(hypothetical) What would you ask Dave Nilsen?
- Thread starter hunter
- Start date
Dear Folks -
Back to the "questions for Dave": In his long editorial in Challenge #77 he mentions an "upcoming epic": a three-part campaign entitled Into the Belly of the Beast. It was going to take characters from the RC deep into Hiver space.
My question is: OK, sounds cool, NOW GIVE US THE GOSS on this campaign!!!
Back to the "questions for Dave": In his long editorial in Challenge #77 he mentions an "upcoming epic": a three-part campaign entitled Into the Belly of the Beast. It was going to take characters from the RC deep into Hiver space.
My question is: OK, sounds cool, NOW GIVE US THE GOSS on this campaign!!!
jchurchill
SOC-12
Quick Quiz:
99% of _ _____ _ give the rest a bad name.
a) Corporations
b) Lawyers
c) Advertisers
d) Politicians
================================================
(b) or the correct missing answer -- (d) All of the above.
99% of _ _____ _ give the rest a bad name.
a) Corporations
b) Lawyers
c) Advertisers
d) Politicians
================================================
(b) or the correct missing answer -- (d) All of the above.
Dreadnought
SOC-12
Okay, how the heck does this work?
Test, test, 1, 2, 3.
Ooh, what does that do?
Ouch!
Test, test, 1, 2, 3.
Ooh, what does that do?
Ouch!
Is that all there is to a message board?
Dreadnought
SOC-12
So, what happens if I change my name? Is it retroactive?
Dreadnought
SOC-12
But only if I post?
Dreadnought
SOC-12
Ah-oooga, ah-oooga, Nilsen surfacing.
19 November, 2004
Holy frijoles, it don’t rain, but it pours. No, I’ve not been lurking. About once or twice a year, when I’m really, really not safe to be around, I’ll do a Google search on my name. I did that once back on Feb 24 when I first discovered that there was, what, T20, QLI, 1248, MJD, whatever, and then walked away (more on that below), and again a few days ago when I came across the flame war that resulted from an attempt to “ask Dave Nilsen,” and then the actual attempt to make a flameproof list. Good luck with that, by the way.
Being nothing if not really stupid, I’ve done gone and responded to the first set of questions. I’m going to be performing in a ballet for the next couple days in addition to my other regular activities, so I might not be checking back in for a little bit.
(Okay, two and ½ weeks later, I’ve been waiting to hear back from Hunter based on someone’s theory that he might want to vet these answers to ensure they don’t impact 1248 in a way he doesn’t desire, but I haven’t heard from him, so what the heck. Oh yeah, the ballet went well, and the girls are still jazzed.)
A few observations at the outset.
In all cases, my replies will be based on the best recollection that I have. After all this time, with very little contact with the other GDW emeriti to reinforce these memories, some may have faded. In the interest of simply answering these questions, rather than digging out all of my old boxes of files and Macintosh computers and spending a couple of months publishing a book, I will stick with the best of my recollection. In some cases there may be gaps in my memory, or given the complexity of the circumstances surrounding decisions, I might not remember all of the inputs. However, I do not lie. I am not going to shade the truth or make up or selectively interpret anything to make myself look better or whitewash anything (as if that were necessary, which it ain’t). So please, if anyone wants to make suggestions along those lines, take it elsewhere.
However, I will make one caveat, along with an illustration. I have found that there is a great affinity between Traveller players and naval historians. So this should ring true with a number of you. You will recall that Chester Nimitz never wrote his memoirs. He did this deliberately, because he did not want to get involved in talking about personalities in ways that would be sure to stir up controversy and wind up harming reputations. I am going to borrow a page from his memoirs, so to speak, when it comes to discussing certain things. “People are people” as some of you remember, but concentrating on any of that inevitable stuff does no one credit. And Buckaroo Banzai is always right.
Here’s some background that may help you understand some of the larger issues. I arrived at GDW in October 1991. At that time we were still publishing MT, and DarkCon was still new. Space 1889 had just been discontinued. DGP had already by this time pulled out of supporting Traveller, and was moving over to AI, which ultimately turned out as the winding down of DGP and ultimate closing. Lester Smith was DarkCon line manager, Loren Wiseman was Twilight line manager, and I soon became Traveller line manager after we decided to pull the game back in house (not from DGP, but from another out-of-house developer). I was also the Harpoon in-house manager (I can’t remember what our name for that was). Frank Chadwick was president of course, and did some of everything, including boardgames, miniatures rules, and being involved in all RPG work as well. During this period the “Carpenter Project” was also underway, which emerged briefly as Dangerous Dimensions—uh, I mean Journeys. Following the painful death of DJ, Lester Smith went to TSR, and on his departure I became Chief of Design at GDW. That meant that I was in charge of making sure everything we did got coordinated properly through manuscript acceptance, design, development, text department, art department, etc. That also meant that I became the de facto line manager of anything that didn’t have a daddy. I worked on, managed, designed, developed, or edited 93 products in my 48 or 49 months at GDW. Some of them were Traveller products. While I was there, we were the last wargame company in existence whose staff didn’t have to have day jobs. I know I’m in a tiny, contemptible minority on this board for believing this, but until we got killed by the CCG dementia, I think we did a pretty good job.
One thing to bear in mind is the nature of working for a full-time game company which has deadlines and release dates to meet on a weekly basis. By the time I was there, we were driven by the comic book distribution industry, which was a pretty unforgiving system, with all of its presolicitations and lock-step ordering practices. Distributors and retailers would make purchasing decisions on the basis of the advance previews we had to write up, and agree to buy so many copies of a product based on its release on a certain date. If you missed that date, you would never get that money back; the buyers would simply reinvest that money in something else that was available that day. And when you finally got it out a little late, you would not recapture the original order numbers, because now it was competing for backlist dollars. So when we missed dates we lost money, and that meant people’s jobs and livelihoods. That doesn’t mean we rushed things out or did a crappy job to meet dates; we did not. We took pride in putting out the best products that we could, but there were non-negotiable deadlines, and it wasn’t Diamond’s concern if we were late. And frankly we were late fairly often (as everyone in the comics industry is) for the precise reason that we weren’t going to put out crap. You hear a lot of damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t talk like, “I don’t care if it’s late, I want it to be perfect,” and “what the hell’s the matter with you guys that you can’t get stuff out on time?” It wasn’t easy, but that was our job, and we did the best we could with the time and resources we had. Marc Miller has made the point somewhere that GDW put out a product every 22 days (on average) for 22 years, which is nothing to sneeze at.
On my first real day at GDW (I spent the previous day, a Sunday, helping playtest Sands of War), I sat down at my new desk with my first assignment. It was a manuscript called Hard Times, and it was due to the printer that day (actually it had been due a month earlier, but it got an extension). The rest, gentlemen and arsonists, is history.
Finally, I suspect that no one is going to be particularly pleased with any of this. It is the “is that all there is?” phenomenon. There were no vaults of almost-finished games and maps (well, I did have like a five-by-four foot map on my wall) and diagrams ready to come to life, otherwise we would have been able to publish them. There were ideas and intents and plans, but they were not yet written. It is in the writing that they take on real life. If Shakespeare had had to quit being a playwright before writing Romeo and Juliet and years later he was interviewed about what his idea was, “well, there are these two teenage kids who fall in love, but their families don’t get along. There’s a lot of cool swordfights, and one guy is really funny and sarcastic, but he dies, and they get married secretly, but then they get confused and accidentally commit suicide.” Wow, Will, good thing you got a new job, then. I’m not comparing myself to Shakespeare (well, I do have a beard, but I never did Gwyneth Paltrow, exactly), but I’m just saying, “is that all there is?” Also, none of these ideas would have made it into print exactly as described. The process of writing them down would have caused them to be modified as designers and writers collaborated on them, and allowed them to benefit from additional ideas generated since the earlier concepts were laid down. Game Designers Workshop was an actual workshop, in which a lot of people were involved in developing things. That might present a problem for some people, but I also know that a lot of people in 1977 believed that George Lucas had all nine movie scripts and all nine novels already written and in a vault. Neat.
I have no idea how any of this stuff compares to the 1248 book, as I have not read any of that material. However, to the extent that I have discussed fragments of that with MJD and members of the Traveller cult over the years, some of it may have filtered in.
19 November, 2004
Holy frijoles, it don’t rain, but it pours. No, I’ve not been lurking. About once or twice a year, when I’m really, really not safe to be around, I’ll do a Google search on my name. I did that once back on Feb 24 when I first discovered that there was, what, T20, QLI, 1248, MJD, whatever, and then walked away (more on that below), and again a few days ago when I came across the flame war that resulted from an attempt to “ask Dave Nilsen,” and then the actual attempt to make a flameproof list. Good luck with that, by the way.
Being nothing if not really stupid, I’ve done gone and responded to the first set of questions. I’m going to be performing in a ballet for the next couple days in addition to my other regular activities, so I might not be checking back in for a little bit.
(Okay, two and ½ weeks later, I’ve been waiting to hear back from Hunter based on someone’s theory that he might want to vet these answers to ensure they don’t impact 1248 in a way he doesn’t desire, but I haven’t heard from him, so what the heck. Oh yeah, the ballet went well, and the girls are still jazzed.)
A few observations at the outset.
In all cases, my replies will be based on the best recollection that I have. After all this time, with very little contact with the other GDW emeriti to reinforce these memories, some may have faded. In the interest of simply answering these questions, rather than digging out all of my old boxes of files and Macintosh computers and spending a couple of months publishing a book, I will stick with the best of my recollection. In some cases there may be gaps in my memory, or given the complexity of the circumstances surrounding decisions, I might not remember all of the inputs. However, I do not lie. I am not going to shade the truth or make up or selectively interpret anything to make myself look better or whitewash anything (as if that were necessary, which it ain’t). So please, if anyone wants to make suggestions along those lines, take it elsewhere.
However, I will make one caveat, along with an illustration. I have found that there is a great affinity between Traveller players and naval historians. So this should ring true with a number of you. You will recall that Chester Nimitz never wrote his memoirs. He did this deliberately, because he did not want to get involved in talking about personalities in ways that would be sure to stir up controversy and wind up harming reputations. I am going to borrow a page from his memoirs, so to speak, when it comes to discussing certain things. “People are people” as some of you remember, but concentrating on any of that inevitable stuff does no one credit. And Buckaroo Banzai is always right.
Here’s some background that may help you understand some of the larger issues. I arrived at GDW in October 1991. At that time we were still publishing MT, and DarkCon was still new. Space 1889 had just been discontinued. DGP had already by this time pulled out of supporting Traveller, and was moving over to AI, which ultimately turned out as the winding down of DGP and ultimate closing. Lester Smith was DarkCon line manager, Loren Wiseman was Twilight line manager, and I soon became Traveller line manager after we decided to pull the game back in house (not from DGP, but from another out-of-house developer). I was also the Harpoon in-house manager (I can’t remember what our name for that was). Frank Chadwick was president of course, and did some of everything, including boardgames, miniatures rules, and being involved in all RPG work as well. During this period the “Carpenter Project” was also underway, which emerged briefly as Dangerous Dimensions—uh, I mean Journeys. Following the painful death of DJ, Lester Smith went to TSR, and on his departure I became Chief of Design at GDW. That meant that I was in charge of making sure everything we did got coordinated properly through manuscript acceptance, design, development, text department, art department, etc. That also meant that I became the de facto line manager of anything that didn’t have a daddy. I worked on, managed, designed, developed, or edited 93 products in my 48 or 49 months at GDW. Some of them were Traveller products. While I was there, we were the last wargame company in existence whose staff didn’t have to have day jobs. I know I’m in a tiny, contemptible minority on this board for believing this, but until we got killed by the CCG dementia, I think we did a pretty good job.
One thing to bear in mind is the nature of working for a full-time game company which has deadlines and release dates to meet on a weekly basis. By the time I was there, we were driven by the comic book distribution industry, which was a pretty unforgiving system, with all of its presolicitations and lock-step ordering practices. Distributors and retailers would make purchasing decisions on the basis of the advance previews we had to write up, and agree to buy so many copies of a product based on its release on a certain date. If you missed that date, you would never get that money back; the buyers would simply reinvest that money in something else that was available that day. And when you finally got it out a little late, you would not recapture the original order numbers, because now it was competing for backlist dollars. So when we missed dates we lost money, and that meant people’s jobs and livelihoods. That doesn’t mean we rushed things out or did a crappy job to meet dates; we did not. We took pride in putting out the best products that we could, but there were non-negotiable deadlines, and it wasn’t Diamond’s concern if we were late. And frankly we were late fairly often (as everyone in the comics industry is) for the precise reason that we weren’t going to put out crap. You hear a lot of damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t talk like, “I don’t care if it’s late, I want it to be perfect,” and “what the hell’s the matter with you guys that you can’t get stuff out on time?” It wasn’t easy, but that was our job, and we did the best we could with the time and resources we had. Marc Miller has made the point somewhere that GDW put out a product every 22 days (on average) for 22 years, which is nothing to sneeze at.
On my first real day at GDW (I spent the previous day, a Sunday, helping playtest Sands of War), I sat down at my new desk with my first assignment. It was a manuscript called Hard Times, and it was due to the printer that day (actually it had been due a month earlier, but it got an extension). The rest, gentlemen and arsonists, is history.
Finally, I suspect that no one is going to be particularly pleased with any of this. It is the “is that all there is?” phenomenon. There were no vaults of almost-finished games and maps (well, I did have like a five-by-four foot map on my wall) and diagrams ready to come to life, otherwise we would have been able to publish them. There were ideas and intents and plans, but they were not yet written. It is in the writing that they take on real life. If Shakespeare had had to quit being a playwright before writing Romeo and Juliet and years later he was interviewed about what his idea was, “well, there are these two teenage kids who fall in love, but their families don’t get along. There’s a lot of cool swordfights, and one guy is really funny and sarcastic, but he dies, and they get married secretly, but then they get confused and accidentally commit suicide.” Wow, Will, good thing you got a new job, then. I’m not comparing myself to Shakespeare (well, I do have a beard, but I never did Gwyneth Paltrow, exactly), but I’m just saying, “is that all there is?” Also, none of these ideas would have made it into print exactly as described. The process of writing them down would have caused them to be modified as designers and writers collaborated on them, and allowed them to benefit from additional ideas generated since the earlier concepts were laid down. Game Designers Workshop was an actual workshop, in which a lot of people were involved in developing things. That might present a problem for some people, but I also know that a lot of people in 1977 believed that George Lucas had all nine movie scripts and all nine novels already written and in a vault. Neat.
I have no idea how any of this stuff compares to the 1248 book, as I have not read any of that material. However, to the extent that I have discussed fragments of that with MJD and members of the Traveller cult over the years, some of it may have filtered in.
Dreadnought
SOC-12
Q: How would you have resolved the Empress Wave?
We would not have had to “resolve” it for a while, as it would have only intruded into the campaign area gradually, and pretty slowly at that. The answer to “how would you have resolved it” has a few answers.
First the point of departure is that it would conceptually refine the relationship of Traveller’s psionics metaphysics with Traveller’s jumpspace metaphysics. Traveller’s psionic skills allow perception over planetary distances in real time, i.e., faster than the speed of light. In physical space, sensory information passes, at best, at C. Psionics in some way places the adept in contact with some medium in which simultaneity is in effect, and the adept is not just waiting for light waves or something else to reach him with their aging data patterns. Similarly, psionic teleperception does not rely on physical phenomena propagated between the observed object and the psionic observer. For example, clairaudience or clairvoyance can hear and see into a sound-proofed or EMS-impermeable room. Further, if a clairvoyant were watching the interior of the room, s/he would see the appearance of a teleported object in real time, not after the amount of time it would take the EMS signature of that object to travel to the clairvoyant at c. Clairvoyance and Clairaudience is not like a biologically-based EMS sensor, which magnifies and classifies light-speed signals which have arrived at the viewer. It is the ability to project some kind of camera or microphone at a distance and perceive the physical signals visible at that vantage point. It seems similar to teleportation except that only the visual or audio sense is teleported (or the eyesight or ears “tunnel through” supraspace to a point closer to the observed zone), rather than the individual. Finally, psionics or psionic devices also allow the seeing of future events.
Jumpspace similarly allowed travel faster than the speed of light (i.e., arrival at a point in the future, at least by the vantage point of light), by allowing entry into it for ~168 hours to allow you to move 1 parsec (J1 space) to 6 parsecs (J6 space). We also know that N space impinged into J space via gravity fields (the 100-diameter G-field causing J precipitation and preventing J insertion. It is therefore possible to imagine the different J# spaces to be similarly related to each other, so that penetration into J space could be thought of as a parabola on a graph. A J1 journey could be thought of as a shallow parabola that did not peak above above the “J1” value on the Y axis. A J6 journey could be thought of as a parabola with a much steeper entry into Jspace which peaked at the “J6” level. The inside of Jspace is a hostile environment for Nspace objects, which require the maintenance of a jump field around them in order to survive Jspace and come out intact after the ~168 hour “immersion.”
Unlike jump, however, psionic teleportation is instant, not ~168 hours. Nonetheless, the notion that Jspace and some psionic realtime space exist “next to” or “above” (hyper) each point in physical space is the same.
The Empress Wave concept was going to explore the relationship between psionic supraspace and Jspace as related phenomena along the same continuum.
So what exists in jumpspace? What happens to ships that misjump, or whose powerplants fail in Jspace and their jumpfields collapse? One of the answers the Empress Wave concept was going to advance was that some events in jumpspace, particularly unusual or catastrophic ones, have ripple effects, and psionic outcomes.
What exists in this psionic supraspace, through which clairvoyant “lines of sight” and teleporting persons pass? Do thoughts merely pass there, or do things settle out there? One of the ideas that the Empress Wave concept was going to advance was that there is consciousness that exists in psionic supraspace, either natively, or as a projection of psionic minds elsewhere, i.e., some of each.
What have all the Research Stations and Jumpspace Institutes been doing all these years? Working on the answers to those questions, of course.
We know that Traveller Jspace is related to gravitic phenomena, both into it and out from it. We know that the physical environment of the galactic core is significantly different from that of the disc, and that the differences of gravitational and radiation intensity may well cause Jspace-Nspace relations to be quite different under those conditions. Likewise psionic phenomena. We also know that the Zhodani have been fixated on the galactic core for thousands of years. There is something there that they are looking for, or rather an explanation to a phenomenon that is psionic in nature.
I know that a lot of your hard science guys don’t like psi, and ignore it in their campaigns to the extent possible, but it is interwoven through Traveller like crazy, but incompletely. It was my intent to regularize it, come up with some principles that would allow it to work better, in short, take it seriously enough to enhance its contribution to the game. You can see the seeds for that in the Lib Data and Refs Notes in RSB in places like point and meta intelligence, psionics, suprastuff, and military research into psi countermeasures, bandwidth, etc. I was looking forward to it, especially the graphs of hyperspace penetration. I kept wanting to take a couple days off and write the Challenge article, but there was never any time.
What the Empress Wave was going to do when it arrived at a place, was to open sentient beings up to a few different results.
Non-psions: no change
Non-psions: development of psionic powers
Non-psions: development of psionic powers with communication with supraspace intellect
Psions: no change
Psions: development of expanded or new psionic powers, initially difficult to understand or control
Psions: psionic powers damaged or burned out by “power surge”
Psions: killed outright by “power surge”
Psions: Various of above plus “possession” by supraspace intellect
The possibilities above would have been placed in two matrices. One for referees who wanted to deal with things randomly (and I would have provided random or pseudo-random characteristics to associate these results with, as Traveller had already established that psionic talent is not base on genetics), and one for referees who knew how they wanted they campaigns to develop, and wanted to be able to deliberately apply the results above, and have justifications to do so.
The wave is the physical manifestation in Nspace of an upheaval in Jspace/supraspace starting at or near the galactic core, or more specifically, the interface or “membrane” between Nspace and Jspace/supraspace. I had been thinking that it could be a variety of things from a gravity wave (if anyone ever decides the things actually exist) to simply an inferred wave because of the fact that the psionic events take place along a moving front. But I see that I described it as an EMS phenomenon. To the best of my knowledge, what I meant by that is that it is moving at the speed of light like an EMS (or gravity) wave. I don’t recall if the final answer would be that the wave would represent a one-time surge of energy that would expose access to new psionic possibilities, or that behind the wave would be a changed environment in which the membrane between Nspace and supraspace would be somewhat more permeable, evidenced by the presence of more psionic possibilities. Jspace physics would not be changed, but to the extent that Jspace and psionic supraspace were related, that supraspace would be “closer” to Nspace. (“I am Ozymandias, King of kings, look upon my works, ye mighty and despair…”)
The Nspace phenomenon was manifested as a surge of psionic energy whose result varied from individual to individual. It was maybe triggered by the Zhodani finally getting to the end of that Ancient gadget corridor they were exploring, or a natural periodic event that happens every few million years, or something, again, I don’t remember which way I was leaning.
What Crocker saw and implanted in Strephon’s mind was like a “test pattern” preceding the surge of energy. The listening posts went off the air because they were staffed heavily by psions and were most susceptible to the damaging effects. The visual image is conditioned upon race and culture. Zhodani would see something about the same, but Zhodani nobles who were aware of it would recognize the sceptre as that core-mapping Ancient widget. Vargr might see a big queen bitch asleep, nursing like 50 puppies at once or something (hyperbole).
Just the same way that psionic talents in humans seem capricious and don’t follow genetic lines, the above variable responses would be almost random, and come with a lot of guidance to referees on how to have it affect or not affect their campaigns as they preferred. There would also have been material on how the effects could be mitigated or prevented, by individuals or governments.
The proximate result of this is already seen in the Zhodani Consulate as far back as 1119 in the overturning of their psionic-based society, with nobles going nuts, being wiped out, and former proles suddenly getting powers, but being regarded with suspicion because of the way some of the nobles went nuts, etc. The very well-ordered Zhodani society would take this hard.
In the Regency the effect would be less, because society is not based on the distribution of psionic ability, and psionics, being in the open now, are less feared than previously.
The overall result would not be a sea-change of the fabric of the campaign background, but the introduction of new abilities. These abilities, if manifested in a PC in a roleplaying group that wanted such a thing, could make quite a difference in the feel of the TNE campaign. However, for an old-time hard-sf roleplaying group, the effects could mostly be, “Didja hear, they hauled away that psion down the street for going nuts?” “Yeah, well that’s what they get for being different.”
In game terms, it would take years for the new powers to become regularized and institutionalized. In addition, the majority of those radically affected and surviving would have made common cause with the exiled Star Vikings and headed off toward the Core to deal with the stuff there.
In the long term it might have allowed an alternative House System science fantasy game set decades or centuries in an alternate Traveller future where thinking starships and “psionic knights” are able to storm Castle Anthrax. However it would have had no such impact on the TNE campaign. I think I threw in a line about a psionic lance somewhere just as a reminder of that possibility. At one time we were considering a lot more House System milieus, and that was just one of many possibilities.
The notion of the possession included a lot of interesting impacts on roleplaying, including temporary control, short or long-term control, opposed control, cooperative control, etc. One of the challenges for players in dealing with data/consciousness from supraspace would be figuring out which was native and which was projections or echoes of things from Nspace so they would know best how to deal with it. And of course the “science” of understanding it would be developing as the plot line moved.
While no one really knew everything about the Empress wave, Strephon ensured that Avery had psionic abilities, was trained in all of the knowledge available, and this was the problem he was focused on. Avery would have returned with information on mitigation and extenuation.
Those were the rough ideas as I remember them (and honestly, I just now had to look up to see if Avery was a clone or not, I couldn’t remember the final decision, but certainly people were expected to wonder if he was), but like I said above, if a better idea came along that fit the concept, we’d have gone with it.
We would not have had to “resolve” it for a while, as it would have only intruded into the campaign area gradually, and pretty slowly at that. The answer to “how would you have resolved it” has a few answers.
First the point of departure is that it would conceptually refine the relationship of Traveller’s psionics metaphysics with Traveller’s jumpspace metaphysics. Traveller’s psionic skills allow perception over planetary distances in real time, i.e., faster than the speed of light. In physical space, sensory information passes, at best, at C. Psionics in some way places the adept in contact with some medium in which simultaneity is in effect, and the adept is not just waiting for light waves or something else to reach him with their aging data patterns. Similarly, psionic teleperception does not rely on physical phenomena propagated between the observed object and the psionic observer. For example, clairaudience or clairvoyance can hear and see into a sound-proofed or EMS-impermeable room. Further, if a clairvoyant were watching the interior of the room, s/he would see the appearance of a teleported object in real time, not after the amount of time it would take the EMS signature of that object to travel to the clairvoyant at c. Clairvoyance and Clairaudience is not like a biologically-based EMS sensor, which magnifies and classifies light-speed signals which have arrived at the viewer. It is the ability to project some kind of camera or microphone at a distance and perceive the physical signals visible at that vantage point. It seems similar to teleportation except that only the visual or audio sense is teleported (or the eyesight or ears “tunnel through” supraspace to a point closer to the observed zone), rather than the individual. Finally, psionics or psionic devices also allow the seeing of future events.
Jumpspace similarly allowed travel faster than the speed of light (i.e., arrival at a point in the future, at least by the vantage point of light), by allowing entry into it for ~168 hours to allow you to move 1 parsec (J1 space) to 6 parsecs (J6 space). We also know that N space impinged into J space via gravity fields (the 100-diameter G-field causing J precipitation and preventing J insertion. It is therefore possible to imagine the different J# spaces to be similarly related to each other, so that penetration into J space could be thought of as a parabola on a graph. A J1 journey could be thought of as a shallow parabola that did not peak above above the “J1” value on the Y axis. A J6 journey could be thought of as a parabola with a much steeper entry into Jspace which peaked at the “J6” level. The inside of Jspace is a hostile environment for Nspace objects, which require the maintenance of a jump field around them in order to survive Jspace and come out intact after the ~168 hour “immersion.”
Unlike jump, however, psionic teleportation is instant, not ~168 hours. Nonetheless, the notion that Jspace and some psionic realtime space exist “next to” or “above” (hyper) each point in physical space is the same.
The Empress Wave concept was going to explore the relationship between psionic supraspace and Jspace as related phenomena along the same continuum.
So what exists in jumpspace? What happens to ships that misjump, or whose powerplants fail in Jspace and their jumpfields collapse? One of the answers the Empress Wave concept was going to advance was that some events in jumpspace, particularly unusual or catastrophic ones, have ripple effects, and psionic outcomes.
What exists in this psionic supraspace, through which clairvoyant “lines of sight” and teleporting persons pass? Do thoughts merely pass there, or do things settle out there? One of the ideas that the Empress Wave concept was going to advance was that there is consciousness that exists in psionic supraspace, either natively, or as a projection of psionic minds elsewhere, i.e., some of each.
What have all the Research Stations and Jumpspace Institutes been doing all these years? Working on the answers to those questions, of course.
We know that Traveller Jspace is related to gravitic phenomena, both into it and out from it. We know that the physical environment of the galactic core is significantly different from that of the disc, and that the differences of gravitational and radiation intensity may well cause Jspace-Nspace relations to be quite different under those conditions. Likewise psionic phenomena. We also know that the Zhodani have been fixated on the galactic core for thousands of years. There is something there that they are looking for, or rather an explanation to a phenomenon that is psionic in nature.
I know that a lot of your hard science guys don’t like psi, and ignore it in their campaigns to the extent possible, but it is interwoven through Traveller like crazy, but incompletely. It was my intent to regularize it, come up with some principles that would allow it to work better, in short, take it seriously enough to enhance its contribution to the game. You can see the seeds for that in the Lib Data and Refs Notes in RSB in places like point and meta intelligence, psionics, suprastuff, and military research into psi countermeasures, bandwidth, etc. I was looking forward to it, especially the graphs of hyperspace penetration. I kept wanting to take a couple days off and write the Challenge article, but there was never any time.
What the Empress Wave was going to do when it arrived at a place, was to open sentient beings up to a few different results.
Non-psions: no change
Non-psions: development of psionic powers
Non-psions: development of psionic powers with communication with supraspace intellect
Psions: no change
Psions: development of expanded or new psionic powers, initially difficult to understand or control
Psions: psionic powers damaged or burned out by “power surge”
Psions: killed outright by “power surge”
Psions: Various of above plus “possession” by supraspace intellect
The possibilities above would have been placed in two matrices. One for referees who wanted to deal with things randomly (and I would have provided random or pseudo-random characteristics to associate these results with, as Traveller had already established that psionic talent is not base on genetics), and one for referees who knew how they wanted they campaigns to develop, and wanted to be able to deliberately apply the results above, and have justifications to do so.
The wave is the physical manifestation in Nspace of an upheaval in Jspace/supraspace starting at or near the galactic core, or more specifically, the interface or “membrane” between Nspace and Jspace/supraspace. I had been thinking that it could be a variety of things from a gravity wave (if anyone ever decides the things actually exist) to simply an inferred wave because of the fact that the psionic events take place along a moving front. But I see that I described it as an EMS phenomenon. To the best of my knowledge, what I meant by that is that it is moving at the speed of light like an EMS (or gravity) wave. I don’t recall if the final answer would be that the wave would represent a one-time surge of energy that would expose access to new psionic possibilities, or that behind the wave would be a changed environment in which the membrane between Nspace and supraspace would be somewhat more permeable, evidenced by the presence of more psionic possibilities. Jspace physics would not be changed, but to the extent that Jspace and psionic supraspace were related, that supraspace would be “closer” to Nspace. (“I am Ozymandias, King of kings, look upon my works, ye mighty and despair…”)
The Nspace phenomenon was manifested as a surge of psionic energy whose result varied from individual to individual. It was maybe triggered by the Zhodani finally getting to the end of that Ancient gadget corridor they were exploring, or a natural periodic event that happens every few million years, or something, again, I don’t remember which way I was leaning.
What Crocker saw and implanted in Strephon’s mind was like a “test pattern” preceding the surge of energy. The listening posts went off the air because they were staffed heavily by psions and were most susceptible to the damaging effects. The visual image is conditioned upon race and culture. Zhodani would see something about the same, but Zhodani nobles who were aware of it would recognize the sceptre as that core-mapping Ancient widget. Vargr might see a big queen bitch asleep, nursing like 50 puppies at once or something (hyperbole).
Just the same way that psionic talents in humans seem capricious and don’t follow genetic lines, the above variable responses would be almost random, and come with a lot of guidance to referees on how to have it affect or not affect their campaigns as they preferred. There would also have been material on how the effects could be mitigated or prevented, by individuals or governments.
The proximate result of this is already seen in the Zhodani Consulate as far back as 1119 in the overturning of their psionic-based society, with nobles going nuts, being wiped out, and former proles suddenly getting powers, but being regarded with suspicion because of the way some of the nobles went nuts, etc. The very well-ordered Zhodani society would take this hard.
In the Regency the effect would be less, because society is not based on the distribution of psionic ability, and psionics, being in the open now, are less feared than previously.
The overall result would not be a sea-change of the fabric of the campaign background, but the introduction of new abilities. These abilities, if manifested in a PC in a roleplaying group that wanted such a thing, could make quite a difference in the feel of the TNE campaign. However, for an old-time hard-sf roleplaying group, the effects could mostly be, “Didja hear, they hauled away that psion down the street for going nuts?” “Yeah, well that’s what they get for being different.”
In game terms, it would take years for the new powers to become regularized and institutionalized. In addition, the majority of those radically affected and surviving would have made common cause with the exiled Star Vikings and headed off toward the Core to deal with the stuff there.
In the long term it might have allowed an alternative House System science fantasy game set decades or centuries in an alternate Traveller future where thinking starships and “psionic knights” are able to storm Castle Anthrax. However it would have had no such impact on the TNE campaign. I think I threw in a line about a psionic lance somewhere just as a reminder of that possibility. At one time we were considering a lot more House System milieus, and that was just one of many possibilities.
The notion of the possession included a lot of interesting impacts on roleplaying, including temporary control, short or long-term control, opposed control, cooperative control, etc. One of the challenges for players in dealing with data/consciousness from supraspace would be figuring out which was native and which was projections or echoes of things from Nspace so they would know best how to deal with it. And of course the “science” of understanding it would be developing as the plot line moved.
While no one really knew everything about the Empress wave, Strephon ensured that Avery had psionic abilities, was trained in all of the knowledge available, and this was the problem he was focused on. Avery would have returned with information on mitigation and extenuation.
Those were the rough ideas as I remember them (and honestly, I just now had to look up to see if Avery was a clone or not, I couldn’t remember the final decision, but certainly people were expected to wonder if he was), but like I said above, if a better idea came along that fit the concept, we’d have gone with it.
Dreadnought
SOC-12
Q: What's inside the Black Curtain?
A nasty, creepy, sharp, spiky, cyber-icky civilization involving Virus and K’kree. If any of you bought the TNE T-shirt, those beetly-looking things with six legs are cyborged K’kree. Imagine the K’kree just as pissed-off as they’ve always been, but now they’re even more pissed off because they’ve been wired and chopped and channeled. These K’kree would not be contiguous to the old 2000 Worlds government, but their native militance, manifest destiny, and general grouchiness would be similar, although in the service of a different ethos. (And just as tasty to Ithklur. Oops, I’ve just pissed you off.)
The “Black Curtain” is a figurative phenomenon, not a physical one. It’s like a Black Hole where there is an event horizon which is the point/curve/radius at which no information (light) escapes. The “Black Curtain” simply means, “beyond this line, no one has ever come back to tell us what the heck is on the other side.”
The reason no one ever comes back is that the area controlled by this civilization is just so technically superior to anyone around that anyone who goes in is killed or captured. The ships are high-technology, and run by sentient computers/cyborged organic minds, as are the weapons, troops, etc. They just outclass anything they come up against. They would have the benefits of the research of the various weapons research projects that Lucan was always reported to be working on, which would include psionics, chemical/biological warfare, large-scale socio-psychological control, whatever. One of the weapons they would have is a logical application of the “meta identity” concept in which a consciousness can move from one host to another. They can implant a processing unit in an enemy, say by a projectile, which would allow a viral host to move itself or a copy of itself into a processing center that could control the target through rapidly-penetrating biochemical, bioelectrical, or simple coercive means (injectable poisons and a speaker system: “if you don’t do as I say, I’ll inject you again,” or “detonate this warhead in your chest”). Such persons could be rescued and surgically restored, but otherwise would be added to the Lucan labor pool.
Within the Black Curtain is a civilization completely run by intelligent machines, and which has made free use of a variety of cyborged concepts. Their shock troops are the cyborged K’kree, but they’ve also got cyborged humans and whatever else. Lucan is still there, cyborged and wired into the main control system on Capital. Why? Because everyone would want to know, “where’s Lucan? What happened to Lucan?” Easiest answer is he’s still there. If you don’t have him in there in some fashion it’s just sort of anticlimactic, and it’s another piece of continuity. I believe he was going to be so corrupted by being sliced and diced and/or anagathics that it might not even be possible to tell if it was really him or a virus intelligence taking on his persona, and I think he was going to have had multiple presences in multiple bodies that could move from one locus to the next, and take over new bodies as described above.
Bear in mind that the concept of the Black Curtain requires someone to be trying to look inside. Before the RC and Regency meet each other nearby, there are precious few trying, so the only notion of the Black Curtain is rumor from Guild ships, free traders, pocket empires, etc. Then as the Regency and RC come up against it, they start to see ships disappearing. Eventually they try harder and trigger a response from the Black Curtain, and the forces behind that “event horizon” burst out and attack the Regency and RC forces.
It is the RC’s “tame” virus ships and Ithklur allies that enable them to withstand this onslaught, along with new, improved, psionic weapons and powers from the Regency, plus the usual good old desperate fights.
Somewhere in here, in order to defeat the virus Lucan force, the “Star Vikings” end up having to commit some big atrocity, I don’t remember what. While this does end the Black Curtain threat, it so destroys their ability to work productively with other human factions that the remaining leaders and those identified closely with the acts choose to join with Avery’s forces and head for the galactic core. I say “Star Vikings” because that doesn’t mean every inhabitant of the RC worlds, or all of the members of the RCES, just those who got branded with the act, and had to bear the guilt away to allow those left behind to reconcile and build a future.
I seem to recall writing some “Why didn’t Maggart tell us it was going to end like this?” soundbites, but don’t know if they ever got published. I suspect they did not, but I can’t prove it.
And again, by the time we got there, we would have maybe gone a different direction. So you gotta write those soundbites kinda open-ended.
A nasty, creepy, sharp, spiky, cyber-icky civilization involving Virus and K’kree. If any of you bought the TNE T-shirt, those beetly-looking things with six legs are cyborged K’kree. Imagine the K’kree just as pissed-off as they’ve always been, but now they’re even more pissed off because they’ve been wired and chopped and channeled. These K’kree would not be contiguous to the old 2000 Worlds government, but their native militance, manifest destiny, and general grouchiness would be similar, although in the service of a different ethos. (And just as tasty to Ithklur. Oops, I’ve just pissed you off.)
The “Black Curtain” is a figurative phenomenon, not a physical one. It’s like a Black Hole where there is an event horizon which is the point/curve/radius at which no information (light) escapes. The “Black Curtain” simply means, “beyond this line, no one has ever come back to tell us what the heck is on the other side.”
The reason no one ever comes back is that the area controlled by this civilization is just so technically superior to anyone around that anyone who goes in is killed or captured. The ships are high-technology, and run by sentient computers/cyborged organic minds, as are the weapons, troops, etc. They just outclass anything they come up against. They would have the benefits of the research of the various weapons research projects that Lucan was always reported to be working on, which would include psionics, chemical/biological warfare, large-scale socio-psychological control, whatever. One of the weapons they would have is a logical application of the “meta identity” concept in which a consciousness can move from one host to another. They can implant a processing unit in an enemy, say by a projectile, which would allow a viral host to move itself or a copy of itself into a processing center that could control the target through rapidly-penetrating biochemical, bioelectrical, or simple coercive means (injectable poisons and a speaker system: “if you don’t do as I say, I’ll inject you again,” or “detonate this warhead in your chest”). Such persons could be rescued and surgically restored, but otherwise would be added to the Lucan labor pool.
Within the Black Curtain is a civilization completely run by intelligent machines, and which has made free use of a variety of cyborged concepts. Their shock troops are the cyborged K’kree, but they’ve also got cyborged humans and whatever else. Lucan is still there, cyborged and wired into the main control system on Capital. Why? Because everyone would want to know, “where’s Lucan? What happened to Lucan?” Easiest answer is he’s still there. If you don’t have him in there in some fashion it’s just sort of anticlimactic, and it’s another piece of continuity. I believe he was going to be so corrupted by being sliced and diced and/or anagathics that it might not even be possible to tell if it was really him or a virus intelligence taking on his persona, and I think he was going to have had multiple presences in multiple bodies that could move from one locus to the next, and take over new bodies as described above.
Bear in mind that the concept of the Black Curtain requires someone to be trying to look inside. Before the RC and Regency meet each other nearby, there are precious few trying, so the only notion of the Black Curtain is rumor from Guild ships, free traders, pocket empires, etc. Then as the Regency and RC come up against it, they start to see ships disappearing. Eventually they try harder and trigger a response from the Black Curtain, and the forces behind that “event horizon” burst out and attack the Regency and RC forces.
It is the RC’s “tame” virus ships and Ithklur allies that enable them to withstand this onslaught, along with new, improved, psionic weapons and powers from the Regency, plus the usual good old desperate fights.
Somewhere in here, in order to defeat the virus Lucan force, the “Star Vikings” end up having to commit some big atrocity, I don’t remember what. While this does end the Black Curtain threat, it so destroys their ability to work productively with other human factions that the remaining leaders and those identified closely with the acts choose to join with Avery’s forces and head for the galactic core. I say “Star Vikings” because that doesn’t mean every inhabitant of the RC worlds, or all of the members of the RCES, just those who got branded with the act, and had to bear the guilt away to allow those left behind to reconcile and build a future.
I seem to recall writing some “Why didn’t Maggart tell us it was going to end like this?” soundbites, but don’t know if they ever got published. I suspect they did not, but I can’t prove it.
And again, by the time we got there, we would have maybe gone a different direction. So you gotta write those soundbites kinda open-ended.
Dreadnought
SOC-12
Q: Other than the Hivers, the RC, and the Regency, were there any other islands of civilization?
A: Yes. There were all of the “pocket empires” we left room for, including the Covenant of Suffren, Solee, the Virus-run consortium in Diaspora, Earth, and probably some other things I’m not remembering right now.
Oh yeah, the Zhodani Consulate. I think there was gonna be some Aslan fragments as well.
The Black Curtain was civilization of a sort as well, but I’m thinking you mean “nice civilization.”
The Ben & Jerry’s planet. Idunno.
Q: Were there any plans for a fourth Imperium?
A: Nes and Yo. The ultimate civilization that would have resulted from the blending of the Regency, pocket empires, and RC, as baked by Black Curtain explosion, etc., would probably have eventually been called a 4th Imperium, if only because people (fictional people in the milieu, not gamers) are not very original and like traditional sorts of things. This would have provided opportunity for RC-philes to say, “hell no, no more Imperia!” and Regency-philes to say, “hell yes, you Viking bastards,” etc., but eventually that stuff would have been blunted when the Vikings headed off to coreward, because mostly people would just want there to be some polity, the name being 99% irrelevant. We had no plans during the period of the story arc to call the new polity by any particular name. Just playing out the movement of RC and Regency toward each other would have taken a year or two, the explosion of the Black Curtain another year or so after than, the aftermath another year or so, and so on and so on.
And when I say, “a year or so,” I don’t mean planned out in actual releases with dates, I just mean practical considerations of putting out TNE products alongside Twilight 2KV2.2 products, alongside Dark Conspiracy 2d Edition, Command Decision products, Volley & Bayonet, Harpoon, Armor 21, 2300AD using the House System, etc., etc.
A: Children of Earth was developed by Harold Hale with the idea that it could be used officially, and submitted it to us. I was very impressed with the work he put into it, but didn’t know that it would fit that well with where we were trying to go. For example, the polity was pretty large, pretty powerful, and pretty militant, so it would have clashed too much with the RC (and maybe even outclassed it), and distracted from where we wanted to go, which was RC and Regency meeting near the Black Curtain. A clash between CoE and RC would probably have pulled the arc in a whole different direction. In the end, Frank drew the assignment for the Guilded Lily epic adventure, which was going to end up with the PCs meeting an expedition from Terra, so he had to make the call on what Terra would look like. Frank’s intent was for something more like a 2d Terran Confederation, so that’s what he went with, and Children of Earth was not used.
It eventually got published by a guy who picked up one of Marc’s fanzine licenses. He’s the same guy (the guy with the ‘zine, not Harold Hale) that called us up one day and said he was going to publish various official sourcebooks on the basis of the fanzine license. But that’s a whole ‘nother damn thing.
“Candles Against the Night” sounds familiar, but I don’t recall it. Please refresh my memory.
Q2: Is it possible that the Black Curtain would undertake an expansion?
A: Yes, it is, and that was the intention. As the RC and Regency were about to come to blows over their differences in the vision of the future (Regency would not like RC using the “tame” AI/Virus ships, RC would rankle under the notion that the Regency was restoring the rightful Imperium, etc.), the Black Curtain would “explode” as described above.
In fact, it probably was already expanding, as the Black Curtain is only noticed when you come up to it and realize that no one comes back from beyond a certain point. It is likely that that radius was moving outwards as the first explorers noticed that no one was coming back from a certain direction.
A: Yes. There were all of the “pocket empires” we left room for, including the Covenant of Suffren, Solee, the Virus-run consortium in Diaspora, Earth, and probably some other things I’m not remembering right now.
Oh yeah, the Zhodani Consulate. I think there was gonna be some Aslan fragments as well.
The Black Curtain was civilization of a sort as well, but I’m thinking you mean “nice civilization.”
The Ben & Jerry’s planet. Idunno.
Q: Were there any plans for a fourth Imperium?
A: Nes and Yo. The ultimate civilization that would have resulted from the blending of the Regency, pocket empires, and RC, as baked by Black Curtain explosion, etc., would probably have eventually been called a 4th Imperium, if only because people (fictional people in the milieu, not gamers) are not very original and like traditional sorts of things. This would have provided opportunity for RC-philes to say, “hell no, no more Imperia!” and Regency-philes to say, “hell yes, you Viking bastards,” etc., but eventually that stuff would have been blunted when the Vikings headed off to coreward, because mostly people would just want there to be some polity, the name being 99% irrelevant. We had no plans during the period of the story arc to call the new polity by any particular name. Just playing out the movement of RC and Regency toward each other would have taken a year or two, the explosion of the Black Curtain another year or so after than, the aftermath another year or so, and so on and so on.
And when I say, “a year or so,” I don’t mean planned out in actual releases with dates, I just mean practical considerations of putting out TNE products alongside Twilight 2KV2.2 products, alongside Dark Conspiracy 2d Edition, Command Decision products, Volley & Bayonet, Harpoon, Armor 21, 2300AD using the House System, etc., etc.
Q1: How were the various fan based efforts eg. Children of Earth or Candles Against the Night fit into the scheme of the unfolding universe of the New Era?
A: Children of Earth was developed by Harold Hale with the idea that it could be used officially, and submitted it to us. I was very impressed with the work he put into it, but didn’t know that it would fit that well with where we were trying to go. For example, the polity was pretty large, pretty powerful, and pretty militant, so it would have clashed too much with the RC (and maybe even outclassed it), and distracted from where we wanted to go, which was RC and Regency meeting near the Black Curtain. A clash between CoE and RC would probably have pulled the arc in a whole different direction. In the end, Frank drew the assignment for the Guilded Lily epic adventure, which was going to end up with the PCs meeting an expedition from Terra, so he had to make the call on what Terra would look like. Frank’s intent was for something more like a 2d Terran Confederation, so that’s what he went with, and Children of Earth was not used.
It eventually got published by a guy who picked up one of Marc’s fanzine licenses. He’s the same guy (the guy with the ‘zine, not Harold Hale) that called us up one day and said he was going to publish various official sourcebooks on the basis of the fanzine license. But that’s a whole ‘nother damn thing.
“Candles Against the Night” sounds familiar, but I don’t recall it. Please refresh my memory.
Q2: Is it possible that the Black Curtain would undertake an expansion?
A: Yes, it is, and that was the intention. As the RC and Regency were about to come to blows over their differences in the vision of the future (Regency would not like RC using the “tame” AI/Virus ships, RC would rankle under the notion that the Regency was restoring the rightful Imperium, etc.), the Black Curtain would “explode” as described above.
In fact, it probably was already expanding, as the Black Curtain is only noticed when you come up to it and realize that no one comes back from beyond a certain point. It is likely that that radius was moving outwards as the first explorers noticed that no one was coming back from a certain direction.
Dreadnought
SOC-12
Q3: Why make the Regency so omnipotent for what in most of Traveller was a Provincial backwater?
A: I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “so omnipotent,” but I’ll take a stab at it.
If what you mean is why did we make it so important in the campaign, it’s because it was the oldest established campaign setting in Traveller, and one which had been continually developed over time. Making it one of the major players in TNE meant that players who loved that area could still play there, and it would continue to survive over time.
Q4: Did he ever see proofs or outlines of the Brunette novels, if so what was the third one to include?
A: Yes, I edited and proofread both of the two published novels, and I believe I actually read the initial submissions and approved them for publication. As I recall I was going to edit the Brunette line, and Frank was going to edit another series of novels written by a pair of guys from Britain, but that fell through somehow.
The third novel was going to involve some mission to recover a lost expedition that included one of Maggart’s daughters. So I think Maggart was going to feature in it as well one or both of his daughters. Naturally when GDW went down, this didn’t happen.
When I was working for the Armor Center in 1996 I got a cell phone call from Paul Brunette to tell me that our old printers were wanting to finish the trilogy, and asked me if I would be interested in editing it. At the moment he called I was driving on Eisenhower avenue, just coming up to the railroad viaduct, and was late for a meeting with the Division of Training and Doctrine Development. My cellphone was running out of battery power, and I was trying to call the guys in the meeting to tell them I was running late when the phone rang, or something like that. I was a little curt with him. As I was telling him to hurry up because my batteries were running out, either my batteries ran out, or I got off the phone with him and tried to call my meeting, and then my batteries ran out. Something like that. I never heard back from him after that. I felt bad about the way the conversation went, but he never called back so I could make it right. I didn’t have his number, I was busy as hell, he never called back, etc. So yes, I’m also the guy who killed the Brunette trilogy of novels, in case anyone wants another reason to crucify me.
Q5: What role did the Guild play in the Wilds beyond the RC Area of Operations? Were they the last vestiges of civilization or just a local mafia that grown powerful due to their access to Starships?
A: The Guild was to be more than a local mafia. It was to have loose connections through large areas of the wilds, and allow access to them, were one of a mind to try to hook up with them.
Logically, the Guild was both. It was a last vestige of civilization by virtue of the fact that they had some of the few starships left, but it was also a mafia.
A: I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “so omnipotent,” but I’ll take a stab at it.
If what you mean is why did we make it so important in the campaign, it’s because it was the oldest established campaign setting in Traveller, and one which had been continually developed over time. Making it one of the major players in TNE meant that players who loved that area could still play there, and it would continue to survive over time.
Q4: Did he ever see proofs or outlines of the Brunette novels, if so what was the third one to include?
A: Yes, I edited and proofread both of the two published novels, and I believe I actually read the initial submissions and approved them for publication. As I recall I was going to edit the Brunette line, and Frank was going to edit another series of novels written by a pair of guys from Britain, but that fell through somehow.
The third novel was going to involve some mission to recover a lost expedition that included one of Maggart’s daughters. So I think Maggart was going to feature in it as well one or both of his daughters. Naturally when GDW went down, this didn’t happen.
When I was working for the Armor Center in 1996 I got a cell phone call from Paul Brunette to tell me that our old printers were wanting to finish the trilogy, and asked me if I would be interested in editing it. At the moment he called I was driving on Eisenhower avenue, just coming up to the railroad viaduct, and was late for a meeting with the Division of Training and Doctrine Development. My cellphone was running out of battery power, and I was trying to call the guys in the meeting to tell them I was running late when the phone rang, or something like that. I was a little curt with him. As I was telling him to hurry up because my batteries were running out, either my batteries ran out, or I got off the phone with him and tried to call my meeting, and then my batteries ran out. Something like that. I never heard back from him after that. I felt bad about the way the conversation went, but he never called back so I could make it right. I didn’t have his number, I was busy as hell, he never called back, etc. So yes, I’m also the guy who killed the Brunette trilogy of novels, in case anyone wants another reason to crucify me.
Q5: What role did the Guild play in the Wilds beyond the RC Area of Operations? Were they the last vestiges of civilization or just a local mafia that grown powerful due to their access to Starships?
A: The Guild was to be more than a local mafia. It was to have loose connections through large areas of the wilds, and allow access to them, were one of a mind to try to hook up with them.
Logically, the Guild was both. It was a last vestige of civilization by virtue of the fact that they had some of the few starships left, but it was also a mafia.
Dreadnought
SOC-12
Q6: What became of Lucan? (I know MJD's answer but would be interested in Dave's
A: Discussed above. See? When people ask, it’s so much better to be able to say, “he’s still around, mad as a hatter, and in charge of surly computers,” rather than, “nobody knows. We’re pretty sure he’s dead, and someone found some dental remains that look promising.”
By the way, I don’t know MJD’s answer, so I’m not prejudiced.
Q7: What about Grandfather and the whole Ancients story arc in TNE? Were the Droyne left finally to grow up?
A: To the extent possible, we were going to leave that one be. It was true, it really happened, but they were not planned to be THE motivating force behind any particular plot element. There might be Droyne working for Lucan, but the Black Curtain is not the Droyne Empire, for example.
Q8. Was there any thought of linking the multiple games that GDW produced into a coherent universe but one with shattered dimensions operating with different assumptions? For example, linking Traveller with Dark Conspiracy or having the French Peace of T2000 result in a Near Earth Campaign for 2300AD?
There was some talk of stuff like that with the last two DC books, Empathic and Protodimensions Sourcebooks. I feel like in those books (both of which I was supervising, although I kept my name as far down on the credits list as possible) we were finally starting to get a handle on what we should have been doing with the line, which up till then had been kind of all over the place. (That’s not a criticism of anyone, but simply an observation on the fact that it seemed like 1990s culture was catching up to DC a little bit after DC had peaked) Unfortunately, the decision had already been made that we were abandoning DarkCon support, and those would be the last two. The idea was that with these protodimension things, we could do anything. And as we did the Empathy SB, we realized that we may could have let the Traveller psionics rules have a little more to do.
But then we figured that the Traveller players would kill us (you know you would, admit it) for corrupting Traveller by letting creepy-crawlies into Charted Space from protodimensions, and it would look too much like an attempt to redo Dangerous Dimensions, or GURPS, or whatever, and our desire was never to do that, but simply to have game lines with a common rule set so that you could reuse material in different universes, and we could more easily maintain them.
So let me state this definitively: No, the Empress Wave was not about letting DarkCon into the Traveller universe. PeeWee Herman, maybe, no, just kidding. Kids in the Hall, maybe, no, still just kidding. Howard Dean….
Then of course, after we did T2KV2.2 and X-Files became such a hit and everyone said DarkCon was the perfect X-Files RPG, we redid the DarkCon rules into the House System. They never got published, obviously, although I think I’ve still got them on disk somewhere.
Q9: What motivated you as a designer to destroy/explode everything in the Imperial Campaign rather opt for a slower implosion...Hard Times resulting in stagnation aka Wounded Colossus-type scenario.
To get it over with and start over. Everyone already hated MT to death for all the errata and lack of support, hated the Rebellion campaign for all of its clear indirection and stasis. (We used to get letters and messages on the boards like, “You need to make a new version of Traveller which isn’t all screwed up and full of errata like MegaTraveller is, but since you’re the guys who put MegaTraveller out, you can’t be trusted to do a better version anyway.”) When I arrived at GDW there was a plan in hand to have all new Traveller stuff developed out-of-house, and the story arc was as you describe: Hard Times to Harder Times, to Arthritis Time, to Paralysis Times, to Rigor Mortis Times, and then somehow climb back out. The whole point was that since people already seemed intensely dissatisfied with what we had, the answer was not to wind it down slower, but to fast forward to the bottom-out point, where everything after that was moving up. Either that, or pretend none of it happened.*
Also, we were getting a lot of input from people (I think distributors and shop owners, I don’t recall for sure, but Frank was the president of GAMA during much of this period, so he got a lot of gouge from a lot of people all of the time) that one of the major problems with Traveller was that it was just “too much.” Too much history, too much background, too much history, too much canon (which I don’t know if anyone realizes this, but that term originated as an aspersion, in the purely ecclesiastical sense). New players were intimidated by the game and wouldn’t pick it up because they couldn’t figure all that stuff out. They were picking up FASA stuff because it was a simple back-of-the-envelope concept, and off you go. So there was an impetus for an easier game with not as much required background homework.
But then you had the long-time players, who loved the background continuity. You couldn’t just take it all away from them** by starting some new simplified version of the game with no background. And guess what? We as GDW were the long-time players who loved that stuff. But we had to find a way to keep the background stuff, but to also open it up, and make it new, to attract new players to help the game grow, which would also benefit the long-time players because the game would keep growing and keep spawning new content, based on that same core reality that they loved.
So we tried to hit upon a balance: an environment where all that history was still there, was still true, but that it wasn’t as important for a new player to learn it all, because the field was wide open. Such new players could play RC campaigns. Older players who wanted to retain the continuity could play in pocket empires or the Regency, or be remnants in an RC campaign, telling the new guys what it was like in the old days, back when fusion power was cheap, antigravity was everywhere, and flying sheep were scared.
And not just me as an individual designer, GDW as an entire design staff. That’s what made sense to us. You may have heard that some people on mailing lists, BBSs, or message boards disagree. What can I say? Everywhere you go….
* And also part of this calculus is that if it all wound down and then started back up again, you’d be back to the same problem in the Rebellion: too many separate campaign cores that would have to be detailed for players. I count nine separate factional “safes” (to use the Hard Times term): Norris/Spinward Marches, Strephon/Gushemege, Dumbassinor/Ilelish, Vilani/Vland, Lucan/Core, Craig/Daibei, “I Am Not a Lizard”/Antares, Margaret/Delphi, and Solomani/Terra. That would have required nine different sourcebooks, and a few years to get to them all, and the whole time players would have been begging for their own favorite to be published. That was not going to be possible. So we elected to have one “safe,” the Regency, stand in for all of the ex-Imperium. We would not have been able to get to everything otherwise, and that would not have been a very supportive decision to the players, and we genuinely gave a damn about that.
** Some will say that we did, by “blowing it up.” However, we always felt that blowing it up was not the same as retconning it out of the campaign. George Washington is still part of American life, even though he’s been dead for a couple hundred years.
A: Discussed above. See? When people ask, it’s so much better to be able to say, “he’s still around, mad as a hatter, and in charge of surly computers,” rather than, “nobody knows. We’re pretty sure he’s dead, and someone found some dental remains that look promising.”
By the way, I don’t know MJD’s answer, so I’m not prejudiced.
Q7: What about Grandfather and the whole Ancients story arc in TNE? Were the Droyne left finally to grow up?
A: To the extent possible, we were going to leave that one be. It was true, it really happened, but they were not planned to be THE motivating force behind any particular plot element. There might be Droyne working for Lucan, but the Black Curtain is not the Droyne Empire, for example.
Q8. Was there any thought of linking the multiple games that GDW produced into a coherent universe but one with shattered dimensions operating with different assumptions? For example, linking Traveller with Dark Conspiracy or having the French Peace of T2000 result in a Near Earth Campaign for 2300AD?
There was some talk of stuff like that with the last two DC books, Empathic and Protodimensions Sourcebooks. I feel like in those books (both of which I was supervising, although I kept my name as far down on the credits list as possible) we were finally starting to get a handle on what we should have been doing with the line, which up till then had been kind of all over the place. (That’s not a criticism of anyone, but simply an observation on the fact that it seemed like 1990s culture was catching up to DC a little bit after DC had peaked) Unfortunately, the decision had already been made that we were abandoning DarkCon support, and those would be the last two. The idea was that with these protodimension things, we could do anything. And as we did the Empathy SB, we realized that we may could have let the Traveller psionics rules have a little more to do.
But then we figured that the Traveller players would kill us (you know you would, admit it) for corrupting Traveller by letting creepy-crawlies into Charted Space from protodimensions, and it would look too much like an attempt to redo Dangerous Dimensions, or GURPS, or whatever, and our desire was never to do that, but simply to have game lines with a common rule set so that you could reuse material in different universes, and we could more easily maintain them.
So let me state this definitively: No, the Empress Wave was not about letting DarkCon into the Traveller universe. PeeWee Herman, maybe, no, just kidding. Kids in the Hall, maybe, no, still just kidding. Howard Dean….
Then of course, after we did T2KV2.2 and X-Files became such a hit and everyone said DarkCon was the perfect X-Files RPG, we redid the DarkCon rules into the House System. They never got published, obviously, although I think I’ve still got them on disk somewhere.
Q9: What motivated you as a designer to destroy/explode everything in the Imperial Campaign rather opt for a slower implosion...Hard Times resulting in stagnation aka Wounded Colossus-type scenario.
To get it over with and start over. Everyone already hated MT to death for all the errata and lack of support, hated the Rebellion campaign for all of its clear indirection and stasis. (We used to get letters and messages on the boards like, “You need to make a new version of Traveller which isn’t all screwed up and full of errata like MegaTraveller is, but since you’re the guys who put MegaTraveller out, you can’t be trusted to do a better version anyway.”) When I arrived at GDW there was a plan in hand to have all new Traveller stuff developed out-of-house, and the story arc was as you describe: Hard Times to Harder Times, to Arthritis Time, to Paralysis Times, to Rigor Mortis Times, and then somehow climb back out. The whole point was that since people already seemed intensely dissatisfied with what we had, the answer was not to wind it down slower, but to fast forward to the bottom-out point, where everything after that was moving up. Either that, or pretend none of it happened.*
Also, we were getting a lot of input from people (I think distributors and shop owners, I don’t recall for sure, but Frank was the president of GAMA during much of this period, so he got a lot of gouge from a lot of people all of the time) that one of the major problems with Traveller was that it was just “too much.” Too much history, too much background, too much history, too much canon (which I don’t know if anyone realizes this, but that term originated as an aspersion, in the purely ecclesiastical sense). New players were intimidated by the game and wouldn’t pick it up because they couldn’t figure all that stuff out. They were picking up FASA stuff because it was a simple back-of-the-envelope concept, and off you go. So there was an impetus for an easier game with not as much required background homework.
But then you had the long-time players, who loved the background continuity. You couldn’t just take it all away from them** by starting some new simplified version of the game with no background. And guess what? We as GDW were the long-time players who loved that stuff. But we had to find a way to keep the background stuff, but to also open it up, and make it new, to attract new players to help the game grow, which would also benefit the long-time players because the game would keep growing and keep spawning new content, based on that same core reality that they loved.
So we tried to hit upon a balance: an environment where all that history was still there, was still true, but that it wasn’t as important for a new player to learn it all, because the field was wide open. Such new players could play RC campaigns. Older players who wanted to retain the continuity could play in pocket empires or the Regency, or be remnants in an RC campaign, telling the new guys what it was like in the old days, back when fusion power was cheap, antigravity was everywhere, and flying sheep were scared.
And not just me as an individual designer, GDW as an entire design staff. That’s what made sense to us. You may have heard that some people on mailing lists, BBSs, or message boards disagree. What can I say? Everywhere you go….
* And also part of this calculus is that if it all wound down and then started back up again, you’d be back to the same problem in the Rebellion: too many separate campaign cores that would have to be detailed for players. I count nine separate factional “safes” (to use the Hard Times term): Norris/Spinward Marches, Strephon/Gushemege, Dumbassinor/Ilelish, Vilani/Vland, Lucan/Core, Craig/Daibei, “I Am Not a Lizard”/Antares, Margaret/Delphi, and Solomani/Terra. That would have required nine different sourcebooks, and a few years to get to them all, and the whole time players would have been begging for their own favorite to be published. That was not going to be possible. So we elected to have one “safe,” the Regency, stand in for all of the ex-Imperium. We would not have been able to get to everything otherwise, and that would not have been a very supportive decision to the players, and we genuinely gave a damn about that.
** Some will say that we did, by “blowing it up.” However, we always felt that blowing it up was not the same as retconning it out of the campaign. George Washington is still part of American life, even though he’s been dead for a couple hundred years.
Dreadnought
SOC-12
Q10: What future products were already sketched out and or near completion at the time of GDW closure and would he consider bringing them out under the Quicklink banner (after some modification due to MJD's efforts)?
A: Before I left GDW to come down to Knox I asked Frank if he wanted me to leave Regency Combat Vehicle Guide for them to finish the art and typesetting, and write the manuscript for Regency Starship Guide, or to do the typesetting, art direction, layout, etc., for RCVG to guarantee that it got done and published. He chose the latter, but I was going to write RSG for GDW after I got down to Fort Knox. I was working on it on my ex-GDW Macintosh in my office down here in Radcliff in the evenings, but about a week or two after I arrived, Frank said forget it, it would never get printed. That would probably have taken a couple more weeks to finish. Loren had a lot of clipper modules and cutter modules he was fiddling with, but that would take a while to pull together. The only other thing was the “Into the Belly of the Beast” Epic adventure, which was where my heart was at in a lot of ways.
I would consider bringing them out, but am not in a position to make any promises as I write this. It would take a while for me to remember how to get into that Mac, never mind remember what I was doing.
Q11: What does he think of Traveller today? Is it as dynamic as he would want it or was TNE the only way to energize the Traveller milieu and make it Darker?
A: Part One: I know very, very little about Traveller today. I have noticed that after GDW died, there were some attempts to start Traveller up again in other milieus that didn’t appear to last very long. T4 has died, I understand. I think the attempt to get into some post-TNE stuff makes sense, because it seems like you can only go so far with prequels. But I hear that even GT and printed paper RPGs in general are on the way out, and so maybe the classic Traveller model itself has been OBE.
It certainly seems the case that the industry and the hobby and the market have changed, and there might not be that much room for a Traveller the way it used to be. I don’t know. It certainly seems to be a pretty niche-y market today. But I am not an expert on today’s market.
We certainly intended that TNE was our attempt to re-energize the Traveller milieu in the midst of how the RPG market was going in the mid-1990s and attract new players. Those who want to vilify us will say that we f@#$ed it up. We will say that the industry changed out from under us with the collectible card insanity, and even had we been transforming lead to gold, we would have gone out of business, because no one would have looked up from MTG for long enough to see if we had the Philosopher’s Stone or not.
Part Two: Okay, I know that no one will ever believe this, but we never set out to make Traveller darker, and we certainly never set out to make it darker just for the sake of making it darker. Darker was being done just fine by White Wolf and others, and FASA was kind of doing an Archie version of darker, so there was no need for anyone else to go, “Hey, sailor, we’re dark too!”
The idea as I described above was that we had to 1. wrap up the whole Rebellion thing and get going again in a way that was 2. accessible to new gamers who wanted to make things happen without thinking that they had to do their history homework first, and 3. seemed to follow from what came before.
Yes, there was the Dallas emerging from the shower or “it was all a dream” approach, but those were non-starters. And anything where you tried to say, “okay, this faction won,” and explain away all of the complete trashing of the campaign was simply not going to fly for the above reasons either. “Oh, we all woke up and realized Margaret is the Empress, all the wreckage and death is forgotten, hooray!” (And see the problem with retaining the nine separate factional “safes” above.)
There is, of course, the theory that we were all a pack of morons, dolts, idiots, bastards, or people who secretly wanted to make GDW go bankrupt. Whatever.
A: I have not read any of it. However, I will say that when we were still in our offices on North Street I got some short story manuscripts from Martin Dougherty that I fell in love with. I thought he had the best feel for the TNE environment of any outside guy that ever sent us anything. I don’t remember why they didn’t get published. So when I learned back in February that he was doing the 1248 stuff I figured there was no one better to do it.
A: Before I left GDW to come down to Knox I asked Frank if he wanted me to leave Regency Combat Vehicle Guide for them to finish the art and typesetting, and write the manuscript for Regency Starship Guide, or to do the typesetting, art direction, layout, etc., for RCVG to guarantee that it got done and published. He chose the latter, but I was going to write RSG for GDW after I got down to Fort Knox. I was working on it on my ex-GDW Macintosh in my office down here in Radcliff in the evenings, but about a week or two after I arrived, Frank said forget it, it would never get printed. That would probably have taken a couple more weeks to finish. Loren had a lot of clipper modules and cutter modules he was fiddling with, but that would take a while to pull together. The only other thing was the “Into the Belly of the Beast” Epic adventure, which was where my heart was at in a lot of ways.
I would consider bringing them out, but am not in a position to make any promises as I write this. It would take a while for me to remember how to get into that Mac, never mind remember what I was doing.
Q11: What does he think of Traveller today? Is it as dynamic as he would want it or was TNE the only way to energize the Traveller milieu and make it Darker?
A: Part One: I know very, very little about Traveller today. I have noticed that after GDW died, there were some attempts to start Traveller up again in other milieus that didn’t appear to last very long. T4 has died, I understand. I think the attempt to get into some post-TNE stuff makes sense, because it seems like you can only go so far with prequels. But I hear that even GT and printed paper RPGs in general are on the way out, and so maybe the classic Traveller model itself has been OBE.
It certainly seems the case that the industry and the hobby and the market have changed, and there might not be that much room for a Traveller the way it used to be. I don’t know. It certainly seems to be a pretty niche-y market today. But I am not an expert on today’s market.
We certainly intended that TNE was our attempt to re-energize the Traveller milieu in the midst of how the RPG market was going in the mid-1990s and attract new players. Those who want to vilify us will say that we f@#$ed it up. We will say that the industry changed out from under us with the collectible card insanity, and even had we been transforming lead to gold, we would have gone out of business, because no one would have looked up from MTG for long enough to see if we had the Philosopher’s Stone or not.
Part Two: Okay, I know that no one will ever believe this, but we never set out to make Traveller darker, and we certainly never set out to make it darker just for the sake of making it darker. Darker was being done just fine by White Wolf and others, and FASA was kind of doing an Archie version of darker, so there was no need for anyone else to go, “Hey, sailor, we’re dark too!”
The idea as I described above was that we had to 1. wrap up the whole Rebellion thing and get going again in a way that was 2. accessible to new gamers who wanted to make things happen without thinking that they had to do their history homework first, and 3. seemed to follow from what came before.
Yes, there was the Dallas emerging from the shower or “it was all a dream” approach, but those were non-starters. And anything where you tried to say, “okay, this faction won,” and explain away all of the complete trashing of the campaign was simply not going to fly for the above reasons either. “Oh, we all woke up and realized Margaret is the Empress, all the wreckage and death is forgotten, hooray!” (And see the problem with retaining the nine separate factional “safes” above.)
There is, of course, the theory that we were all a pack of morons, dolts, idiots, bastards, or people who secretly wanted to make GDW go bankrupt. Whatever.
Q: What do you think of the 1248 material - is that similar to the direction that you would have taken the setting in?
A: I have not read any of it. However, I will say that when we were still in our offices on North Street I got some short story manuscripts from Martin Dougherty that I fell in love with. I thought he had the best feel for the TNE environment of any outside guy that ever sent us anything. I don’t remember why they didn’t get published. So when I learned back in February that he was doing the 1248 stuff I figured there was no one better to do it.
Dreadnought
SOC-12
Q1: What had he planned for Avery in 1201? Had he met up with the Empress Wave and found out what it was - maybe even mitigating its effects on the Regency?
Yes, as described above.
Q2: What story arc was planned for the Droyne? Were they helping Avery to create a psi buffer around the Regency?
I don’t recall that we had planned a specific role for the Droyne as such, other than as members of local governments that included Droyne worlds. Certainly there would have been Droyne members of Avery’s expedition, but that doesn’t mean “The Droyne” did it themselves. In a lot of ways I see the different “races,” (particularly the pseudo human “iti” races) the same way I see races today. In the (US) Army you don’t say, “what did the black guys do,” or “what did the Hispanic guys do,” and so on, you say, “what did 2-34 Armor do,” and by God, there are whites and blacks and Hispanics in the unit, and they did it all together and that color shit don’t matter. So you’re short and have scaly skin and wings? People can get past that. And that’s not just me waxing kumbaya, that’s a valid game point that just about any PC or NPC group in any campaign can contain a variety of racial types, because what is important is common cause, not common ancestry.
While there are times when you might prescriptively write a scenario around a group of predominantly one race, that generally serves as an educational purpose to help players learn about that race and what they’re like. Once you get past that, mix and match ‘em, I say. And don’t forget to always have an elf or a dwarf in your party for infravision and to detect sloping corridors (or however that used to go).
Q3: What did he have planned for when the Regency and RC met?
A: Discussed above.
Dreadnought
SOC-12
Q1: What other pocket civilizations where out there?
Discussed above.
Q2: Would the Soleean Empire defeat the RC or what was his plans for them both when meeting?
The Solee were going to be defeated or encompassed by the RC by virtue of the RC developing “tame” virus starships as an ultimate result of the developments in the Guilded Lilly storyline.
Ask me again, there’s more detail in there.
Q3: What was his plans for the Black curtain?
Discussed above.
Q4: What was his plans for the benign Sandman-type strain viruses?
Umm, specifically what about the Sandman-type strain? We were going to wind up with the RC including “tame/friendly/allied” virus working with them, and that would be predicated on the benign/stable strains of virus we had discussed.
I think that the taxonomy of virus that I developed for Survival Margin was more a generic model to allow follow-on flexibility rather than to follow specific strains, but I may be missing some particular detail that you have in mind.
Q5: What was the idea and impact on the universe with the Empress wave?
Discussed above.
Q6: A 4th empire? How big? How stable? Location? What about its neighbours?
As I discussed above, sooner or later someone would have eventually said, “hey, this must be the 4th empire,” and made it so. We had no pre-conceived notion of when this would be, or what the boundaries would be by then. No preplanned tear-inspiring re-coronation of the Emperor on the Iridium throne. (But see Jar-Jar Binks, below, for a different kind of tears.)
I guess it would have been impregnable until, what, somebody got shot or something? That could never happen. Because of course all hell would break loose.
Q7: I also want to know how Vargr and Aslan countered firstly Virus and then Imperial fleets.
I think in RSB I talked about how the Vargr got hosed by Virus because they were so fragmented they couldn’t organize a coherent defense. Sorry I can’t tell you much about the Aslan. They hadn’t had a lot of work done on them because the primary line of action wasn’t really running through their area. What Aslan stuff there would have been would have been primarily via interaction with the Regency.
Which Imperial fleets? 4th? It still wouldn’t have been called the 4th Imperium by then. Still just Regency and RC rebuilding, recontacting, reintegration activities.
Dreadnought
SOC-12
Q: I would ask DN if he would be interested in writing any more RPG material, in general or for TNE or 1248.
Yes, I would be interested, but I have found to my dismay that it is not easy to do this stuff as a sideline when I am a software and training development manager (more on this immediately below). On occasions when I’ve tried to do both, I’ve found that I do neither well, and that’s not fair to the people that have a right to expect my best work and my full attention.
I’m not saying “no,” because it would be nice to find a better way to do both. I just know it’s easier said than promised. And I don’t want to promise something that I cannot deliver on. However, I suspect that I am doing the Traveller community a greater service by being a scapegoat, and for me to become involved in doing new stuff might not be feasible.
Q: So, to get to the question, why have you not revealed, in any form or forum, what you had intended? Ten years is a long time to hold on to something. Sure, I understand that in the beginning you probably planned on trying to do it in a fashion that would generate at least a little money. But as time passed, didn't it become more and more clear that that goal was becoming unattainable?
A: There are some faulty assumptions embedded in that question including 1. The practicality of my revealing what I intended (i.e., time and effort constraints), and 2. Given serious considerations of practicality, what obligation was I under to undertake such an effort? (i.e., without anyone wanting to publish that material, how was I to deliver it to you?) 3. Money had nothing to do with it. 4. Ten years may or may not be a long time to “hold on to” something, but it is no time at all if one has simply had to go on with ones life and let go if it. The notion that I was lingering ghostlike with my nose pressed against the candy store window waiting for the perfect moment to return and finish it all is false.
So, to answer the question, for the first several years after GDW went down, there was no interest in, and no possibility of publishing the TNE stuff I was interested in developing. Marc was going other directions. And I had a demanding job, and I went months or years without the opportunity to even remember Traveller. At this point I was still interested in publishing some of the TNE stuff if the interest ever went back that way, so it made no sense to dribble it all over the place in a disorganized fashion, even if I had been in a position or had the time to do so, which I wasn’t and didn’t. You can’t do a good job that way. You have to try to do it right. And that’s what I mean about it not being about the money. It’s about being in a position to tell the story the way you wanted to tell it so you could do it justice. This entire massive post in which I am attempting to answer these questions is a testament to how unsatisfactory, vague, incomplete, and hand-wavy these efforts are, compared to actually writing the thing properly. (And, by the way, is a testament to my desire to do right by those who have patiently waited for these answers for all these years, now that I have belatedly come to the realization that there are, in fact, such persons. And God bless you, by the way.)
Then GT came out, and I did a little work with Loren for a while, and there was maybe the possibility of bringing the TNE stuff out in a few years. However, when I tried to do some work on one of the Aliens books, I was at the same time managing software and training development projects, and trying to find a new home for my programming team, which involved meeting with venture capitalists and other companies all the time, flying all over the place, living in Kentucky two weeks and Alabama two weeks each month, and then coming home and working on the Aliens book instead of sleeping. After about a couple months of this I basically suffered a mental and emotional collapse, and could not finish the project. Maybe someone else could have done this; I was not able to. I sent in my unfinished stuff to Loren, and to this day I don’t know what he did with it, because I have not even opened the box of author’s copies they sent to me, I am so disgusted with the way I was unable to fulfill my obligation to Loren and the project. The good news is that I got another company to pick up my programming team and our software, and we remain there to this day, making training solutions for the US Army and Marine Corps. The bad news is that I was forced to conclude that you can’t go home again. I can’t pretend to be a software and training development manager and a game designer at the same time. I may wish that I could, but I have proven inadequate to produce such evidence.
That was 2000 or something. Since then I don’t think I looked at a single Traveller thing until February of 2004 when I tripped over this site and learned to my considerable surprise that Dougherty was doing 1248. While I think I traded some words with Martin pre-GT Aliens, I don’t believe I had any contact from anyone about Traveller (besides Loren) since before GT Aliens. I cruised around the site a little bit, was frankly shocked that someone like me living in the wilderness for so long could be remembered so “warmly” by so many after all this time, and basically concluded that with MJD having taken over Traveller and so explicitly slain the ghosts of the past, I was no longer needed. Bummer, dude.
Q. So, at this point, why the secrecy? What is gained (for you) by this? Did you just get disgusted with the reactions like those two above and just drop the game? Or do you still harbor hope to make that knowledge profitable somehow?
A: As hopefully you have seen from the above, there is no secrecy. I was living in another world, was not even aware of this one anymore, and no one was looking for me. That’s not secrecy, that’s an absolute absence of mutual relevance. I also hope you are at last satisfied that abso-freaking-lutely nothing is gained for me by this.
Q: In summary, why does Dave Nilsen not want anyone to know what Dave Nilsen's vision for TNE is/was?
A: (Fill in your own answer here. Seriously, there may be a contest. I might send you a dollar.)
a) Would there be more adventures?From Kafka47 again (inquisitive fellow that he is):
quote:
Yes? What do you mean specifically?
b) What role did the emerging Internet play in design. When I was in Prague, I did subscribe to both the TML & X-boat and found voth listservs to be very hostile to newcomers and in tone to others?
Well, we found a lot of the listservs to be pretty hostile in general, and pretty hostile to us in particular.
I think the emerging Internet certainly caused a lot of pain for us. Here’s the way it would go. We did not have an Internet connection at the 203 1/2 North Street offices, because the phone lines were not good enough, and only Loren had Internet at home. He would bring in a stack of like 70 pages of printed out messages every couple of days and beg us to reply to them. It was simply impossible to respond to that volume of stuff. Loren used to call it “like trying to drink out of a firehose,” back before everybody else learned to say it.
And bear in mind that we were pretty busy. My first year at GDW I worked 77 hours a week (total hours worked in the year divided by 52), my second I worked 78 hours, and my third I worked 79 (we stopped keeping count after year 3, but I can assure you it only got worse). Naturally, I got divorced. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for listservs and mailing lists. We couldn’t even keep up with the mailed game questions and phone calls on a daily basis. At one point Frank required us to spend our lunch hours answering game questions maybe every day or one day a week or something, but we could never keep up.
Every once in a while we’d try to respond to some of it, but it always caused more trouble than it solved (flame wars), and so we’d swear off of it for like six months, then we’d get conned back into it again, and we’d have another disastrous experience, and the cycle would just repeat itself. I can honestly not remember if I ever posted a message (actually, give to Loren to take home and post). I remember Frank would occasionally post one (via Loren), and these were sometimes when he was honked off about the existing hostile messages.
After Les left for TSR, I think you could maybe roughly characterize us as: Loren, the guy who kept trying to keep us integrated with the mailing lists. Dave, the guy that kept trying to get all of the work done, and was afraid that if we spent too much time with the mailing lists, we wouldn’t get any work done at all. Frank, the guy who mostly agreed with Dave, but every once in a while would lose his temper and try to respond to the mailing lists. There was a lot of work to do, and the mailing lists would have been happy to take up all of it.
I remember maybe twice going over to Loren’s apartment to participate in two-hour on-line forums with some on-line groups, and another time we used one of the lists to test a design sequence for Fire, Fusion and Steel, maybe firearms. But mostly it was just too hard and too painful to use.
One of the stupid, weird things that would happen is that I’d sometimes get a phone call from someone wanting to ask some Traveller questions. I’d be really busy, and not really have the time to take the call, but then I’d think, “oh, come on, take a few minutes and be nice.” So I’d take the call and the person would introduce himself, and I’d talk to him for a little bit and answer the questions. Then two days later one of the listservs would publish “Interview with David Nilsen,” after of course never having asked for permission or indicated an intention to do so. And then it would get printed in a fanzine. So I’d stop taking calls for a while, until one day I’d think, “oh, come on, take a few minutes and be nice,” and it would happen all over again.
We used to have lots of friends in the other gaming companies. And they always used to make fun of us for the negative virulence of our Traveller fans. They’d always say, “it sucks to be you guys. ShadowRun/Vampire fans never say, ‘we hate you, but you’d better not let the next product be late!’ the way Traveller fans do.” Yeah, well, it sucked to be us, but we were lucky to be us, too. I wouldn’t have traded it for the world, not even now, knowing what it cost me. But the Internet guys were the most concentrated, virulent population of that ethic. See Challenge 59 ½, page 6MW, “Cheez Whiz Statistics,” for GDW’s most cogent word on all of that.
We did put out a licensed computer product that used hypertext back in the early days of the WWW. High tech!
c) Why release something like the Players Forms as a second release...surely, something more flashy would sell the line better?
You are correct, of course. But two reasons:
1. We had a lot of advice from retailers and distributors to get some game aids out FAST to help the line get established. It is entirely possible that those people were wrong, and that we should not ever have listened to them.
2. It was perceived as a relatively quick and easy project to get out the door. Out of all of the supposedly “quick and easy” projects that we tried (can you say folio?), this was perhaps the only one that ever really was.
d) Did you ever consider going back to any era of the Traveller universe and allow for multiple eras of play but using the TNE rules?
A: That was one of the things that we hoped to do with the flexibility of the House System and the FF&S design system, but we never got so far as scheduling a title. The first thing like that would have been a 2300 sourcebook, which of course was not Traveller. There was a thought to do some alternate/future Traveller universe, but those were scrapped in favor of better detailing the TNE universe.
e) What was the relationships like in GDW? How were you treated by the Ancients or Old Ones?
So which is the Ancients, and which is the Old Ones? And that means that I must be some naked virgin getting her heart cut out atop a ziggurat?
Excellent, allowing for the fact that we were all working our fingers to the bone all the time, and production stresses would sometimes emerge. It truly was a “workshop” in that we all got to share in all kinds of activities, all got to participate, all shared ideas. Marc was on his way out when I started and John Harshman, Rich Banner, Tim Brown were gone by then as well. I worked with Frank Chadwick, Lester Smith, and Loren Wiseman. Les left after about a year to TSR, but I enjoyed working with Frank and Loren for the remainder of the time we had. After my wife left me Frank and his wife Tessa used to invite me over to their house a lot to eat real food and watch movies. Frank and Loren were great people, and I enjoyed working with them. Marc and his wife Darlene, who continued to work for GDW for a few years, were also supportive. We also had some great artists and text staff who were great to work with. It was the best job I've ever had in my entire life. If it were up to me, I’d be perfectly happy to still be working with them today. But some things aren’t up to me.
f)What were the various story arcs that were not explored in any of the published products that were forthcoming in others.
• “Into the Belly of the Beast” epic adventure into the Hiver sphere.
• Some stuff we wanted to do with James Maliszewski with groundhogs. Of all the outside authors we worked with, Jim and Greg Videll were the guys that I felt worst about not doing more work with….until I think of someone else that I forgot after 10 years. But seriously, Maliszewski and Videll were good, talented people.
• The clash between RC and Solee
• A broader base of RC fiction, like the Dougherty stuff.
• The longship/clipper books
• I don’t remember right now what the Regency epic adventures was going to be. That was when the organism was starting to shut down and the brain was being starved of oxygen. Okay, my brain is starved of oxygen. Whatever.
g) What is all this discussion about "Jedi" in Traveller?
A: I don’t know. We were going to have Jar-Jar Binks the new emperor of the 4th Imperium, but we never discussed Jedi. Kidding.
We never used the word Jedi, for obvious legal, ethical, intentional, etc., reasons. I think that is probably a reference to the “psionic knights” concept that I mentioned above.
Dreadnought
SOC-12
h) Did you ever collect any of the fanzines that were coming out and covering the TNE? Did they shift any of your ideas?
I think that all of the TNE fanzines got sent to our offices, and we looked at them as time permitted. I’m sure that in some cases they influenced our ideas, but I would say that overall they had not a lot of effect. There is only so much time in a day, and when you have a bunch of stuff that you already know you plan on doing, there’s a limit to how much time you can give to saying, “naah, what if we did this instead?”
As Marc pointed out, GDW put out a new product on average every 22 days for 22 years. That’s a lot of work.
i) Where did you get your ideas and what books/themes inspired you to write TNE?
There were no direct inspirations, i.e., at no point did I or anyone say, “TNE should be like this book.” Certainly lots of people point to H. Beam Piper for Space Vikings, but that term was already in play before I arrived. I’m not even sure if Frank read that book. So I wouldn’t say that I can think of any direct inspirations, but before taking on the job at GDW I had read a great deal of military history and other non-fiction. As far as science fiction authors were concerned, I read a lot of Poul Anderson, Frederick Pohl, Ray Bradbury, H. Beam Piper, Keith Laumer, David Drake, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Harlan Ellison, Ben Bova, Norman Spinrad, Spider Robinson, Theodore Sturgeon, Heinlein, Asimov. Once I got to GDW I didn’t have much time to read for fun. The only book I can remember right now reading for fun while I was there was a biography of Theodore Roosevelt.
I would say that inspiration came from other projects and genres, and the GDW staff’s generally catholic love of history and movies, genres, etc. One of the realities of my job is that I’d be working on multiple things at the same time: Traveller projects, Harpoon projects, DarkCon projects, T2K projects, wargames, etc. So a little creativity exercise I’d use when switching projects would be, okay, what if this Harpoon project were recast in Traveller terms, or wargame into DarkCon, etc., how would it look? That would sometimes produce a lot of interesting ideas that would get me started quickly, rather than taking a lot of time to transition between “unlike” genres.
A: The “Into the Belly of the Beast” epic adventure. If I could only remember all of it.
Q: This is the same question as in the other one, but for me is just as valid. Who's Dave Nilsen?
A: Some asshole. Discussed earlier.
Q: Have you been lurking anywhere, and for how long?
A: If you mean boards, the only Traveller board I’ve ever visited since GDW broke up is this one. As discussed above, I came across it on February 24 and spent a couple days thinking, “Geez, these guys have got proportion issues,” then spent a couple days getting over it, then spent a couple days reading some of the other threads, then basically drifted away until about a week ago (written ca. Nov. 20 2004). I sent private messages to I think two people back in Feb 04. Made no public posts. Internet bulletin boards hold not much attraction for me. (Ooh, flame wars between people who don’t share their real names—pinch me!)
I have visited the occasional Traveller or 2300 site over the past ten years, and generally try to leave an e-mail with the owner, but most times the e-mails bounce as undeliverable or leave without a trace, which is too bad, as I wanted to congratulate these people for doing a good job.
Q: Have you used alternate names with which to post ideas, like maybe you're actually Aramis?
Nope. I don’t do message boards as a rule. This is an exception.
Q: What was the next Alien Module going to be?
Don’t remember.
Q: What were are all the original details behind the Empress Wave?
A: All the original details? I don’t remember them all. I already discussed what I remember. But now that those parts of my brain have been reawakened I got little tidbits falling out in the car on the way to work. Maybe more will shake loose.
Q: My question would be: Where did such a devastating idea such as Virus come from? What was your inspiration for it?
A: Frank Chadwick had been pitching the idea for a while, but it was not a firm decision. When we started doing the advance planning for TNE (which was not called TNE then) we kept kicking around ideas on what “the event” could be. We even discussed whether there should be “an event.” Just because MT started with “an event”: Assassination & “Rebellion,” didn’t mean another new rules edition had to, and we toyed with the notion that the new rules would just pick up with the story in progress. But we eventually decided that having a storyline change in parallel with the rules change just made more sense. The discussion groups over time included Frank, me, Loren, Les, Steve Maggi (one of our text department), I think probably Steve Bryant and Kirk Wescom from the art department, and Steve Olle, the head of our text department, and a couple of outside contributors, like I think the guy who ended up writing the DC2 book, whose name I can’t remember.
We initially rejected the Virus idea, as it seemed a little pat, but we kept coming back to it because there was something interesting about a single event that everyone throughout charted space would experience in roughly the same way, unlike the way the Rebellion had splintered the campaign vision into all of these local POVs. A single event that would happen at one time and everyone would find their lives synchronized by it sounded pretty cool. I don’t remember if or what any alternatives to Virus were, but we kept coming back to something like that. I remember saying that I thought that maybe I could come up with a sketch that linked the Virus concept back to existing things in the canon, like Signal GK. I threw some stuff together and I recall Frank and Les definitely liking it, probably Loren as well, although I don’t remember Loren specifically (you’re off the hook, Bro. Run. RUN!!!). The neat thing about it was that it would allow us to pole vault over the mouse turd that had been lying in Traveller for a number of years: by what semantic sleight of hand do you decide that a computer has crossed the line from really good computations to actual thought, i.e., intelligence? Well, when it wakes up and tries to kill your ass is a pretty good wake-up call. That has a tendency to dispose of all that intellectual and philosophical hand-wringing when you have to just give it the benefit of the doubt and fight with it (much like the Kinunir adventure Way Back When).
What we certainly didn’t see was how so many 20th century gamers would sit down and try to derive, with mathematical precision/geometric logic, how 58th century computer architecture would definitely prevent such a thing from happening. Our attitude was “plot device,” end of discussion. As I’ve said too many times, I don’t believe in jump drives, psionics, antigravity, gravitic focusing of lasers, or any of a host of other things, and yet I sleep like a baby.
The other nice thing about Virus is that it was self-inflicted. It reminded me of that quote at the opening of Anton Myrer’s epic “Once an Eagle,” which I don’t have with me, but I’m sure someone on this list can find. I’ve known a lot of Army officers who read it annually, but if no one here does, well, shoot.
So the initial concept came from Frank, we kicked it around for a long time, rejected it a few times and kept coming back to it, primarily for dramatic reasons. And I wrote Survival Margin over my 1992 Christmas vacation, in my little brother’s old bedroom on the GDW “Travellin’ Mac” as Les named it.
By the way, I love the response from “TheEngineer” about “MS Windows.”
A few years ago I tried to start a hoax using the standard bullshit body (you know, “AOL and Microsoft have announced a dangerous new virus, it will erase your hard drive, cause your system to lock up,” etc.) but put in the name “Windows 95” or “Internet Explorer” for the name of the virus (I don’t remember). I e-mailed it to everyone I could find, but alas, I never saw it again.
I think that all of the TNE fanzines got sent to our offices, and we looked at them as time permitted. I’m sure that in some cases they influenced our ideas, but I would say that overall they had not a lot of effect. There is only so much time in a day, and when you have a bunch of stuff that you already know you plan on doing, there’s a limit to how much time you can give to saying, “naah, what if we did this instead?”
As Marc pointed out, GDW put out a new product on average every 22 days for 22 years. That’s a lot of work.
i) Where did you get your ideas and what books/themes inspired you to write TNE?
There were no direct inspirations, i.e., at no point did I or anyone say, “TNE should be like this book.” Certainly lots of people point to H. Beam Piper for Space Vikings, but that term was already in play before I arrived. I’m not even sure if Frank read that book. So I wouldn’t say that I can think of any direct inspirations, but before taking on the job at GDW I had read a great deal of military history and other non-fiction. As far as science fiction authors were concerned, I read a lot of Poul Anderson, Frederick Pohl, Ray Bradbury, H. Beam Piper, Keith Laumer, David Drake, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Harlan Ellison, Ben Bova, Norman Spinrad, Spider Robinson, Theodore Sturgeon, Heinlein, Asimov. Once I got to GDW I didn’t have much time to read for fun. The only book I can remember right now reading for fun while I was there was a biography of Theodore Roosevelt.
I would say that inspiration came from other projects and genres, and the GDW staff’s generally catholic love of history and movies, genres, etc. One of the realities of my job is that I’d be working on multiple things at the same time: Traveller projects, Harpoon projects, DarkCon projects, T2K projects, wargames, etc. So a little creativity exercise I’d use when switching projects would be, okay, what if this Harpoon project were recast in Traveller terms, or wargame into DarkCon, etc., how would it look? That would sometimes produce a lot of interesting ideas that would get me started quickly, rather than taking a lot of time to transition between “unlike” genres.
if you could write a Traveller supplement or adventure for T20 what would it be?
A: The “Into the Belly of the Beast” epic adventure. If I could only remember all of it.
Q: This is the same question as in the other one, but for me is just as valid. Who's Dave Nilsen?
A: Some asshole. Discussed earlier.
Q: Have you been lurking anywhere, and for how long?
A: If you mean boards, the only Traveller board I’ve ever visited since GDW broke up is this one. As discussed above, I came across it on February 24 and spent a couple days thinking, “Geez, these guys have got proportion issues,” then spent a couple days getting over it, then spent a couple days reading some of the other threads, then basically drifted away until about a week ago (written ca. Nov. 20 2004). I sent private messages to I think two people back in Feb 04. Made no public posts. Internet bulletin boards hold not much attraction for me. (Ooh, flame wars between people who don’t share their real names—pinch me!)
I have visited the occasional Traveller or 2300 site over the past ten years, and generally try to leave an e-mail with the owner, but most times the e-mails bounce as undeliverable or leave without a trace, which is too bad, as I wanted to congratulate these people for doing a good job.
Q: Have you used alternate names with which to post ideas, like maybe you're actually Aramis?
Nope. I don’t do message boards as a rule. This is an exception.
Q: What was the next Alien Module going to be?
Don’t remember.
Q: What were are all the original details behind the Empress Wave?
A: All the original details? I don’t remember them all. I already discussed what I remember. But now that those parts of my brain have been reawakened I got little tidbits falling out in the car on the way to work. Maybe more will shake loose.
Q: My question would be: Where did such a devastating idea such as Virus come from? What was your inspiration for it?
A: Frank Chadwick had been pitching the idea for a while, but it was not a firm decision. When we started doing the advance planning for TNE (which was not called TNE then) we kept kicking around ideas on what “the event” could be. We even discussed whether there should be “an event.” Just because MT started with “an event”: Assassination & “Rebellion,” didn’t mean another new rules edition had to, and we toyed with the notion that the new rules would just pick up with the story in progress. But we eventually decided that having a storyline change in parallel with the rules change just made more sense. The discussion groups over time included Frank, me, Loren, Les, Steve Maggi (one of our text department), I think probably Steve Bryant and Kirk Wescom from the art department, and Steve Olle, the head of our text department, and a couple of outside contributors, like I think the guy who ended up writing the DC2 book, whose name I can’t remember.
We initially rejected the Virus idea, as it seemed a little pat, but we kept coming back to it because there was something interesting about a single event that everyone throughout charted space would experience in roughly the same way, unlike the way the Rebellion had splintered the campaign vision into all of these local POVs. A single event that would happen at one time and everyone would find their lives synchronized by it sounded pretty cool. I don’t remember if or what any alternatives to Virus were, but we kept coming back to something like that. I remember saying that I thought that maybe I could come up with a sketch that linked the Virus concept back to existing things in the canon, like Signal GK. I threw some stuff together and I recall Frank and Les definitely liking it, probably Loren as well, although I don’t remember Loren specifically (you’re off the hook, Bro. Run. RUN!!!). The neat thing about it was that it would allow us to pole vault over the mouse turd that had been lying in Traveller for a number of years: by what semantic sleight of hand do you decide that a computer has crossed the line from really good computations to actual thought, i.e., intelligence? Well, when it wakes up and tries to kill your ass is a pretty good wake-up call. That has a tendency to dispose of all that intellectual and philosophical hand-wringing when you have to just give it the benefit of the doubt and fight with it (much like the Kinunir adventure Way Back When).
What we certainly didn’t see was how so many 20th century gamers would sit down and try to derive, with mathematical precision/geometric logic, how 58th century computer architecture would definitely prevent such a thing from happening. Our attitude was “plot device,” end of discussion. As I’ve said too many times, I don’t believe in jump drives, psionics, antigravity, gravitic focusing of lasers, or any of a host of other things, and yet I sleep like a baby.
The other nice thing about Virus is that it was self-inflicted. It reminded me of that quote at the opening of Anton Myrer’s epic “Once an Eagle,” which I don’t have with me, but I’m sure someone on this list can find. I’ve known a lot of Army officers who read it annually, but if no one here does, well, shoot.
So the initial concept came from Frank, we kicked it around for a long time, rejected it a few times and kept coming back to it, primarily for dramatic reasons. And I wrote Survival Margin over my 1992 Christmas vacation, in my little brother’s old bedroom on the GDW “Travellin’ Mac” as Les named it.
By the way, I love the response from “TheEngineer” about “MS Windows.”
A few years ago I tried to start a hoax using the standard bullshit body (you know, “AOL and Microsoft have announced a dangerous new virus, it will erase your hard drive, cause your system to lock up,” etc.) but put in the name “Windows 95” or “Internet Explorer” for the name of the virus (I don’t remember). I e-mailed it to everyone I could find, but alas, I never saw it again.
Dreadnought
SOC-12
Q: What freedom did you have in developing TNE and how much was pre-plotted by the more established people at GDW such as Frank Chadwick?
A: Quite a bit of freedom, in that nothing was “pre-plotted” by older employees. But as I’ve said, GDW really was a workshop. We coordinated our stuff all the time, and a lot of ideas got into it. Frank was also the president, and if there was something important to him, you could bet he’d speak forcefully for it. There were some ideas (for Traveller and other things) that he wanted that I talked him out of, and some that he talked me into (and I’m not thinking of anything in particular, just lots of things). There were some that other people talked us into, or really excited us.
The other thing to remember is that we all wrote bits of stuff for Traveller, Frank in particular wrote a large amount of Star Viking stuff in Path of Tears, Smash and Grab, etc. When a designer is lead on a project, that designer gets a lot of de facto freedom to develop his own ideas. I would always read Frank’s stuff during text processing, just as he would read mine. There were no secrets, no one was sneaking stuff past anyone else. We were all in it together, although as line manager, I had more direct responsibility for making sure certain things got done. But there were also times, like when I was trying to get the last two DarkCon products out, that probably Frank or someone was maybe doing more directly for Traveller for a certain time.
Q: My question? What was your favorite Depeche Mode album?
A: Anything without “People Are People” on it. That whole early ‘80s nuclear freeze, Greenham Commons, no-first-use, nuclear-free-zone, MTV period leaves a metallic taste in my mouth. At school I once joined the NC PIRG for a year just to make sure they didn’t have the big “die in” (where they simulate the explosion of a nuclear warhead at some point above the campus at some pre-arranged time and everyone falls to the ground pretending to be vaporized—give me a break) that year. That was the same period of time when the US cardiologists decided that the greatest risk to public health was nuclear warfare. Any excuse to not do your job, I guess. Nukes are also bad for flowers, I hear.
Anyway, I was also a DJ at Duke, and I know I played some Depeche Mode on the air (it was on the play list; it was a college after all). I just don’t remember the album particularly. I do remember that’s the time Neil Young’s “Trans” came out, and Dire Straits “Twistin’ By the Pool” EP disk, Tom Petty’s “Long After Dark,” etc. Remember vinyl? We even had dial pots on the mix boards then, before the straight sliders. By the way, I broke Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” at Duke. I saw them open for Blondie, and I SWEAR, I had no idea how it was going to turn out. When I saw them open for Blondie, I thought, “Wow, a male singer with four girls in the band, that’s unusual. Wait, that’s a guy. Still, two guys and three girls is pretty unusual…..”
Sorry, not really an answer, but I really did drone on for as long as I could manage.
Q: Why did you take the editorial and game design approach in RSB to democratize the Regency?
A: I don’t know what you mean by an editorial approach, but from a game design approach it was very simple. Things change over time, and after 80 years you need to try to show the passage of time, especially when something as significant as Virus has come by. So what’s it going to be? Well, it ought to be something that seems to derive logically from the storyline. So, here it is.
1. The classic 3d Imperium (and 1st, 2d) derive from the notion that over interstellar distances without real-time communication, any kind of participatory government is impractical. So what you are left with is a Roman-style government of in loco parentis, whether they derive their power from the center or locally (historically, and in practice, from the center). This is the classic space opera approach, which derives either from history of the Roman empire or from the Polesotechnic League/Dominic Flandry novels of Poul Anderson. Either way, it’s the same idea, and Traveller didn’t come up with it.
Now, if we postulate, as we did in TNE, that the distances are radically reduced, and communication time from government center to rim is reduced from Roman Empire standards to, say, 19th century standards, by our original logic, a more bottom-up data-driven model (as opposed to top-down direction-driven model) of government is possible.
2. Given the external threat of Virus (and if you hate Virus, imagine something else which requires a non-porous defense against some external force—think rocks in the ocean as opposed to barrier islands), how does an entity defend itself from such a threat? Virus requires an absolute, non-porous defense. How do you achieve that? You achieve that by gaining the participation of all citizens by their common interest, not by the irrelevance of their common interest, the latter epitomized by the Imperial dictum that the Imperium controlled the spaces between star systems, but not the star systems themselves. How do you get a guy to work with his neighbor and work to ensure that all do their part to accomplish the mission? By some distant, reactive, punitive ethic of “we’ll punish you if you screw up enough to force us to notice,” or an immediate, proactive prescriptive ethic: “this is your job; you’re part of the government.” (The premise of this derives from the Traveller UPP/UWP in which smaller polities have more participatory governments and larger polities have more insular ones, but writ larger across multiple subsectors.) The citizenry must be invested in their joint survival, which speaks of a more corporate sense of identity, not an Imperial-style sense of identity in which each planetary system can go its own way so long as trade continues. Such a model is more participatory in execution, and requires, what? More representatives from the center to harvest participatory data, and also to oversee and supervise that local activities proceed as they should, rather than adopting an self-destructive hands-off approach.
This is fortunate, as many of the worlds in the DoD (Norris’ fief, not Rummy’s) are not exactly trustworthy, overrun as they are by various ihatei, Vargr, or whatever influxes. Election monitors, or whatever I called them, were observers/shadow enforcers/shock troops/special operators to attempt to keep a handle on things locally, to ensure Regency power and prevent viral infection. “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” How better to keep tabs on people than to have close relationships with them?
3. As you’ll see if you read the RSB, there are lots of cleavage lines in this model, with the disenfranchised nobility, the issues of whether Norris is really being free, open, and democratic (fat chance, the guy’s in charge), or whether he’s reserving a lot of hole cards for himself (the classic Imperial nobility model—like how he used the Imperial Warrant to appoint himself), plus all of the traditional regional and racial attitudes. All of this creates potential conflict, which creates potential storylines and campaigns and adventures and roleplaying, which is the point of the game. (Sure, they’ve held it together for 80 years to make sure Virus doesn’t get them, but now it’s 1202, and time to let the players back in. That cooperation isn’t going to last.)
The Regency is trying to model itself on a new political model to meet the current needs, while holding itself up as a model of eternal Imperial values, while further holding within it people who want to gain power at the expense of the Old Guard, and members of the Old Guard who want to hang onto it, etc., etc. That’s all fertile ground for roleplaying, which is the point of the game. And had we been able to last for a little longer, we would have explored that, and what it would be like to be an election observer, and what you really did all day.
4. I saw somebody post something about “America, Love it Or Leave it.” I don’t know where that idea came from, but it reminds me of some of the Canadians a few years back who thought that was an American flag on the back of their $5.00 bill. It rather exposes the pre-existing sensitivities of folks getting the wrong end of the stick rather than hitting any reality. I suppose to the extent that there is any legitimate parallel between the Regency and the US of A, it would be that living in (the US of) America is all the about the presence of a variety of cleavage lines, and the hope of everyone from P. F. Sloan or Jefferson Airplane to Rage Against the Machine that someday they’ll get to say, “Up against the wall, motherf@#$%r!”
5. I think maybe I realize now what you meant when referring to “editorial approach,” which was twofold.
First was the intent to lay out various thought patterns through the game, to give sample points of view for roleplaying, like the various historical retrospectives about “Star Vikings” as murderers. Part of the RC mindset was anti-Imperial, which talked a lot about the sins of the late departed 3d Imperium, to set the stage for conflict between the RC and Regency when they would meet. However, since we knew that eventually the RC and Regency would have to be able to make common cause, there had to be common ground in their conceptions of society. The extent to which the Regency would be shown to have some flexibility about and critical distance from “Imperial-style governance” would become one of the axes around which cooperation could develop. And again, the extent to which this “Imperium-bashing” would create hard feelings among disenfranchised nobles was intended to be grist for roleplaying.
Second, as I’ve said somewhere else in here, we heard a lot of complaints about our imputed desire to make the game darker, and in many and various ways we attempted to register our collective, “no, that’s not it at all.” One of these responses was to the notion that everything was perfect in the old Imperium, and “dark” was anything that undermined the Imperium. It seemed rational to remind players that the Third Imperium was corrupt and inhumane in a variety of ways, shown in adventures such as Divine Intervention and so on, to try to shed a little constructive light on what really is and is not dark, or attempting to be dark.
Was it always understood? Of course not. Did it sometimes get laid on a little thick? Entirely possible. As Goldilocks knows, you have to try out too hard and too soft and too hot and too cold before you get to “just right.”
A: Quite a bit of freedom, in that nothing was “pre-plotted” by older employees. But as I’ve said, GDW really was a workshop. We coordinated our stuff all the time, and a lot of ideas got into it. Frank was also the president, and if there was something important to him, you could bet he’d speak forcefully for it. There were some ideas (for Traveller and other things) that he wanted that I talked him out of, and some that he talked me into (and I’m not thinking of anything in particular, just lots of things). There were some that other people talked us into, or really excited us.
The other thing to remember is that we all wrote bits of stuff for Traveller, Frank in particular wrote a large amount of Star Viking stuff in Path of Tears, Smash and Grab, etc. When a designer is lead on a project, that designer gets a lot of de facto freedom to develop his own ideas. I would always read Frank’s stuff during text processing, just as he would read mine. There were no secrets, no one was sneaking stuff past anyone else. We were all in it together, although as line manager, I had more direct responsibility for making sure certain things got done. But there were also times, like when I was trying to get the last two DarkCon products out, that probably Frank or someone was maybe doing more directly for Traveller for a certain time.
Q: My question? What was your favorite Depeche Mode album?
A: Anything without “People Are People” on it. That whole early ‘80s nuclear freeze, Greenham Commons, no-first-use, nuclear-free-zone, MTV period leaves a metallic taste in my mouth. At school I once joined the NC PIRG for a year just to make sure they didn’t have the big “die in” (where they simulate the explosion of a nuclear warhead at some point above the campus at some pre-arranged time and everyone falls to the ground pretending to be vaporized—give me a break) that year. That was the same period of time when the US cardiologists decided that the greatest risk to public health was nuclear warfare. Any excuse to not do your job, I guess. Nukes are also bad for flowers, I hear.
Anyway, I was also a DJ at Duke, and I know I played some Depeche Mode on the air (it was on the play list; it was a college after all). I just don’t remember the album particularly. I do remember that’s the time Neil Young’s “Trans” came out, and Dire Straits “Twistin’ By the Pool” EP disk, Tom Petty’s “Long After Dark,” etc. Remember vinyl? We even had dial pots on the mix boards then, before the straight sliders. By the way, I broke Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” at Duke. I saw them open for Blondie, and I SWEAR, I had no idea how it was going to turn out. When I saw them open for Blondie, I thought, “Wow, a male singer with four girls in the band, that’s unusual. Wait, that’s a guy. Still, two guys and three girls is pretty unusual…..”
Sorry, not really an answer, but I really did drone on for as long as I could manage.
Q: Why did you take the editorial and game design approach in RSB to democratize the Regency?
A: I don’t know what you mean by an editorial approach, but from a game design approach it was very simple. Things change over time, and after 80 years you need to try to show the passage of time, especially when something as significant as Virus has come by. So what’s it going to be? Well, it ought to be something that seems to derive logically from the storyline. So, here it is.
1. The classic 3d Imperium (and 1st, 2d) derive from the notion that over interstellar distances without real-time communication, any kind of participatory government is impractical. So what you are left with is a Roman-style government of in loco parentis, whether they derive their power from the center or locally (historically, and in practice, from the center). This is the classic space opera approach, which derives either from history of the Roman empire or from the Polesotechnic League/Dominic Flandry novels of Poul Anderson. Either way, it’s the same idea, and Traveller didn’t come up with it.
Now, if we postulate, as we did in TNE, that the distances are radically reduced, and communication time from government center to rim is reduced from Roman Empire standards to, say, 19th century standards, by our original logic, a more bottom-up data-driven model (as opposed to top-down direction-driven model) of government is possible.
2. Given the external threat of Virus (and if you hate Virus, imagine something else which requires a non-porous defense against some external force—think rocks in the ocean as opposed to barrier islands), how does an entity defend itself from such a threat? Virus requires an absolute, non-porous defense. How do you achieve that? You achieve that by gaining the participation of all citizens by their common interest, not by the irrelevance of their common interest, the latter epitomized by the Imperial dictum that the Imperium controlled the spaces between star systems, but not the star systems themselves. How do you get a guy to work with his neighbor and work to ensure that all do their part to accomplish the mission? By some distant, reactive, punitive ethic of “we’ll punish you if you screw up enough to force us to notice,” or an immediate, proactive prescriptive ethic: “this is your job; you’re part of the government.” (The premise of this derives from the Traveller UPP/UWP in which smaller polities have more participatory governments and larger polities have more insular ones, but writ larger across multiple subsectors.) The citizenry must be invested in their joint survival, which speaks of a more corporate sense of identity, not an Imperial-style sense of identity in which each planetary system can go its own way so long as trade continues. Such a model is more participatory in execution, and requires, what? More representatives from the center to harvest participatory data, and also to oversee and supervise that local activities proceed as they should, rather than adopting an self-destructive hands-off approach.
This is fortunate, as many of the worlds in the DoD (Norris’ fief, not Rummy’s) are not exactly trustworthy, overrun as they are by various ihatei, Vargr, or whatever influxes. Election monitors, or whatever I called them, were observers/shadow enforcers/shock troops/special operators to attempt to keep a handle on things locally, to ensure Regency power and prevent viral infection. “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” How better to keep tabs on people than to have close relationships with them?
3. As you’ll see if you read the RSB, there are lots of cleavage lines in this model, with the disenfranchised nobility, the issues of whether Norris is really being free, open, and democratic (fat chance, the guy’s in charge), or whether he’s reserving a lot of hole cards for himself (the classic Imperial nobility model—like how he used the Imperial Warrant to appoint himself), plus all of the traditional regional and racial attitudes. All of this creates potential conflict, which creates potential storylines and campaigns and adventures and roleplaying, which is the point of the game. (Sure, they’ve held it together for 80 years to make sure Virus doesn’t get them, but now it’s 1202, and time to let the players back in. That cooperation isn’t going to last.)
The Regency is trying to model itself on a new political model to meet the current needs, while holding itself up as a model of eternal Imperial values, while further holding within it people who want to gain power at the expense of the Old Guard, and members of the Old Guard who want to hang onto it, etc., etc. That’s all fertile ground for roleplaying, which is the point of the game. And had we been able to last for a little longer, we would have explored that, and what it would be like to be an election observer, and what you really did all day.
4. I saw somebody post something about “America, Love it Or Leave it.” I don’t know where that idea came from, but it reminds me of some of the Canadians a few years back who thought that was an American flag on the back of their $5.00 bill. It rather exposes the pre-existing sensitivities of folks getting the wrong end of the stick rather than hitting any reality. I suppose to the extent that there is any legitimate parallel between the Regency and the US of A, it would be that living in (the US of) America is all the about the presence of a variety of cleavage lines, and the hope of everyone from P. F. Sloan or Jefferson Airplane to Rage Against the Machine that someday they’ll get to say, “Up against the wall, motherf@#$%r!”
5. I think maybe I realize now what you meant when referring to “editorial approach,” which was twofold.
First was the intent to lay out various thought patterns through the game, to give sample points of view for roleplaying, like the various historical retrospectives about “Star Vikings” as murderers. Part of the RC mindset was anti-Imperial, which talked a lot about the sins of the late departed 3d Imperium, to set the stage for conflict between the RC and Regency when they would meet. However, since we knew that eventually the RC and Regency would have to be able to make common cause, there had to be common ground in their conceptions of society. The extent to which the Regency would be shown to have some flexibility about and critical distance from “Imperial-style governance” would become one of the axes around which cooperation could develop. And again, the extent to which this “Imperium-bashing” would create hard feelings among disenfranchised nobles was intended to be grist for roleplaying.
Second, as I’ve said somewhere else in here, we heard a lot of complaints about our imputed desire to make the game darker, and in many and various ways we attempted to register our collective, “no, that’s not it at all.” One of these responses was to the notion that everything was perfect in the old Imperium, and “dark” was anything that undermined the Imperium. It seemed rational to remind players that the Third Imperium was corrupt and inhumane in a variety of ways, shown in adventures such as Divine Intervention and so on, to try to shed a little constructive light on what really is and is not dark, or attempting to be dark.
Was it always understood? Of course not. Did it sometimes get laid on a little thick? Entirely possible. As Goldilocks knows, you have to try out too hard and too soft and too hot and too cold before you get to “just right.”
