Creativehum, I think I see a point in the statement about the 'larger universe'.
In the same sense that say an outback village in the Third World can be it's eternal self, but iPhone's are arriving and thus they are being affected by this United States and computer/comms revolution even though they may have the vaguest of ideas about it all.
Another concept might be that the Travellers are experiencing a sort of childhood to adulthood maturation about the nature of the universe they are living in.
They only know about a few of the worlds they come from and travelled between before, but now are seeing a wider worldview (galaxyview?) and become aware of why things are the way they are, and maybe some things they want to change.
The sooner the ref 'knows'/decides about the larger backstory, the more it can be entwined with foreshadowing, and bigger adventures can be built.
The notion that you are proposing -- that the setting or the PCs are "naive" in some way is certainly a possibility, but that's generally not what I'm talking about.
I apologize for this, but I was finishing up a long post that the browser ate. I will make this brief:
Looking at the rules of original Traveller, one can look at the dangers of space travel, the difficulties of space travel, the rules for trade, the rules for how mail is delivered, and make a 1:1 anology of the setting of play (that is, where the PCs adventure) being a spot in the U.S. Territories before statehood, or areas of India under the control of British trading companies during the age of sail, or exploration down the Nile into Africa.
-- The Original Free Trader
Thus (again, as a direct anology), the PCs are former members of trained armed services (the Union, the Confederation, the British Empire) who head off to exotic lands in search of adventure, exploration, and fortune.
In this clear cut anology formed simply by reading the original rules, the subsector the Referee builds, then, might be a chunk of territory in the Punjab (as an anology). The PCs are not from Indian, nor naive about the worlds. They have TRAVELLED TO these lands (or mustered out there) and decided to make their fortunes away from society. They are British subjects making their way in a new world.
Again, reading the original rules of Traveller, before the introduction of any OTU material, makes this setup for play almost impossible to ignore, and almost a default setup for play.
The Empire is thousands of miles away, after months of travel. The adventure -- the setting of play that the Referee creates-- is in India.
The point is the Refree does't have to map all of India, Europe, and Great Britain to have adventures with former soldiers in a section of the Punjab. He doesn't need to deal with the royal politics and intrigue happening in London. He doesn't have to dig through countless Wikipedia entries about the royal lineage. The empire "back that way" is implied and suggested. We don't need to know the name of every king and queen going back 800 years, because that has little to do with
all the cool adventure stuff right in front of us to play with at the table in the setting the Referee worked up.
What he
needs to do is dig up some interesting tidbits about colonial India. He'll want details about the British trading companies, competitors from other countries. Adventure ideas from the local landscape. He needs to map out broadly the area of the campaign (in this case, a section of India). He needs to make a list of locations of ancient temples full of gold, assassin cults, other British treasure hunters, villages in need of mercenaries to protect them, and so on. That's the focus. That what he needs to prep.
In the same way the Referee for Traveller can make up a subsector far from the remote centralized government without having to a) deal with a map the whole centralized government and all it controls; and b) obsess about every detail about that centralized government... Because the adventure is happening on
these worlds in the subsector, far from the centralized government.
Does that make sense?
