Meanwhile, I've had entire parties of movers and shakers - one party centered around a Duke from the Noble Career who was involved in working for Norris to negotiate the end of the 5FW, and every PC was on a first name basis (at least outside the view of the press) with His Grace Norris Duke Regina and Her Grace Delphine Duchess Mora.
I had another campaign where Strephon was still unmarried, and seeing one of the PC's...
... She was a peer...
... but that ended when she died. From surgery. Elective surgery.
I've had players playing the movers and shakers...
@CreativeHum
The S1 list isn't "the inspirations list"...
The S4 list is equally as informative...
- 1. Luke Skywalker, from Star Wars, by Gene Lucas.
- 2. James "Slippery Jim" di Griz, from The Stainless Steel Rat, by Harry Harrison.
- 3. Sargeant Major Calvin, from Sword and Sceptre, and The Mercenary, by Jerry Pournelle.
- 4. Senior Physician Conway, from the Sector General series, including Major
- Operation and Ambulance Ship, by James White.
- 5. Jame Retief, from the Retief series, including Galactic Diplomat and Retief's War, by Keith Laumer.
- 6. Lord Darth Vader, from Star Wars, by Gene Lucas.
- 7. Harry Mudd, from Star Trek.
- 8. Simok Artrap, from The Stars, Like Dust, by Isaac Asimov.
Only 3 are very pulpy at all: Slippery Jim, Luke and his father.
CT 77 included a lot of reasonable speculation, much of which doesn't fit many of the pulps. And the list above shows that classic pulps aren't the sole inspirations.
Far more telling is that large swathes of the OTU are grounded firmly in CJ Cherryh, Issac Asimov, and Doc Smith. Doc Smith was a failed projection.
As for Psionics... A great many otherwise hard settings have Psi. And more than 10% of the population believe in it as plausible. It's inclusion is one of those "Sure, right, whatever,
" moments for many, but thoroughly plausible for not a few. And those not a few tend to be disproportionately more highly represented in the RPG player base.
Hi Wil,
First, I too am always envious and in awe of the high level campaigns you design and play. They always sound great.
Second, I didn't mean to say the list from Supplement 1 was an "inspirational" list for Classic Traveller. All I was saying is that when Miller grabbed a bunch of fiction off the top of his head, that was the list he grabbed. I think it's telling. Others might not.
Third, yes, Asimov and other others you name are certainly influential for the Official Traveller Universe. But as I, others, and even you have noted, there's no straight line from LBBs 1-3 to the OTU. This isn't to say there's anything wrong with the OTU or it shouldn't exist. The entire point of LBBs 1-3 is to serve as a toolkit to build whatever setting someone wanted. GDW wanted the Third Imperium, and the expanded and altered ideas from the toolkit to make what they wanted.
Fourth, when I do talk about inspirational fiction for LBBs 1-3, I simply go to what
Miller said himself in a Space Gamer interview from 1981 and other interviews.
In these interviews Miller always makes it clear:
a) there was never any assumption GDW would be producing an official setting when the gang was working on
Traveller (everyone assumed the purpose of an RPG rules set was for the Referee to build his own setting for his friends to explore)
b) he seldom names the books and authors most people who love the OTU name when describing the OTU. (In the interview linked to above the first names out of his mouth are
The Demon Princes series, the
Flandry series, and the
Dumarest series.
Now, those book are fun entertaining pulp adventure stories. But anyone reading them with an eye toward "real" or "speculative fiction" would have to dismiss them.
I'm not sure of what you think of them, though. What do you think of them?
I do know you recently posted about how you received an email from Miller clarifying that LBBs 1-3 were not striving to be Hard SF, but, instead, the pulp tales he mentions in interviews. So, I'm not exactly sure how what I'm saying is particularly controversial or worthy of argument.
Now, I might be defending pulp differently than you! So, it occurs to me you might be drawing your lines differently than I am. But, again, none of the series listed by Miller are speculative nor have any regard for actual science. They have the
feel of reality, yes. And that's due to solid writing. But they aren't SF in the way you seem to suggest the OTU is. (If I'm misreading you, again, apologies.)
Finally, all of this is neither here nor there. The OTU took root in a specific way around 1981, it kept growing, becoming the assumption for many, many players. (Not all. Off this board, when I wander the internet, I find most people using CT don't use the OTU, but in stead are happy building their own settings. This board is, of course, self-selective.)
For many people Traveller is the setting, the rules don't matter. It's a kind of SF with a Hard SF edge, a certain kind of feel in a specific setting, and that's great.
My own bugbear has been that when I first arrived on this site to talk about CT and the cool possibilities contained in LBBs 1-3 a few folks kept showing up to tell me I was doing everything wrong because "that's not how it works in the Third Imperium." Even when I made it clear that I wasn't interested in the Third Imperium, folks showed up with the logic underlying the Third Imperium to say, "Well, this is how it has to work." (Note, of course, that one could easily use the CT rules play in settings like
The Demon Princes books, the
Flandry books, and the
Dumarest books and those settings aren't anything like the Third Imperium! Note further the entire notion of interstellar civilizations is suspect, so anyone speaking of how it would
really work as if talking about how a car engine works is someone to gently walk away from.)
It struck me as weird that there was only one way one was supposed to use the rules, so, I dug further into the rules, found interviews with Miller, read the books he mentioned (which are a blast), and was able to dig the LBBs 1-3 out from under decades of OTU development.
I'm content now with what I found -- keys of a sort to the kind of game that inspired me when I first found the rules when I was a teenager -- but a kind of game that became stranger and less interesting the more OTU material I ended up buying. It was a personal project, but one I've loved.
My RPG time is limited, and I'm running another game now, but I look forward setting up a Traveller game in the future. It probably will probably be like the Noble House conflicts found in
Dune, along with the fantastical situations and environments found in both
Dune and the kinds of fantastical SF environments and situations in the books that originally inspired Miller for the game.
I think it'll be a blast. And really, that's all that matters.
