So, in a fantasy adventure, it's much easier to keep players in the dark and keep information away from them than perhaps in a more modern setting.
This statement is true.
You seem to see the statement as a contradiction what I typed. I don't think it is. Nowhere do I assume the PCs are going into utterly unknown territory.
The point of my post was this:
If the Referee plays in a subsector of his own creation, with the centralized government "back that way" [
jerk thumb over shoulder], there's no need to have detailed stacks of information about the Imperial lineage of the royal family going back six hundred years. Even if one is playing in the Spinward Marches, I suggest that most of information about the Imperium is moot if it doesn't affect the adventures at hand the PCs are adventuring through.
That was my point about the comparison to the OSR. You've misunderstood what I meant with the comparison. (Which is on me. I didn't go into detail.) Remember, I can go dig up fantasy setting books from the 80s and 90s thick with gazetteer-style setting info... and maybe .05% of that stuff will actually have any bearing on a bunch of PCs going into a dungeon. The OSR, as a design philosophy, is dumping useless encyclopedic books like that. The wisdom of some of the OSR publishers is that the setting material that matters is the setting material that PCs can interact with. And it's fine to have stuff that is about matters far afield from the haunted keep the PCs are exploring, but that
none of that matters until they interact with some broach or imprisoned relative or something in the keep that ties into that far afield bit of politics or whatnot. That's all. That was my point for bringing up the OSR.
Now, as for
secrecy...
I'm not advocating it. Things will be known. Of course. So let's take that off the table.
But let's talk about incomplete information:
There is a reason Basic
Traveller kicked off with the notion that communication worked at the speed of travel. In the implicit setting of Books 1-3 trade and travel are relatively rare and interstellar civilization has not taken full hold of the setting yet. (The "setting" being the subsector of play. The game assumes there is a well-developed interstellar community "back that way." But that is not the setting of play, per the rules in Books 1-3.)
The PCs with a Type A Trader are like packet boats in the Age of Sails, bringing news and communication to remote areas where trade does not exist. Note, please, that the PCs are contracted to deliver mail on every jump. The PCs' dinky ship is what folks are depending on to get communication out. (Vital Note: In LBBS 1-3 there is no X-Boat system. The 1981 edition of the rules establishes the concept of "Communication Routes." Which one can already assume exist from dedicated routes of travel for vital trade routes.)
Now, some people want to blow past these assumptions. That's fine. Some people find these assumptions intolerable. That's fined. I don't want to blow past these assumptions. I like them. I find them inspiring.
They are part of why I want to play the game.
My post was built from the default assumptions of LBB Books 1-3 -- and specifically Books 1-3, which are in many ways
very different in implicit and explicit assumptions about the setting.
So, we have worlds which are in some ways settled (by someone, each campaign is different), trade is rare, communication is rare, political connections between worlds is tenuous -- so tenuous as to require ties of feudal loyalty to keep any sort of interstellar government going. (And we all know how not-particulary-stable feudalism is.)
All of the above assumptions are from LBB 1-3. I extrapolate from them and find that the PCs will have information about that world they are traveling to. Awesome! But we're not sitting on a stack of internet forum arguments about how the Imperial council (located a year of travel away) conducts regular business. That's all. That's the point. The Imperial Council is "back that way." It's the thing the PCs got the hell away from.
Thus, the Referee is responsible for the data for
one subsector (maybe two), as the rules state clearly in the 1977 edition. That's about 40 worlds to kick off with. With the political and cultural elements easily contained and explained within those 80 hexes. Especially since, if using the rules from Books 1-3, the Referee is making up his own subsector. She isn't worrying about trying do dig through the logic of what someone else wrote and created. She's got a handle on her own setting because it is
hers.
It's all still relatively a "frontier."* If the Referee has done her job, it is ripe with adventure possibilities. That means subterfuge, deceit, secrets, changing tides of politics and power, and more. All of this means that the PCs get to interact with the environment, find out more about the environment, impact the environment, and get kicked in the head from the fall out of their actions and the actions of everyone else getting things done.
If a revolution is taking place on a world (and let's hope the PCs are blessed with chaotic situations taking place on the worlds they visit) the news will be at least one week old by the time anyone in another system hears about it. By the time PCs hear about it will will be one week two two months or more, depending on where they've been traveling in the subsector. In one week to two months time of a government's collapse or the start of a war or a terrorist attack on the construction of an A-Class Starport lots and lots of things will have happened. Who got the news out, what was the agenda, who shaped it, who carried it, what was withheld, what was unknown, what has changed since the news was sent out... these are all questions affect what anyone can know when they arrive in-system.
So, that's my thinking about any kind of "secrecy" issue.
But, again, that wasn't the focus of my original post. The original post was about:
a) the Referee
owning his own setting, per the original rules;
b) an emphasis of setting detail on a single subsector to kick off, rather getting caught up in buying a metric ton of setting books far afield from that subsector that have little relevance to the PCs in an adventure;
c) releasing background information through adventures (the PCs are going to a world? great, they get some info about the world as they Jump, and get more when they land and interact with the world);
d) that the setting, implicit in the rules, is still on some level
undeveloped, not static and safe, and still contains mysteries, crisis, power gaps, confusion, and other details that must still be sorted out by the NPCs and PCs alike.
I will repeat (and as I made clear in the opening sentence of my post): Some folks on this board don't want a
Traveller campaign to be like this. That's awesome! It's a toolkit! Make what you want of it!
I'm only talking about what I've extrapolated by building the implicit setting assumptions out from the rules of LBBs 1-3. And I like those assumptions. And since Books 1-3 are rare and paved over by the changes made in
The Traveller Book (a much more common version of Classic
Traveller), I'm pointing them out to folks who might have hit a wall with setting fatigue and setting bloat from the OTU.
* I'm not interested in arguing what sort of frontier we're talking about, nor the definition. I think it is clear from the context of my post my meaning.