Originally posted by Cymew:
I actually bought "Survival Margin" a while ago and I found it not as interesting as everyone claimed. Maybe I just wasn't that interested in the "story" if it wasn't me playing it...
Survival Margin was a very strange supplement to me, like exceedingly odd. I enjoyed reading it, especially the TAS part (the part about why the Imperium fell wasn't so good, in my opinion).
However, TNE always seemed to me a game about the future, not about the past. The past is just that, the past. TNE was a "young" setting - and like most young people, history wasn't such a big concern as the present. Like idealistic 60s college students in space. The people of the RC seem indoctrinated into a black and white view that the Imperium was a terrible and decadent place, filled with sociopaths of different stripes who ended up killing each other off and destroying the best thing that humanity ever had. Idealists like that tend not to care about the specifics of history.
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I actually liked quite a bit of Nielsen's stuff. I liked the idea of The New Era a lot - a cataclysmic event that pretty much reduced the Traveller universe to rubble, in effect creating a new Long Night and civilization and hope springing a new from the cracks of the fallen civilization. Great stuff. Then there were three BIG problems with the setting that really turned me off of it:
* The Long Night turned out to be kinda of a short night. More like a total solar eclipse instead of a night. Somehow, you have massive devolutions in language, regression to tribal farming, hunter-gathering socities, shamanistic belief systems and other social developments generally considered to be Stone Age, but also being the hard-won social developments that are generally considered to have took thousands of years to develop on Earth ... all occuring just 70 years? Shennanigans. I found that hard to buy.
* TNE felt very much like a less of a roleplaying game and more of a vehicle to push GDW's or Nielsen's personal political views. I guess it was written shortly after when the Wall came down in Europe, but it became very tiring (for me) about this concept that "nobility = bad" and democracy is somehow presented as not only a form of government but as some Truth and the ultimate evolution of human thought and organization. To explain this (for us assumably dim readers) they had to give us not one, but two examples. You had Reformation Coalition, which is pretty obviously modelled after the United States between the end of the War of Independence and the adoption of the Consititution. Then have you have the Regency - who are supposedly keeping alive traditions of the Imperium - whose first step was to disenfranchise their nobility in favor of democracy (big fat WTF there ... nevermind that the system of nobility was like one of the cornerstones of the Third Imperium). Started by the unrealistically perfect figure of Archduke Norris (a guy who apparently couldn't ever make mistakes), these democratic reforms were welcomed by everyone ... well except for those evil, selfish anti-democratic nobles twisting their handlebar mustaches and wringing their hands and plotting away, and we all know they're evil because they're decadent and selfish and don't like democracy. The entire setting in the Regency very much seems based on the post World War I United Kingdom.
* The third was the condescending self-indulgence and tedency for GDW in those last days to increasingly go into strange tangents and injecting odd quirky humor (often at inoppurtune moments) that really got severe as time went on (H&I sourcebook anyone?). It really ruined a lot of what should have been "serious" moments.
But for the most part (besides some of the weird nation names in the book) Path of Tears avoids the pitfalls of the larger setting and is basically designed as a fun jumping off point for the universe of TNE. It's a great book and easily scavenged for ideas for adventures in a variety of frontier settings. I think most of it could be adapted for use in T4 with minimal effort, as well as D20 settings in frontier areas, like in the Client States.
EDIT - fixed some bad typos.