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I. Introduction
In 1977 Traveller was released by Game Designers’ Workshop, and the world of role-playing games changed. Traveller was the first real science-fiction game, and one of the first to introduce detailed character backstories through the character generation process. Traveller characters weren’t callow youths, but experienced professionals.
And, of course, you could die during the character creation process. It’s a tough galaxy.
What Traveller lacked, initially, was an official setting. This wasn’t uncommon, as it was expected that groups would create their own campaigns using the rules as a framework. But the gamers of the day wanted official campaigns and settings. So we got places like Blackmoor and Greyhawk, Glorantha and Tékumel, all epic worlds for fantasy adventures. Game Designers’ Workshop (GDW) handled things differently.
The first mention of an established empire in Traveller came in Book 4: Mercenary, which was released in 1978. The book states that Traveller assumes that there is a distant central government, the Imperium, that due to travel times and the vast area it controls, has little influence on the frontiers. As Marc Miller has stated that the idea was to create a Roman Empire feel, this image of the Imperium gave you the idea that games would be played in the interstellar equivalent of Gaul or Palestine.
The problem is that nature and gamers abhor vacuums. We demanded more details, and, with the rise of the internet, began to create more and more stuff to fill out this vague distant government. What became an issue was that most of these writers, fan and professional, were living in western federal states, with a strong central government that handles almost every aspect of government. The writers, knowing almost no other way to govern, began inventing Imperial ministries and departments. There were multiple variations on Imperium-wide law enforcement and court systems.
A great deal of this was caused not just by our reliance on centralized government in our own lives, but on a catastrophic failure to understand the consequences of information moving only at the speed of travel. We are all used to living on a globe where information and communication moves almost instantly. I could, right now, check the current weather in Istanbul, a city some 9,000 miles away. (46 degrees, but a little windy.)
It is impossible to overstate the consequences of Traveller’s “jump takes one week” rule on how an interstellar government would work. Even in a subsector, news of a crisis might take weeks to reach the nearest naval base of subsector capital, and weeks for help to arrive. Informing the Throne? Months. Just to get word of a crisis on the edges of the realm, even with high-jump couriers on stand-by, the core worlds will never have a handle on what is happening in the Imperium except on the largest of scales.
With that in mind, it is clear that the Imperium has to cede most of the powers of planning and enforcement to the local nobles and to the officers of the Navy. The Emperor simply cannot rule in anything short of plans for the next decade. The Imperium is ruled by the nobles of the realm under the guidance and authority of the Emperor. This is a paradigm shift and needs further explanation.
Last summer I read an amazing book. Seapower States, by Andrew Lambert. It examines those historical states the eschewed traditional land empires in favor of sea power and trade. It’s an incredible book, and I highly recommend it. But in reading it, I was struck by how states like Carthage and Holland resembled the canonical Third Imperium.
• The Imperium contains 11,000 worlds, but actually controls less than a hundred of them.
• The Imperium rules the “space between the stars", rather than worlds directly.
• The Imperium allows its members almost unlimited self-rule.
• Most of the rules the Imperium forces on member worlds enhance trade. (Universal currency, calendar, trade language, etc.,)
• The Imperial Navy is cruiser-heavy, and many of its missions support free trade.
From that reading, and close examination of the canonical writings on the Third Imperium, I have to conclude that, for most of its recent history anyway, the Imperium has been operating as a starpower state, if you will. Cleon Zhunastu saw that the cause of the Long Night, and what killed so many failed states during that era, was the failure of trade. The empire he forged was dedicated to one thing, and I’ve created a quote that sums up his view.
“Without the free flow of trade and ideas, without open markets and open minds, the flame of civilization dies in the darkness.”
The Third Imperium at its heart is a trade federation. Everything it does is to encourage trade. If you look at it that way, you see that there is no need for a large, central bureaucracy. The power structure of the Imperium is not a pyramid, it is a web, with all parts working in tandem.
But there is one final problem. Seapower states universally were run by parliamentary organizations. The Senate of Athens, the Dutch Staten-Generaal, even when there was some sort of hereditary monarch or other executives. I have to conclude that the Imperial Moot is far more than the debating society portrayed in official publications. At some point, the Moot grabbed the reins.
That is a topic for the next essay, which is my slightly modified history of the Imperium, showing how it went from expanding empire to trade federation. After that, I’ll tackle the structure of the Imperial government and the Moot, the role of Imperial Consulates on member worlds, and finally, having written Ground Forces, I’ll take on the Imperial Navy.
In 1977 Traveller was released by Game Designers’ Workshop, and the world of role-playing games changed. Traveller was the first real science-fiction game, and one of the first to introduce detailed character backstories through the character generation process. Traveller characters weren’t callow youths, but experienced professionals.
And, of course, you could die during the character creation process. It’s a tough galaxy.
What Traveller lacked, initially, was an official setting. This wasn’t uncommon, as it was expected that groups would create their own campaigns using the rules as a framework. But the gamers of the day wanted official campaigns and settings. So we got places like Blackmoor and Greyhawk, Glorantha and Tékumel, all epic worlds for fantasy adventures. Game Designers’ Workshop (GDW) handled things differently.
The first mention of an established empire in Traveller came in Book 4: Mercenary, which was released in 1978. The book states that Traveller assumes that there is a distant central government, the Imperium, that due to travel times and the vast area it controls, has little influence on the frontiers. As Marc Miller has stated that the idea was to create a Roman Empire feel, this image of the Imperium gave you the idea that games would be played in the interstellar equivalent of Gaul or Palestine.
The problem is that nature and gamers abhor vacuums. We demanded more details, and, with the rise of the internet, began to create more and more stuff to fill out this vague distant government. What became an issue was that most of these writers, fan and professional, were living in western federal states, with a strong central government that handles almost every aspect of government. The writers, knowing almost no other way to govern, began inventing Imperial ministries and departments. There were multiple variations on Imperium-wide law enforcement and court systems.
A great deal of this was caused not just by our reliance on centralized government in our own lives, but on a catastrophic failure to understand the consequences of information moving only at the speed of travel. We are all used to living on a globe where information and communication moves almost instantly. I could, right now, check the current weather in Istanbul, a city some 9,000 miles away. (46 degrees, but a little windy.)
It is impossible to overstate the consequences of Traveller’s “jump takes one week” rule on how an interstellar government would work. Even in a subsector, news of a crisis might take weeks to reach the nearest naval base of subsector capital, and weeks for help to arrive. Informing the Throne? Months. Just to get word of a crisis on the edges of the realm, even with high-jump couriers on stand-by, the core worlds will never have a handle on what is happening in the Imperium except on the largest of scales.
With that in mind, it is clear that the Imperium has to cede most of the powers of planning and enforcement to the local nobles and to the officers of the Navy. The Emperor simply cannot rule in anything short of plans for the next decade. The Imperium is ruled by the nobles of the realm under the guidance and authority of the Emperor. This is a paradigm shift and needs further explanation.
Last summer I read an amazing book. Seapower States, by Andrew Lambert. It examines those historical states the eschewed traditional land empires in favor of sea power and trade. It’s an incredible book, and I highly recommend it. But in reading it, I was struck by how states like Carthage and Holland resembled the canonical Third Imperium.
• The Imperium contains 11,000 worlds, but actually controls less than a hundred of them.
• The Imperium rules the “space between the stars", rather than worlds directly.
• The Imperium allows its members almost unlimited self-rule.
• Most of the rules the Imperium forces on member worlds enhance trade. (Universal currency, calendar, trade language, etc.,)
• The Imperial Navy is cruiser-heavy, and many of its missions support free trade.
From that reading, and close examination of the canonical writings on the Third Imperium, I have to conclude that, for most of its recent history anyway, the Imperium has been operating as a starpower state, if you will. Cleon Zhunastu saw that the cause of the Long Night, and what killed so many failed states during that era, was the failure of trade. The empire he forged was dedicated to one thing, and I’ve created a quote that sums up his view.
“Without the free flow of trade and ideas, without open markets and open minds, the flame of civilization dies in the darkness.”
The Third Imperium at its heart is a trade federation. Everything it does is to encourage trade. If you look at it that way, you see that there is no need for a large, central bureaucracy. The power structure of the Imperium is not a pyramid, it is a web, with all parts working in tandem.
But there is one final problem. Seapower states universally were run by parliamentary organizations. The Senate of Athens, the Dutch Staten-Generaal, even when there was some sort of hereditary monarch or other executives. I have to conclude that the Imperial Moot is far more than the debating society portrayed in official publications. At some point, the Moot grabbed the reins.
That is a topic for the next essay, which is my slightly modified history of the Imperium, showing how it went from expanding empire to trade federation. After that, I’ll tackle the structure of the Imperial government and the Moot, the role of Imperial Consulates on member worlds, and finally, having written Ground Forces, I’ll take on the Imperial Navy.
