You're welcome.
Actually, I am a fan. You wrote Lee's Guide to Interstellar Adventure, one of the best supplements for CT and one whose format I wished had been widely copied. You also wrote Cirque, which I've bought and believe to be one of the better examples of a "non-militarized" campaign.
The operative phrase being "in general".
You put furries on Corridor because you needed them for your sourcebook and now that there are furries in Corridor you can use them in your novel. Nice circular reasoning.
I'll ask this again: Is further inflicting T20's mistake on canon worth whatever the furries add to your sourcebook and novel?
The same fellow approved the T5SS data too.
If you need furries IYTU put furries IYTU. There's no need to create another IRIS some future product will need to explain away.
Well, thanks for the kind words about the work I've done previously.
Look, I understand that you think that the Ursa are unnecessary, and that you disagree with decisions that were made during the writing of a campaign sourcebook. I even understand that we could have done it without putting two colonies closer to the Marches. I also understand that you might not get what in the novel-writing process brought the Ursa to my attention as characters that sort of insisted on development (with so many vagabonds to choose from, why THEM, you could well ask -- and the simplest answer is "read it when we get it out").
I didn't go into either the sourcebook or the novel with a bear agenda. In the earlier case, as I have always lightly pointed out, discussions with credited collaborators led me to a bit of lightness. Now, I could throw Craig under the bus because HE actually created those characters, dice-and-pencil, with no more direction than, "One can be a craftsman and the other a scholar, but stereotypical unicycles MUST be involved." But that would be unfair -- because he added touches that made them interesting.
As for the novel -- well, it's mostly a prequel, and I looked at where the chess pieces were on the board as I wrote snippets of the invasion and war. And the Ursa were positioned to represent something we rarely see in space opera OR Traveller -- the war refugee. Now, I don't OWE you that explanation, but you want to be critical, and I think you should be critical AFTER you have some idea of what is there. Otherwise, you're just filtering this through your dislike of bears in space.
I could go through a very long list of why certain characters are who they are in Cirque. The Vargr is the Ringmaster because I fought the temptation to make a Vargr an animal trainer, but I wanted a Vargr. The Aslan female is a lawyer -- and hails from an Aslan enclave within the Marches -- because there was LOTS of precedent. The tumblers are Aslan because Marc suggested it. ANdii is a double amputee for the reason I gave in the sourcebook -- I don't like war being sanitized and consequence-free in fiction, because it isn't in daily life.
OK, so you don't agree with every decision that was made, none of which contradicted canon, all of which was passed in front of Don, Marc, Craig, Rob, Jim, Andrea, etc. The bears apparently are a big old sore spot, as is my sometimes humorous touch on the issue.
Bottom line: I don't see how a couple of bears on fewer than 20 of 10,000 worlds, a few dogs, a few cats, the odd gill-man, the occasional lizard-man, all those nine-armed nasties and other such critters, scaly, slimy, furry, or bark-encrusted somehow DAMAGE the setting.
Really, just chill. There are two worlds in Corridor with Ursa mixed in -- and they aren't taking over the sector. As far as I can tell, they never travel to SPinward. Gabby and Roland are the only two who ever made it there, at least until someone ELSE decides they want a bear in a CT-Era campaign. For now, there are only TWO BEARS of in all of the Spinward Marches during the war period. The rest, as it turns out (because I say it here, and it is thus automatically accurate) are "conscies," conscientious objectors, and ALSO terrified of spacing. And you have every right to take those weak, simpering conscies out if you run Cirque.
Heck, you can nuke Shishkala from orbit just to get rid of the infestation if it bothers you such much.
But otherwise...more fuss than I think is needed.
