OTU Only: Is There Enough Artwork in Traveller?

[dmccoy1693]

Are you happy with the amount (and kind) of art in Traveller? Should there be more high tech city images and landscapes? Do you want to see the unique look of various locations. I'm not just talking about the various tech and other stuff of Traveller, but locations, scenes, what areas look like, city skylines, and so forth.

 

[ovka]

Since neither my players nor I have ever travelled to another planet, its nice to be able to show them different scenes of cities, ships, starports, biospheres, etc.

Cheers,

Baron Ovka

 

[Blue Ghost]

When my friend bought me Starter Traveller for my birthday all those eons ago I was really taken with the box cover art, the detailed map for Shadows and Mithril, and the occasional sketch in the rule book.

But wow, what an artistic desert the rest of the publications turned out to be.

Fast forward to 2002ish and Hunter and I are talking T20. I get a copy of T20 and wow, am I blown away by the full colored renderings inside. To me that's how the game should have always been.

I'm a bit more savvy as to what Traveller is all about, but still, if you're going to be a scifi game, then be a scifi game.

I actually did put down the game partially (not largely) out of a lack of art. And to be brutally honest, I never liked Keith's sketches. Especially when he paid homage to Syd Meade or Stewart Cowley.

Call me all kinds of names for those comments, but that's how I truly feel. You want scifi art? To me Angus McKee did some rocking stuff. Peter Elson and Chris Foss. Those kinds of guys are expensive, but if you want your game to take off and not hang around in the "it's kind of good" territory, then invest in the visuals.

 

[khadaji2002]

When my friend bought my Starter Traveller for my birthday all those eons ago I was really taken with the box cover art, the detailed map for Shadows and Mithril, and the occasional sketch in the rule book.

But wow, what an artistic desert the rest of the publications turned out to be.

Fast forward to 2002ish and Hunter and I are talking T20. I get a copy of T20 and wow, am I blown away by the full colored renderings inside. To me that's how the game should have always been.

I'm a bit more savvy as to what Traveller is all about, but still, if you're going to be a scifi game, then be a scifi game.

I actually did put down the game partially (not largely) out of a lack of art. And to be brutally honest, I never liked Keith's sketches. Especially when he paid homage to Syd Meade or Stewart Cowley.

Call me all kinds of names for those comments, but that's how I truly feel. You want scifi art? To me Angus McKee did some rocking stuff. Peter Elson and Chris Foss. Those kinds of guys are expensive, but if you want your game to take off and not hang around in the "it's kind of good" territory, then invest in the visuals.

I agree. I don't want a full glossy pic on every page (I'm not buying an art book, after all.. ). I do want enough pictures to have an idea what the authors had in mind when they wrote the game up. I got spoiled in most of my online games that Bryan Gibson (absent friend) gamed in the same group and offered character sketches and the like to us freely. That fueled the games to a certain degree as everyone then had an image of the character. Same for the ships, and for the planets....

Yeah, I like seeing more pictures.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

I want art that pertains to the chapter of a book. Not generic clip-art place holders. But ya, more art. Not just the one or two pictures that Book 1 might have. And not the generic art like GURPS Traveller and some of the Mongoose books used. Mongoose's Zhodani book was very generic art-wise.

 

[Ishmael]

I don't necessarily think there is too little artwork, but that it is repetitive.
There same ships and equipment over and over for 30 years is a bit much. With 11,000 worlds and a thousand years for the Third Imperium alone, there should be dozens, in not hundreds, of different versions of each ship type, but the same version gets redone ad nauseum.

 

[Timerover51]

I am working on building a collection of copyright-free artwork for use.

 

[epicenter00]

In a "setting free" Traveller book, I'd actually like to see less "miscellaneous" art of just men and women wandering around future landscapes and perhaps a lot more "technical" art. Like stuff that would be a springboard for the imagination. Like "five different ways a free trader might look in five different sci-universes", "five different looks for a TL12 vacc suit" - same rules but very different looks.

The rulesbook I don't think needs lots of art, but it should be themed in a way that suggests different ways to play Traveller.

I agree. I don't want a full glossy pic on every page (I'm not buying an art book, after all..

"SECOND SURVEY: A Visual Guide To The Third Imperium" is a book that I think should exist and I think it should be precisely that. An art book, as if produced by photographers traveling with the Scout Service who took pictures during the Second Survey. No 20 pages of masturbatory history that nobody but the GM (and old grognards, which sadly I am one) reads, no 30 pages of dry UWPs, I want to see images - basically large color plates with a bit of blurb under it. Stuff that players (and potential players) could flip through and in like five minutes of flipping through the book cover to cover could get to inspire them to imagine what the Third Imperium looks like, its scale, how its people live, what the major planets look like. Something that looks glossy, professionally produced, like a setting guide you might get with a Japanese Console RPG or Halo or something. It's 2017 (soon to be 2018). It's about time.

They could have other books that have less art, and in black-and-white that can cover things like "Imperial Encyclopaedia" and so on.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

I think that a little more "technical art" would be great. I have an imagination,, but I am not as well versed on seeing some things. Also, IMO I think the younger generation of gamers requires more concrete visualizations of "hard science"

Like Battledress and Artillery Battledress. Does it look like like 40K Space Marines? Like Iron Man? Just where do I stow my PGMP-15?

MgT2e is not my favorite rule set, but it is my favorite for artwork. If not, give me T4, Chris Foss, Steven Crowley and the bonkers 70's sci-fi artwork. Well I wanted those posters they were selling at Pier-1 Imports when I grew up in the '70s.

 

[agorski]

I want art that pertains to the chapter of a book. Not generic clip-art place holders.

This. T4 was terrible in this regard.

I have a large collection of dead tree books, so I probably already have a decent image of anything I would want to refer to.

 

[Ulsyus]

I want art that pertains to the chapter of a book. Not generic clip-art place holders.

Shawn said it.

And well thought out stuff - The Mongoose Aslan and Vagr books were terrible in that regard.

Someone please find the next Brian Gibson. We miss him terribly.

 

[jcrocker]

I missed out on Classic, I got into Traveller with MT - I thought the three book set had a great amount of art. At the time, of course, I didn't know how much had been used in CT, but even so, there was a lot of newer art that was good.

The Traveller Adventure had a good balance, evocative but not overdone.

T4 - some people seemed to like the 'spaceship pulling up stone head' theme, but after two or three variants, it was a theme I thought could have been dropped.

TNE had a good mix, I liked some artists' work better than others.

 

[JimMarn]

Unless its ship deck plans, art work doesn't really interest me.

Much more important is text written such that a new person to the game will understand it, without having to know acronyms, special words, etc.

Most rpgs I have played over the decades did word the various parts so they were followable by new players.

The big problem I had with ad&d is the dice... I simply couldn't figure out the d4s until someone showed me. The rest of the dice you read the upper most number as the roll result. The original d4s, it was the number on the bottom edge.

Of course, Traveller only uses d6s.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Well, the reason I wrote what I did is that the game is now setting specific. In spite of what it says in the old CT basic rule books, Traveller is no longer GURPS-ish, but is in fact its own setting. As such the art, I think, should reflect that.

Even though I come here with the idea that the back of the 1001 Characters or 76 Patrons book flatly give examples of NPCs and situations as per the original rules, you can't really (at least not officially) play things like "Bill, Hero of the Galaxy", "Star Trek" or whatever.

When I used to gawk and read the old Stewart Cowley books, back then at least, the scifi zeitgeist was fairly open with a lot of cross pollination. Now scifi is a big money making machine, so that kind of thing doesn't happen anymore. Meaning that this game, as I knew it, can't really reach out to other art or settings, and so the art should reflect that.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

I have a large collection of dead tree books, so I probably already have a decent image of anything I would want to refer to.

OMNI magazine is great for browsing Traveller sci-fi art. Up to about 1983. That's when the art went bad (new age junk science stuff) and the mag started losing customers.

TNE had a good mix, I liked some artists' work better than others.

I thought TNE had the best character/career artwork over all the other editions. Each face thumbnail was great in it.

Now scifi is a big money making machine, so that kind of thing doesn't happen anymore. Meaning that this game, as I knew it, can't really reach out to other art or settings, and so the art should reflect that.

It's never been a problem for me playing any setting using Traveller.

 

[Blue Ghost]

It's never been a problem for me playing any setting using Traveller.

We're talking art though. The game was originally a generic all purpose scifi RPG. But now it has it's own thing which is separate and distinct from other games.

 

[Ulsyus]

We're talking art though. The game was originally a generic all purpose scifi RPG. But now it has it's own thing which is separate and distinct from other games.

Does there need to be more Direction with artwork commissioned for Traveller? Should the art be more consistent with how things are depicted?

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

We're talking art though. The game was originally a generic all purpose scifi RPG. But now it has it's own thing which is separate and distinct from other games.

And the last two (maybe three) Core rulebooks for Traveller are still basically generic for players to make up their own settings in. Their artwork is generic.

 

[phorner]

Since neither my players nor I have ever travelled to another planet, its nice to be able to show them different scenes of cities, ships, starports, biospheres, etc.

Cheers,

Baron Ovka

In January I will be releasing version 3 of my TAS Access Terminal which includes over 300 images of surfaces, cities, fauna, etc. for various locations in the Spinward Marches.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Just as you can do so with D&D or any other game, but Traveller's setting now makes it unique. The game is basically now an original scifi property like Trek or SW, but the art, what little there is, really doesn't reflect that too much.