Well, there's no harm at all in creating a
Star Wars setting with the
Traveller rules, of course. Marc wanted people to do with it what they wanted. From his statement he was excited when he saw
Star Wars and knew that the movie would feed that appetite for the folks who were playing
Dungeons & Dragons.
More importantly, we look for inspiration when creating. Nothing is born whole cloth from imagination, and if you're a teenager or young adult trying to whip up an interstellar civilization of one kind or another, you're going to grab on to what is available. And, perhaps more importantly, you're going to grab onto what is
vivid. And
Star Wars sure is vivid. Lucas made a whiz bang soap-opera of the sort that had not been made for decades. In the previous ten years before
Star Wars, we had
Countdown, Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, Marooned, Moon Zero Two, Silent Running, Solaris, and
Barbarella. Aside from
Barbarella (which was a kind of gonzo-art-house version of pulp SF),
Star Wars was about as different in tone and feel for an SF movie as anyone could imagine. It was a surprise. It startled. It made an impression because, despite having deep roots, it was new to the popular movie going culture of that year. (This is why no one in Hollywood thought the movie was going to work. Because Hollywood doesn't trust anything that is different than what is right in front of them.)
But, as you point out, the text doesn't really support, you know,
Star Wars as such:
- The majority of weapons look like something you might have found in the Viet Nam war.
- The lack of whiz-bang weapons.
- The Jump Drive technology for interstellar travel.
- The computers.
- The lack of FTL communication.
- The "modest" size of the ships.
- The Player Characters all being generated out of a military service.
- A deadly combat system.
- Missiles and sandcasters; no shields for space combat
Certainly there are
Star Wars elements that
can map to Traveller (and/or
vica versa), like psionics, a noble class, a tramp freighter, and other details. But I think that's the brilliance of
Basic Traveller. It's a tool box with
lots of tools in it, to help people make what they want.
Using
Star Wars as inspiration for setting makes perfect sense. But, as you said, you'll be bumping your head against a lot of things that simply don't match. (By the way: I agree with you about Bespin and Cloud City being a wonderful setting for a
Traveller location.)
Fun Fact: I was never much of a
Star Wars fan. (I was like, "So, everyone's fighting with everyone else. But why? What are the politics? What makes the Empire evil? What is the agenda of the Rebellion?" Seriously, I was a weird kid.)
It was SF movies out after
Star Wars that always made me think of
Traveller:
Outland, Alien, Aliens. I watched those movies and thought, with surprise, "Hey, that reminds me of
Traveller." Which I guess is kind of weird, because I was always trying to figure out what the look and feel of the game was supposed to be -- and these movies provided that after the game was published. I had always been trying to sort the game out from what what was inside the game, rather than trying to put something on the game that didn't quite fit.
It was actually older movies (as I came across them) that really made me see the vision of
Traveller I'd like to play. Specifically, one night at a revival house I saw
The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston, Michael Caine, Sean Connery) and I thought, "Holy cow, that's a
Traveller adventure!"
In the movie we've got two soldiers drummed out of the military in a status conscious society. (Remember, the two of them do a whole routine knocking the queen and English nobility at the start of the film.) They admit they have limited skill sets (Soldiering, basically) and nowhere really to apply them now they they've been kicked out of the army. At the edge of a colonial empire they buy up a bunch of rifles and travel into the backwaters of Afghanistan where the guns will be a high-powered, advanced technology in order to train their own army and become kings themselves.
- We had protagonists created out of a military background
- We had high and low technology side-by-side (and used to exploit political dynamics)
- We had the fringe of a colonial empire (the reference to 18th Century ships in Book 1 always made me think of earth's colonial empires)
- We had adventuring into unknown backwaters and having adventures
- We had protagonists raised and trapped in class-conscious society (a revelation, as I felt like I finally understood what Social Standing was for as a characteristic (not just a bit of background detail) but something that could actually be part of the character)
- We had men with ambitions and skills and drive that would only find a home far from civilization, unleashed in extraordinary circumstances, and we'd see what would happen
None of this matches the color of an SF movie,
per se. But the
feel of the characters and the plot it seemed very much in tune what I had read in the Little Black Books out of the box.
But, of course, that's what
I saw in those
Traveller books in that little black box. Or, rather, I saw things in the LBBs and after I read them began seeing movies that matched what I saw in them.
etc etc.
