the powerhouse trio of Tim Brown, Stu Dollar, and Joesph Walsh. I got an "Additional Design" credit because, in my gearhead glory, I designed four ships for the book. The write-ups made it in, but the designs got mangled into uselessness. This experience, and not getting paid for my article for JTAS (along with growing reports of lots of people not getting paid at all for major works) soured me on Imperium Games, and I never even bothered to bid for another project from them.
As a side note, Imperium Games was run by Courtney Solomon. The man responsible for the crappy Dungeons & Dragons movie.
Sadly, I wasn't able to provide any help at all. I don't even own a copy of the book anymore, that went in the Great Sale. Like I said above, I can't even remember the details of my designs. But I have to wonder why Marc is bothering with a dead system 14 years after it crashed and burned. Traveller fans have given up on T5, Marc's vaporware "next version" that has been in development for at least a decade. People these days are mostly playing Mongoose's version, which is very true to the feel of classic Traveller, or whatever legacy system they like best.
Really sorry I couldn't help more, but I'm not the right person to ask.
isomeme brought it home from PacifiCon in 1977, and never quit. I love the game (in all its incarnations) and the setting. One of the survival goals I set while battling cancer was to write for the game. In 1996, in the wake of the death of Game Designers Workshop, a new edition of Traveller came out. Marc Miller's Traveller (better known among fans as T4) was published by Imperium Games and moved the default setting to the days of the Third Imperium's founding. T4 was, in short, a hot mess. The problem was there was little or now editorial understanding of the game's conventions and unique attributes that had come to be associated with the name Traveller. There was also an ungodly rush to get product out the door, resulting in terrible editing and in at least two cases, the wrong draft being published. The absolute nadir of the line was First Survey, a sector book covering the area around the newly-born Imperium. Remember, the setting assumption was that this is all happening at the end of the Long Night, a near-two thousand year interruption of interstellar trade. The sector should have contained some scattered small states that had only recently redeveloped the jump drive, worlds with pre-spaceflight technologies, and many worlds where the population had died out due to the loss of trade or warfare. It should have been a howling wilderness waiting to be tamed. Instead we got what looked like a developed area of space with a ton of developed worlds. Even worse, the computer program used to generate world stats borked everything. The vast majority of the results given weren't possible under the rules, and every world's law level was exactly the same as the government code. So, 99, 88, 33, AA, CC, etc.
But among all the crap, there were a few diamonds. This was the first version of the game where members of the Traveller Mailing List got heavily involved in writing for the game. Some of the best material ever for Traveller was produced in that era. Pocket Empires, Psionic Institutes, and even with the typesetting that destroyed all the formulas, Fire, Fusion, and Steel 2. I can aslo say with pride that the terrible combat system prompted James Lindsay and myself to write At Close Quarters for BITS.
So, why this walk down memory lane? I was contacted yesterday by someone who has been tasked by Marc Miller to clean up all the errors in T4. He had been referred to me for information on Imperial Squadrons, the not-quite-the-Imperial-Navy sourcebook. I didn't write the book. That was the powerhouse trio of Tim Brown, Stu Dollar, and Joesph Walsh. I got an "Additional Design" credit because, in my gearhead glory, I designed four ships for the book. The write-ups made it in, but the designs got mangled into uselessness. This experience, and not getting paid for my article for JTAS (along with growing reports of lots of people not getting paid at all for major works) soured me on Imperium Games, and I never even bothered to bid for another project from them.
As a side note, Imperium Games was run by Courtney Solomon. The man responsible for the crappy Dungeons & Dragons movie.
Sadly, I wasn't able to provide any help at all. I don't even own a copy of the book anymore, that went in the Great Sale. Like I said above, I can't even remember the details of my designs. But I have to wonder why Marc is bothering with a dead system 14 years after it crashed and burned. Traveller fans have given up on T5, Marc's vaporware "next version" that has been in development for at least a decade. People these days are mostly playing Mongoose's version, which is very true to the feel of classic Traveller, or whatever legacy system they like best.
Really sorry I couldn't help more, but I'm not the right person to ask.
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“Why Marc is Bothering”
Date: 19 Nov 2011 18:42 (UTC)- is obvious: Traveller was the brass ring, and he's lunging after it to grab it anyway he can. What else is he known for? It's exactly like the current, 'why bother' version of Metamorphosis Alpha - it's all James Ward is remembered for - it's all he's got.
I, too, picked up Traveller in 1977, and I, too, regard it as a foundation-stone. The only basic change I ever made to the rules was making the jump-drive instantaneous - if you're leaving normal space, you're leaving normal time. In practice this didn't change the society as much as you might think, because you also had to be much farther away - in our system, beyond Jupiter.
I collected Traveller TNE and FF&S, and I liked them as reference works, but by then I'd quit actually playing. Until GURPS Traveller came out, and afterward, I had what I needed, and didn't trouble to buy anything else.
Nor, to my mind, is there any need even now. What the basic 1977 system can't handle, GURPS can!
Re: “Why Marc is Bothering”
Date: 20 Nov 2011 02:54 (UTC)no subject
Date: 21 Nov 2011 07:55 (UTC)http://baron-waste.livejournal.com/1758247.html