I would say there is another element that is involved with you using the Third Imperium or not, besides that of the "scale" of conflict, and that is the nature of the setting itself.
For some people, The Third Imperium is exactly what they would want. (Some people here seem incapable of envisioning anything else.) And that's great.
But for some of us, The Third Imperium is bland. I know some of you might say, "But there's so much!" And great. You love it. That's great. But for a lot of us, not so much.
It's important to note that LBBs 1-3 are
light on on Science-Fiction. It's isn't just the archaic weapons I'm talking about. I'm pointing out that the original rules contained:
- Jump Drive Technology for Interstellar Travel
- Interstellar Civilizations
- Interstellar Communication Moves at the Speed of Interstellar Travel
- Indigenous Life Forms on Countless Worlds
- Psionics
- Cold Sleep
- Grav Vehicles
- Advanced Drugs
- Laser Canons
- Laser Rifles
And that's it for the SF elements.
Most of that list is built of daily life stuff that most PCs would not find mysterious or startling. The SF elements in LBBs are both bland and routine for the most part.
That's because Miller expected people who played
Traveller to mine the SF books they read and use those at the "sourcebooks" for their Traveller games. A "conservative" SF sensibility allowed the basic rules to port to any other strange environments the Referee created. But, importantly, it was assumed the Referee would create strange environments, alien races, new technologies, and all the stuff that the Referee would love to share with is Players as their characters traveled from world to world.
But when GDW built the OTU, how strange and colorful were the worlds and alien races that showed up? Well, apart from the Ancients and their genetic-engineering shenanigans, the OTU universe is... no more colorful or strange than the basic setting details presented in the LBBs 1-3. What was a conservative baseline for the basic rules became the definition of the SF for the OTU.
Here is a sample world from MgT's THE REFT SECTOR:
Racha is a small gas giant orbited by a collection of small planetoids its gravity has captured over the millennia. None of these moons is large enough to support a colony, but some are big enough to be worth mining. So thought the crew of the asteroid-hulled sublight colony ship ColSec Mariner when they arrived several centuries ago. ColSec Mariner was placed in a parking orbit around the gas giant, and gradually changed its name to Mariner Colony. From this artificial moon, the colonists began to exploit the mineral deposits of the secondary system’s scattered planetoids, obtaining hydrocarbons and petrochemicals from Racha’s atmosphere.
Mariner Colony did well, reaching a population of about 100,000 at its peak. This has declined somewhat but the colony remains entirely viable. Although there are no moons suitable for habitation orbiting Racha, the scattered planetoids of the secondary system include a number that could be, and indeed have been, settled. Thus Mariner Colony has fathered a brood of small belter settlements. These are self-governing, using the same system of semi-hereditary officers as the main colony.
Mariner’s engines remain functional, and are occasionally used to change orbit or to visit a planetoid chosen for seeding with a colony. There is even some talk of transferring most of the population to the planetoid colonies and loading up with minerals for a trading voyage back to the main system. This is doable in terms of technology and practicalities, but it would cause considerable disruption to the populace whilst probably not being economically viable.
Thus for the time being Mariner Colony remains a mobile planetoid habitat which is usually a temporary moon of the gas giant Racha. The planetoid population (including Mariner) trade with Svaneti. This mainly takes the form of raw materials for food, but skills and experience are often traded, and personnel will sometimes marry into another society. Relations are friendly, though there is nothing even resembling a formal government- to-government embassy.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and point at that most worlds written up in OTU material are pretty much like this. A little bit about a not particularly intriguing environment, a little bit about some trade, a little bit about some politics. Usually things are fairly stable. Usually nothing particularly interesting is happening. And if something interesting is happening it will be about trade or politics, and rarely at all involving any sort of SF theme or idea.
(Out on a limb not because I'm wrong, but because someone might show up with an outlandish exception. Great. There are exceptions. And those will prove the point. Again, I'm looking at the overall write-ups of OTU worlds.)
Now, for some people, great. They want a space setting that feels pretty much like earth in the 20th Century, except you need space ships to travel around, and instead of having bland bureaucrats that are addressed Mr. or Ms., they are given noble titles.
But let's look at the references for
Traveller material before the OTU came into existence:
In the back of
Supplement 1: 1001 Characters (1978), nine characters from fiction are described and statted as
Traveller PCs. These characters are:
- John Carter
- Kimball Kinnison
- Jason dinAlt
- Earl Dumarest
- Beowulf Shaeffer
- Anthony Villiers
- Dominic Flandry
- Kirth Girsen
- Gully Foyle
I'm going to be both blunt and quick here:
These are the characters in the stories that inspired Marc Miller to create
Traveller. I challenge anyone to go do some googling, dig up some of the books, read about the stories and the settings (or better yet, read them), and come back and tell me that the splendor, wonder, weirdness, color, SF-themes, and settings are as straightforward, mundane, and perfunctory as most of the material in the OTU.
(I will exempt The Stainless Steel Rat books from this challenge, as they fit to the temple of OTU world-buidling aesthetics rather closely. But most of us are familiar, at least as a reference with John Carter. When you think of the OTU as developed over the years, do you imagine anything as bold and over the top as Burroughs' world? The other characters and their settings are worth investigating for their adventure and playfulness as well.)
Some of us want worlds and settings that are strange, and wondrous, and places to explore, and to astound our players with unexpected wonders, and so on. And the fact is, the world-building aesthetics of the OTU have never been particularly friendly to that kind of world-building.
But there are some great mechanics in various editions of
Traveller that work fantastically well independent of any OTU setting. In fact, when Miller sent Traveller off to the printer, he assumed (like Gary Gygax before him, sending D&D off to the printer) his work was done. He had built a game for people to be inspired by books he loved and go make those setting for their games with the mechanical framework he had provided.
For some of us, that's exactly what we want to do with the game. And for some of us, the OTU isn't what we would want from a far-future SF setting. And so we'd make something else for our friends.
Again, this isn't that big a deal.
People should play in the kinds of settings they want. If the OTU works for you, great.
