mike wightman
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One other thing, the Traveller Adventure shows just how little direct Imperial involvement there is in out of the way frontier subsectors.
Canon Subject 1: Imperium and Member Worlds
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Calling the marches a frontier is like calling Chicago the "wild west"... may have been true once, but it's not viable descriptor now.
The Marches have been settled as part of the imperium for 500+ years. They're a borderland, but not a frontier.
The whole problem arises because the game came before the setting. And the setting was created by a whole bunch of different people with different ideas, working from the principle that gameplay comes first. So naturally, there are contradictions....
Not to undermine the intent of this thread, but I take the view that trying to nail down all the canon conflicts is futile. You can pick and choose.
But if we do want to nail it down then I agree: it needs to start from first principles. And this starts with questions like, "What is 'membership' in the Imperium, anyway?"
True, in a way. But the point is that the setting was developed ad hoc.
unavoidable. so make it a feature, not a bug. my latest poll on official rules/materials vs house rules/materials indicates that 1) people rely on the official setting while 2) customizing it heavily towards their own games. so incorporate this necessary and pre-existing practice into traveller - make the setting general and allow referees and players to populate it with specifics. not only is this the way it has to be done, it's also realistic - the galaxy is a big place, not even the emperor can begin to grasp it all, and not only will unknown aspects suddenly arise and make their presence known but new features will be appearing all the time. incorporate that into the game.
Traveller canon accreted. As Mike correctly points out, there was no plan beyond the need for the next adventure.
Making things worse, there was no Greyhawk or Blackmoor either. No long running and very personal sci-fi campaign settings lovingly crafted by the men who'd become GDW using early versions of the rules set that would become Traveller.
OTU canon was assembled much like how California was geologically assembled. Dozens of times over hundreds of millions, island chains rammed ashore on the North American Plate leaving behind a complex and diverse geological potpourri west of the Rockies where juxtaposed "suspect terranes" are not just different but whose geologic evolution is also incompatible.
So we have the nebulous "idea" of Traveller repeatedly colliding with different versions, authors, publishers, and so forth accreting canon with every collision.
CT1e comes ashore in 1977, is subducted by the 1981 version, and leaves fragments behind only to be quickly followed by the early adventures, and two versions of High Guard among dozens of others things. Publishing "tectonics" brings MT ashore soon after followed by smaller collisions involving MT-ish terranes all leaving their own fragments behind. The process keeps repeating with every new version, every addition to canon, every supplement, and every 3rd party publication up through the explosion of OGL products we're seeing today.
In the end, we're left with a collection of fragments which can never be reconciled with each other.
heh. you left out the biggest accretion force of all - the individual referee. no setting however detailed could be sufficient to run a game without referee input. and not merely supplemental input either, but vast swathes of primary input.
heh. mere kingdoms, footnotes in the galaxy and in time.
Not unavoidable. A flexible setting needn't be developed ad hoc. It can be developed deliberately to that end.
That no one ever laid out the relationship between the Imperium and its member worlds isn't unavoidable. And laying it out in some early book or adventure would not have taken away anyone's flexibility, because that relationship itself could be flexible. We have different government types, and there is no reason we could not have different "membership types" -- except that nobody thought of it at the time.
Exactly.
Now, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. As I said before, we can pick and choose and need not be bound by everything that has been written over the years. I resist the idea that there is a single canonical rule governing what a world controls, and what the Imperium controls, which would apply in every case.
But I do think the setting would be richer if it had been developed deliberately.
True, but individual referees don't leave behind fragments other referees must then try to somehow fit into the whole.
My point is that Traveller canon is much like California's geological make-up in that there are hundreds of examples of "suspect terrane"; chunks of the landscape ranging from house-sized boulders to islands to mountain ranges which don't fit the landscape around them in a geological sense.
It isn't. As Fly loves to point out and as I agree, it's a feature and not a bug.
It's a great feature for referees and a nightmare for writers.
Hans Rancke and I wrangled over what I disparagingly called the Spreadsheet Imperium for well over a decade. I want wiggle room and not handcuffs.
I thought and posted something similar for decades now. GDW made a mistake very early on in Traveller's life. It may not have been obvious in 1977, but someone as dim as I was noticing it by the mid-80s: Traveller's official rules and official setting should have been more sharply differentiated.
GDW wrote from the first that the rules would allow a referee to create nearly any setting they chose. Here's a sentence from LBB:1, the 1981 edition, first paragraph on page 5:
GDW failed to follow up on their own advice however. By HG2, the OTU was firmly embedded in the rules and it only got worse.
It's well past time to treat the OTU as a subset of Traveller. The OTU needs to be presented as a setting which uses some of Traveller's rules as written, others modified to some degree, and still others ignored entirely.
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Isn't that what it is now?
Let's say Marc sets his next novel in the Spinward Marches, I read it and think that 99% of it is genius, but that last percent...
So when it comes time to run the players through the plotline of the novel, guess which 1% gets quietly dropped.
Or maybe I don't like the rule on determining which side of buttered toast lands on the floor when it falls off the table. Gone.
There's a whole lot of OTU out there, and some of it doesn't make sense in light of later additions.
For example in the original Kinunir, Adventure Number One, the rescue of an Imperial Senator figures prominently (it was published in 1979, I can't imagine what might have influenced it) but Imperial Senators are never mentioned again.
In practice, perhaps. In the rules, not at all.
Look T5, it's fundamentally a rules set for the OTU/3I setting and no other. Play T5 as written and you're playing that setting.
Now, if this statement - "Using this set of three books, players can play single scenarios or entire adventuring campaigns set in any science-fiction situation." - had been the goal, T5 wouldn't default to the OTU/3I setting.
Instead, you'd be handed T5 and be told "Apply these rules in this manner for the OTU. Apply them in this other manner for XYZ. Apply them in this other manner for..." and so on.
Exactly. Canon accreted.
the first three books specified navies and armies and scout services and nobility, which suggests an awful lot about the implied setting. it also specified high passage, which all by itself suggests entire volumes about the implied setting. it also listed forgery and bribery as skills, which suggests entire volumes more about the implied setting.
starting with those three books, the otu seems like the sparsest and most minimal setting possible.
Not an implied setting, but instead an implied range of settings.
While the First Three LLBs aren't going to give your Star Trek or Star Wars without wholesale and fundamental changes, they will still give you far more than the OTU however.
See above.
I'd say the "Up to LBB:4 Mercenary" version of the OTU is the setting which automatically falls out of those early books when you shake them hard enough. However, that OTU is a very different from the OTU which exists now.
if you say so, I have nothing past book 6. but like I pointed out in the imperial culture thread, the "present otu" referenced seems to consist entirely of noble-level sector-level politics and history, while the rest of the gamespace is ... well, ignored, even deprecated near as I can tell. whole lotta room in the spinward marches for lbb1-8 and a whole bunch more, near as I can tell. I hear people complain that "the game is too locked up, we need a whole new sector to play in!" and I haven't the slightest clue what they're talking about. I'm still trying to work up pagaton and I don't think I'll ever finish.
That would be a straw man you're building there.
You don't have to develop a whole sector over a thousand years to lay out, for example, just what the relationship between worlds and the Imperium actually is.
That's a pretty basic characteristic of the setting. But this stuff grew ad hoc, and as this thread makes clear, still is not fully defined.
And defining it need not handcuff anyone: "psionics is banned in the Imperium" generates adventure possibilities but still leaves us free to include psionics, ignore psionics, or whatever. Adventure hooks aren't found in UWPs; they're in the questions of how a society works.
I agree.
And unfortunately GDW went down the road of providing the setting, rather than continuing to flesh out the rules by which one might create a setting (Book 6 excepted). It would be nice to have both.
That's something I've thought a great deal about for a great many years. Rather than further derail this thread, let me just say I don't think there is one type of relationship or even 2D6 types of relationships between a member world and the Imperium. No "One Size Fits All" or "Spreadsheet Macro Imperium" for me.
What I do think is that each relationship was negotiated differently, that each remain subtly different, and that each evolves over time. I believe that many Imperial nobles under the rank of marquis act as living treaties. I also believe the Imperium describes itself as feudal because it operates under the pre-1789 premise of territorial supremacy instead of the post-1789 concept of territorial sovereignty.
All of that, however, is for another thread.
Setting materials sell. Adventures sell. Campaigns sell. Even Build-A-Whoosit books sell. Rule systems not so much.
GDW was wise enough to know they were in business to sell things, so they made things which sold.
