Dreadnought
SOC-12
Q: Why did you choose a comedic approach for the Ithklur?
A: H&I was one of those horrifying projects where all of a sudden here the deadline was looming, and a satisfactory MS had not come in, and I had to come up with a book at the last minute.
In looking at the CT Hivers book for inspiration, I was struck by the fact that this was either a not very satisfactory piece of self-contradictory writing that said just about nothing, or a really brilliant piece of propaganda, and the conspiracy behind it was ripe for exposure. Until it was time to write this book we at GDW had frankly thought that all of this “manipulation” crap was a load of hooey, a pathetic self-glamorization equivalent to Madison Avenue marketing, or Republican-vs.-Democrat political advertisement. I.e., something that any teenager could see through and say, “so what?”
However, in the context of a science fiction game, that’s not very interesting. It’s a lot more interesting to think about whether some cabal of nefarious banana-heads really could get you group-thinking without your realizing it, and before you knew it, you really would be puppets dancing to their tune, incapable of stopping yourself. That’s a LOT more interesting in a science fiction roleplaying game, so I reversed all of our sophisticated, world-weary thinking, and pursued wheels within wheels within wheels within wheels. Having read Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, I was able to do this, and recreate in my mind the paranoia necessary to do so. So the Hiver side of the H&I symbiosis went pretty quickly.
That left the Ithklur. Up until that time, we had limited ourselves to a single illustration and character sketch, in “Star Vikings.” Having worked with our artists for a couple of years to try to figure out what the Ithklur looked like, I had basically determined to get as far away from their Poul Anderson Merseian models as we could, and Brad McDevitt and I (after working with Rob Lazzaretti) settled on a sort of lithe version of the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grimm.
So what were they supposed to be like? Great big intergalactic tough guys? What, Samurai (Aslan), Mafia (Vargr) or something else? Traveller had already done the testosterone-addled ST:TNG Klingon “you have no honor!” schtick, so what original was there to do? One of the under-appreciated meanings of the term “alien,” at least among science fiction audiences, is the sense of “different,” and “incomprehensible.” What is more incomprehensible than totally weird, inexplicable behavior? And what becomes of that objective fact in the face of the human compulsion to rationalize? Truly alien behavior should defy our ability to predict and anticipate, and yet just as we don’t allow a horsey-shaped cloud to remain simply a cloud, we have to impose some sort of descriptive order on this thing we don’t understand.
The fact that the Ithklur were established as a subject race of the Hivers, cunningly reinvented by manipulation over generations to be what the Hivers wished them to be, presented the answer. If you take seriously the notion of radical contingency, that your experience of reality is not necessary (i.e., potentially wrong), you know what true existential horror is, and that madness lies just around the corner. There was no point in making beret-wearing, Gaulloises-smoking nihilists, however. The idea was to attempt to model a race that had in some fashion snapped, but that had a strong enough sense of self that they were trying to fight against it….whatever it was, and whatever that struggle meant.
What the Ithklur know is that they hate the Hivers, and that they are dependent on the Hivers (which is a pretty heady brew on its own), and that whatever they are, that is supposedly what the Hivers intended them to be. Except that they hate the Hivers, which is not presumably what the Hivers intend, so part of them is their own, but maybe that’s just what the Hivers want them to think…Which really pisses them off, because they don’t want the Hivers to win, but what part of them is authentic, and what part of them was made by Hivers? What do they rebel against?
What they end up rebelling against is predictability and the Hivers in general, and what they end up taking as positive role models is humanity, because the one thing that they do know by spending as much time around the Hivers is that the Hivers are spending an awful lot of time trying to manipulate the humans, meaning that the humans are still wild and unspoiled, in the Ithklur terms, “unbowed.” So humans know something that the Hivers don’t, or are doing something that the Hivers don’t like, so that means that something about what the humans are doing is all right with the Ithklur, and the more ancient it is, the better, because that’s more likely to be untainted by Hiver influence. Much of the Ithklur use of human cultural references is an attempt to open communications with humans on topics that the Hivers cannot control (and that the Ithklur do not understand, so they can only speak in phonetically and hope that the humans will explain to them what it means, a vain hope at best, speaking as a human), and most of that just spirals into a feedback loop, which is the origin of the Santa Claus imagery, for example. Noting the accidental similarity of sound of their San*Klaass hero to a human folk hero, Ithklur thought this may be have been a sign of some significance and researched the human folktale. Finding some further random parallels with items of Ithklur adornment (nostril covers and a stiff conical hat), some Ithklur modified their items to be more similar to the human items, and in so doing discovered items that they liked for their own sake, such as the human design of jingle bells, which would eventually displace the native Ithklur-designed beads and become their traditional spontaneity bells. The attempt at subtle communication failed, but the fashion innovations remained. One important feature of this Ithklur fascination with human cultural details is the obsession to establish that it is an authentic human item, and not some piece of Hiver disinformation.
How that ended up coming out in the book is that the Hivers are the weird, deceptive, confusing force, and the Ithklur are those who have snapped under the pressure. And the most effective way to convey that snapping was just to present them as if they had gone crazy, which they had, and they knew it, and embraced it. And crazy looks funny, and funny is something which had not been done before in Traveller, and I won’t belabor those implications. Not funny with the intent of undermining the game’s basic pretense at “realistic” space opera, but funny in inside-the-game terms, where an Imperial human would notice that Vargr were this way, and Aslan were that, and Zhodani were another, but the Ithklur were just flat-out demented, and WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? How many times have you looked at the events of your life and noted that if you were an outsider looking in, rather than the poor sod caught in the gears, it would be funny? And if you were the poor sod, you might still have thought, “this is crazy.” That was the intent of the humor with the Ithklur, to say, “there is something crazy going on here.”
Now I will stipulate that it is possible that that intent did not get conveyed in a perfectly successful manner. That has to do with the finite amount of time, energy, and resources that were available for any project that we undertook. You had some time to do the work, and then you had to finish it, and get it out, because there were other projects to do. I will also stipulate that there were going to be follow-on projects to allow me to follow up and finish fleshing out the ideas, such as the “Into the Belly of the Beast” Epic adventure, to allow me to shore up what didn’t get done right at first. An idea is never conveyed well when it is not conveyed completely, and that was certainly the case with the Ithklur material. But as we all know, GDW did not last long enough for that to be written and published, and so none of those ideas got developed. The Ithklur were never intended to be comprehended solely on the basis of H&I, but also with the addition of the follow-on materials which unfortunately did not emerge.
I do not regret the humor. But I will say that a part that I would probably do differently if I had it to do over is in handling the details of the 20th century humor in the material. There was a specific intent to use 20th century mass media humor, but it could perhaps have been nuanced better to prevent players from drawing the wrong conclusions than I was able to do under the time constraints.
I had toyed around for a while with the notion that in effect science fiction humor had to be translated into time/space-specific analogues (or homologues, depending on how you look at it). Humor is immediate, and is based on personal social experience. Once you start explaining, “well, in this society, A means B, and C means D, so when you say ‘X = Y,’ that’s funny,” the best you can get is a polite smile. True humor comes from the real experience of the reader, which in our case was 20th century consumers of Western culture. So the idea was that even if the 57th century joke was “Flrggt snrfled the farglecarb,” in 20th Century terms it would be as meaningful to say, “So Angel said to Rockford…” (or whatever) and so in a sense we could have some kind of Star Trek “universal translator” running to make the joke work in terms translated to 1994 English from the Galanglic. And so I filled in some segments with filler that hopefully I’d be able to go back to later and make some sense trans-galactic, trans-millenial, trans-racial sense of. In the event, there was not time to fiddle around with it any more, and as I said, there was a deliberate intent to use some 20th century humor, both for its immediate “whiskey tango foxtrot, over” effect and for its shortcutting of the verschuggene mrglkrats of Fernplatz 5 problem.
Either that, or it was the medication I was on. Who knows? As I recall, Rob Prior liked it, and that counts for something.
Actually, there is one more thing. H&I was the only Traveller book that we ever printed from pure electronic files, rather than physical paste-up pages that were photographed at the printer. That made it the cleanest, crispest, and best-looking Traveller product we ever did. We also did one issue of Challenge as pure electrons.
The problem was that there is a learning curve in doing pure electronic submissions, and our printer would only let us continue doing electrons if we had fewer than X number of errors or redos per job, and on those our first two attempts, we could not meet that standard, so either they stopped letting us do it, or they charged us so much extra that we had to decline doing it again.
Q: Was Aliens of the Rim V2 in the works?
A: In the works, like anything written? No. In the works, like we knew what we intended it to be? Yes, but I don’t remember. It might have initially been some alien races down by the RC, but the thinking might have been revised to fit in with the Regency line. In the case of the former, it would have been something like the Vegans or Schalli, not the Solomani, as they ain’t aliens. If the latter, obviously something like Zhodani or Daryens or Smurfs.
Q: Why couldn't you (well, GDW) release the Long Ships before you went under? Arrrrgh! The one I wanted the most....
A: Well, because we went under, and my attention at that point was focused on getting some Regency products out. I think that after I got out the Regency Starship Guide I was going to go back to the RC and work on something like Longships or the Belly of the Beast epic, but I don’t remember for sure. And of course all of that stuff was subject to change and reprioritization of effort. For example, I was also typesetting and art directing some of our books at the end, which took away time from design.
Loren had been working on deckplans for clipper modules on the side for a long time, but it was still along way from being done. All of those modules had to have their designs carefully checked, and revised, etc., and the deckplans then varied off of those. I happen to know that Loren is still working on those deckplans, and hopes to get them out as some e-books in the near future, and I am trying to help him out with some of that.
A: H&I was one of those horrifying projects where all of a sudden here the deadline was looming, and a satisfactory MS had not come in, and I had to come up with a book at the last minute.
In looking at the CT Hivers book for inspiration, I was struck by the fact that this was either a not very satisfactory piece of self-contradictory writing that said just about nothing, or a really brilliant piece of propaganda, and the conspiracy behind it was ripe for exposure. Until it was time to write this book we at GDW had frankly thought that all of this “manipulation” crap was a load of hooey, a pathetic self-glamorization equivalent to Madison Avenue marketing, or Republican-vs.-Democrat political advertisement. I.e., something that any teenager could see through and say, “so what?”
However, in the context of a science fiction game, that’s not very interesting. It’s a lot more interesting to think about whether some cabal of nefarious banana-heads really could get you group-thinking without your realizing it, and before you knew it, you really would be puppets dancing to their tune, incapable of stopping yourself. That’s a LOT more interesting in a science fiction roleplaying game, so I reversed all of our sophisticated, world-weary thinking, and pursued wheels within wheels within wheels within wheels. Having read Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, I was able to do this, and recreate in my mind the paranoia necessary to do so. So the Hiver side of the H&I symbiosis went pretty quickly.
That left the Ithklur. Up until that time, we had limited ourselves to a single illustration and character sketch, in “Star Vikings.” Having worked with our artists for a couple of years to try to figure out what the Ithklur looked like, I had basically determined to get as far away from their Poul Anderson Merseian models as we could, and Brad McDevitt and I (after working with Rob Lazzaretti) settled on a sort of lithe version of the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grimm.
So what were they supposed to be like? Great big intergalactic tough guys? What, Samurai (Aslan), Mafia (Vargr) or something else? Traveller had already done the testosterone-addled ST:TNG Klingon “you have no honor!” schtick, so what original was there to do? One of the under-appreciated meanings of the term “alien,” at least among science fiction audiences, is the sense of “different,” and “incomprehensible.” What is more incomprehensible than totally weird, inexplicable behavior? And what becomes of that objective fact in the face of the human compulsion to rationalize? Truly alien behavior should defy our ability to predict and anticipate, and yet just as we don’t allow a horsey-shaped cloud to remain simply a cloud, we have to impose some sort of descriptive order on this thing we don’t understand.
The fact that the Ithklur were established as a subject race of the Hivers, cunningly reinvented by manipulation over generations to be what the Hivers wished them to be, presented the answer. If you take seriously the notion of radical contingency, that your experience of reality is not necessary (i.e., potentially wrong), you know what true existential horror is, and that madness lies just around the corner. There was no point in making beret-wearing, Gaulloises-smoking nihilists, however. The idea was to attempt to model a race that had in some fashion snapped, but that had a strong enough sense of self that they were trying to fight against it….whatever it was, and whatever that struggle meant.
What the Ithklur know is that they hate the Hivers, and that they are dependent on the Hivers (which is a pretty heady brew on its own), and that whatever they are, that is supposedly what the Hivers intended them to be. Except that they hate the Hivers, which is not presumably what the Hivers intend, so part of them is their own, but maybe that’s just what the Hivers want them to think…Which really pisses them off, because they don’t want the Hivers to win, but what part of them is authentic, and what part of them was made by Hivers? What do they rebel against?
What they end up rebelling against is predictability and the Hivers in general, and what they end up taking as positive role models is humanity, because the one thing that they do know by spending as much time around the Hivers is that the Hivers are spending an awful lot of time trying to manipulate the humans, meaning that the humans are still wild and unspoiled, in the Ithklur terms, “unbowed.” So humans know something that the Hivers don’t, or are doing something that the Hivers don’t like, so that means that something about what the humans are doing is all right with the Ithklur, and the more ancient it is, the better, because that’s more likely to be untainted by Hiver influence. Much of the Ithklur use of human cultural references is an attempt to open communications with humans on topics that the Hivers cannot control (and that the Ithklur do not understand, so they can only speak in phonetically and hope that the humans will explain to them what it means, a vain hope at best, speaking as a human), and most of that just spirals into a feedback loop, which is the origin of the Santa Claus imagery, for example. Noting the accidental similarity of sound of their San*Klaass hero to a human folk hero, Ithklur thought this may be have been a sign of some significance and researched the human folktale. Finding some further random parallels with items of Ithklur adornment (nostril covers and a stiff conical hat), some Ithklur modified their items to be more similar to the human items, and in so doing discovered items that they liked for their own sake, such as the human design of jingle bells, which would eventually displace the native Ithklur-designed beads and become their traditional spontaneity bells. The attempt at subtle communication failed, but the fashion innovations remained. One important feature of this Ithklur fascination with human cultural details is the obsession to establish that it is an authentic human item, and not some piece of Hiver disinformation.
How that ended up coming out in the book is that the Hivers are the weird, deceptive, confusing force, and the Ithklur are those who have snapped under the pressure. And the most effective way to convey that snapping was just to present them as if they had gone crazy, which they had, and they knew it, and embraced it. And crazy looks funny, and funny is something which had not been done before in Traveller, and I won’t belabor those implications. Not funny with the intent of undermining the game’s basic pretense at “realistic” space opera, but funny in inside-the-game terms, where an Imperial human would notice that Vargr were this way, and Aslan were that, and Zhodani were another, but the Ithklur were just flat-out demented, and WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? How many times have you looked at the events of your life and noted that if you were an outsider looking in, rather than the poor sod caught in the gears, it would be funny? And if you were the poor sod, you might still have thought, “this is crazy.” That was the intent of the humor with the Ithklur, to say, “there is something crazy going on here.”
Now I will stipulate that it is possible that that intent did not get conveyed in a perfectly successful manner. That has to do with the finite amount of time, energy, and resources that were available for any project that we undertook. You had some time to do the work, and then you had to finish it, and get it out, because there were other projects to do. I will also stipulate that there were going to be follow-on projects to allow me to follow up and finish fleshing out the ideas, such as the “Into the Belly of the Beast” Epic adventure, to allow me to shore up what didn’t get done right at first. An idea is never conveyed well when it is not conveyed completely, and that was certainly the case with the Ithklur material. But as we all know, GDW did not last long enough for that to be written and published, and so none of those ideas got developed. The Ithklur were never intended to be comprehended solely on the basis of H&I, but also with the addition of the follow-on materials which unfortunately did not emerge.
I do not regret the humor. But I will say that a part that I would probably do differently if I had it to do over is in handling the details of the 20th century humor in the material. There was a specific intent to use 20th century mass media humor, but it could perhaps have been nuanced better to prevent players from drawing the wrong conclusions than I was able to do under the time constraints.
I had toyed around for a while with the notion that in effect science fiction humor had to be translated into time/space-specific analogues (or homologues, depending on how you look at it). Humor is immediate, and is based on personal social experience. Once you start explaining, “well, in this society, A means B, and C means D, so when you say ‘X = Y,’ that’s funny,” the best you can get is a polite smile. True humor comes from the real experience of the reader, which in our case was 20th century consumers of Western culture. So the idea was that even if the 57th century joke was “Flrggt snrfled the farglecarb,” in 20th Century terms it would be as meaningful to say, “So Angel said to Rockford…” (or whatever) and so in a sense we could have some kind of Star Trek “universal translator” running to make the joke work in terms translated to 1994 English from the Galanglic. And so I filled in some segments with filler that hopefully I’d be able to go back to later and make some sense trans-galactic, trans-millenial, trans-racial sense of. In the event, there was not time to fiddle around with it any more, and as I said, there was a deliberate intent to use some 20th century humor, both for its immediate “whiskey tango foxtrot, over” effect and for its shortcutting of the verschuggene mrglkrats of Fernplatz 5 problem.
Either that, or it was the medication I was on. Who knows? As I recall, Rob Prior liked it, and that counts for something.
Actually, there is one more thing. H&I was the only Traveller book that we ever printed from pure electronic files, rather than physical paste-up pages that were photographed at the printer. That made it the cleanest, crispest, and best-looking Traveller product we ever did. We also did one issue of Challenge as pure electrons.
The problem was that there is a learning curve in doing pure electronic submissions, and our printer would only let us continue doing electrons if we had fewer than X number of errors or redos per job, and on those our first two attempts, we could not meet that standard, so either they stopped letting us do it, or they charged us so much extra that we had to decline doing it again.
Q: Was Aliens of the Rim V2 in the works?
A: In the works, like anything written? No. In the works, like we knew what we intended it to be? Yes, but I don’t remember. It might have initially been some alien races down by the RC, but the thinking might have been revised to fit in with the Regency line. In the case of the former, it would have been something like the Vegans or Schalli, not the Solomani, as they ain’t aliens. If the latter, obviously something like Zhodani or Daryens or Smurfs.
Q: Why couldn't you (well, GDW) release the Long Ships before you went under? Arrrrgh! The one I wanted the most....
A: Well, because we went under, and my attention at that point was focused on getting some Regency products out. I think that after I got out the Regency Starship Guide I was going to go back to the RC and work on something like Longships or the Belly of the Beast epic, but I don’t remember for sure. And of course all of that stuff was subject to change and reprioritization of effort. For example, I was also typesetting and art directing some of our books at the end, which took away time from design.
Loren had been working on deckplans for clipper modules on the side for a long time, but it was still along way from being done. All of those modules had to have their designs carefully checked, and revised, etc., and the deckplans then varied off of those. I happen to know that Loren is still working on those deckplans, and hopes to get them out as some e-books in the near future, and I am trying to help him out with some of that.
