Traveller's direction; history and future

[Blue Ghost]

Well, one of the dichotomies of Traveller is that it stems from a near setting-less background with undefined world, to an established well fleshed out background with all kinds of defined worlds.

In the days of yore you generated new worlds for your players; some of those world would be stone age, others might be magic-tech like, and the Traveller rule-set was there to help structure play. Therefore TL for worlds wasn't the "big issue" it is now because as you jumped from world to world you would meet "strange new worlds ... seek out new life forms, and new civilizations, to boldly go...."

To me, the whole tech-level thing is ridiculous on the one hand, and quite apropos on the other. It's ridiculous because I have a hard time thinking that tech does not bleed or just get shipped from one system to the next, in particular within the Imperium.

On the other hand, there are, in the pre-official TU, worlds with magic-tech that simple don't want their stuff spread about that neck of the galaxy.

 

[rancke]

To me, the whole tech-level thing is ridiculous on the one hand, and quite apropos on the other. It's ridiculous because I have a hard time thinking that tech does not bleed or just get shipped from one system to the next, in particular within the Imperium.

It's a quite common trope in classic SF of the kind that inspired Traveller. It's a recurring thread in Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League stories. Worlds that don't have resources valuable enough to be able to buy the technology needed to upgrade their infrastructure (Apparently bootstrapping becomes expensive at ultra-tech levels). Other authors have low-tech (or poor-tech) worlds too. Vance, Piper, Chandler, de Camp, ...


Hans

 

[creativehum]

On the other hand, there are, in the pre-official TU, worlds with magic-tech that simple don't want their stuff spread about that neck of the galaxy.

Because of some really smart info handed to me on these boards, I've come to see that in CT LBB Book 2 there are lots of limitations on both the size and J-capability of ships based on a world's tech level. Thinking this through with the fact that only A Class Starports are capable of building starships it occurred to me that the technology of starships, specifically, is a rare and precious thing in the implied Traveller universe.

It then occurred to me there might be a reason for this. If starships are the method by which key players in interstellar politics protect their interests and project their power, the ability to make sure that they -- and only they -- can build, sell, license ships and so forth is a huge deal.

It seemed to me that espionage at the level of basic starship ship construction, as well as possible espionage or direct attacks at A Class Starworts would be the name of the day. Engineering and shipbuilding plans would be a big bright target for theft...

And yet... to build a starship requires an A class starport. Which is a big thing in-and-of itself. If word got out a world was suddenly building such thing, well... it would be a magnet for trouble.

I'm thinking now of the Age of Sails, of course, where European capitals always had an ear out for any new technologies, ideas, or novel ship designs their foes (and allies) were cooking up.

[Note: I'm new to these boards. This might all have been covered eighteen times over.]

In the OTU it seems like technology (apart from plot McGuffins for adventures) is freely distributed across the Imperium for the sake of keeping trade moving. But in my experience, both looking at history and my own country's patent and intellectual property laws, secrecy and blocking the sharing of ideas and technology is the name of the game. And this feels like it would be more at home in a Proto-Traveller setting, based primarily on LBBs 1-3, which is exactly what I'm looking for.

I think in the Traveller game I'm building there will be some steep disparity of technology in nearby worlds. But I'm pretty sure that those who have it will work hard to make sure they have some key technologies... and others never get it. Not only does it feel quite "real," it's one more source of tension, situation, and adventure.

 

[rancke]

It's not really a viable secret if several hundred worlds have it.

Also, you don't need a class A starport to build starships. You need a TL9+ shipyard. There a rule in High Guard that worlds with the requisite tech level can build starships regardless of its starport rating.

You do need a shipyard that builds ships for the civilian market to get an 'A' rating for your starport. In other words, if you have a shipyard that only builds ships for the navy (or for a single company or otherwise limited group of people), it doesn't count towards a Class A starport rating.


Hans

 

[creativehum]

Thanks for pointing that out about High Guard. Again, I'm only working from Books 1-3, and then building my assumptions out from there. But it is good to have that pointed out.

As for what counts as a viable industrial secret and what doesn't... you and I, I suspect, are always going to have different views on that. (I'm not bothered by that or anything. It's just an observation.)

 

[Blue Ghost]

creativehum; that's an interesting observation on starship tech.

 

[salochin999]

On tech bleeding - a lot of countries in the world today that couldn't design or build F16s have an air force full of F16s but a lot of those countries either have foreign technicians maintaining those planes or they don't fly.

So I assume a lot of low tech planets will have a boss man in a TL12 grav maintained and flown by an offworld technician / driver with a shady past.

Saudi Arabia is a good example of a country with limited manufacturing ability but lots of hi tech imports.

 

[creativehum]

A follow up on this:

I'm seeing the "mortgage" on a ship as more of a licensing fee, or even a patent of sorts (to keep the whole European-Nobiity-Age-of-Salis thing going) with ownership granted as part of the carrot for a loyal customer. (Of course, it's a bit of a mugs game, since making those payments for all those decades is tough.)

Since I like the idea of local nobles having a lot more authority than implied in the OTU -- with Nobles being responsible for raising their own armies and fleets (which leads to a lot more political/military shenanigans*) -- the financing for a ship would probably be through a noble house's shipyards (owned or co-owned) which is in part how the noble keeps his coffers lined.

Either way, following the logic in my first post on this matter, if you try to skip off with the ship, they really will come after you.

*Which is better for PCs, because slippery cracks in hierarchy and political instability means more adventure.

 

[creativehum]

On tech bleeding - a lot of countries in the world today that couldn't design or build F16s have an air force full of F16s but a lot of those countries either have foreign technicians maintaining those planes or they don't fly.

So I assume a lot of low tech planets will have a boss man in a TL12 grav maintained and flown by an offworld technician / driver with a shady past.

Saudi Arabia is a good example of a country with limited manufacturing ability but lots of hi tech imports.

Yes. Exactly.

And I'm also looking at how much effort goes into sabotaging countries that somehow get tech specs and start building things that other nations don't want them building.

First there's the tech bleed. And then there's the tech building. Both of them can lead to espionage, subterfuge, spec-ops, and stand-up fighting.

Which is, again, good for PCs, because that's good for adventures.

 

[rancke]

Again, I'm only working from Books 1-3, and then building my assumptions out from there.

I keep forgetting that. But in any case, since this is a forum for general Traveller discussions, my comments are not just aimed at you, but at anyone who might like to know about the ramifications of general developments during those 35 years that has followed after the publication of Book 1-3.

Incidentally, Book 1-3 rules out restricted starship sales since anyone (i.e. any PC) with the requisite amount of money can go to any Class A starport and buy a ship. The rules say so.

So if you have a world where the ruler maintains a monopoly on shipbuilding and refuses to sell to just anybody (or anybody at all), what starport class is it? It's not Class A, because you can't get the services the rules say you can get at a Class A starport. And it's not any other class, because it can build starships.


Hans

 

[creativehum]

I hadn't realized I had said anyone could be refused service in the above posts.

I was, however, not clear in my post that the twist of the patent on a ship loan was a specific twist on the rules I was coming up with for my Traveller game. I was extending the line of thinking I'd already worked out in previous posts -- it seems to make sense and be intriguing -- but if it sounded like I was inferring this as the rules, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply it was in the rules as such.

That said, the rules only say, regarding the loan, "The bank." And since Basic Traveller is a toolkit when it comes to setting, there's no reason to think that it couldn't be a Noble House running the loans on ships.

I have no idea if a bank (whether ruled by a Noble House, or not) would turn down an applicant for a ship (after all, I pointed out in my scenario the Noble Houses makes money off the patents, so they want their ships to sail out). But I do know that banks turn down people all the time. That is, roleplaying-wise, if the PCs have managed to rack up 15 counts of larceny and theft and are known as criminals, there's a chance they can't get a loan for a multi-million dollar ship no matter who owns that bank. There are reasons that someone might not get a mortgage.

That said, again, I wasn't trying to keep people from buying ships. So I don't where you're coming in with this concern.

As for the Class A Starport: It's still a Class A Starport. The port can finance starships with 20% down and a monthly payment for a fixed amount of decades. I haven't in any structural way changed anything found in Book 2.

The only thing I probably did is make who the PCs decide to go get a ship from more interesting in this setup, since they are now negotiating with a specific Noble House. And they might take an interest in how each house conducts itself.

That's some nice color for the fiction. It sets up interesting conflicts. Ties the PCs into politics they might not have otherwise gotten involved with. Seems solid to me.

Again, that contradicts nothing in the Basic Traveller rules... which, of course, were designed to be expanded upon from the basic assumptions in the game. Basic Traveller was a toolkit to build one's own universe.

As for the nature of the thread... From the original post:

"When I first picked up the game it was 'D&D in Space', with no real hard background, and a lot of suggestion of how to apply the rules to your gaming tastes.

"Traveller has now evolved into a hard setting with a definite history, but also has lots of room for generalities in terms of developing house rules, pocket universes and importing known sci-fi settings using the current rules.

"Does anyone think that Traveller can still be a generic RPG, or is it more now a creature unto itself with its own established background?"

I am discussing exactly this.

 

[Blue Ghost]

It's an interesting notion, and one that I'm sorry wasn't thought of before, but it makes a lot of sense that in some regions of the Imperium, or anyplace else with an aristocratic social structure and/or nobility, that part of being a noble is that you are granted a license from the sovereign to finance and/or build ships.

What's interesting is that as Traveller was evolving, and new LBBs were being put on the rack in the back of the game store, you never knew what to expect in the new books. Aramis or someone said that Loren had a "Star Wars"-ish vision for Traveller, and one can definitely see shades of that, but clearly the way the rules and setting are presented, there's something that's far more open to interpretation and use, and that's not just because of a need to stay away from "official Star Wars" stuff, but by the very nature of the game.

I'm sorry for repeating myself here; but I think the long of the short of it is that it would help the game and players to push the boundaries a little. I think this way Traveller can dust off the crown as the premier sci-fi RPG, and we can all have more to talk about here, and, hopefully, I can write and play again with one of my favorite hobbies.

Some interesting conjectural titles to stir imaginations;
"Traveller; 'Aliens'"
"Traveller; Anime"
"Traveller; Doctor Who"
"Traveller; John Carter of Mars"
"Traveller; First Men in the Moon"
"Traveller; Kaiju"
"Traveller; Parallel Dimensions"

Again, some of those things are verboten territory for the current Traveller establishment, but, without going all fantasy-like, it would be interesting to see how traditional characters and players who are used to gunning it out with pirates, guarding corporate treasures, or even doing the odd merc job or espionage, deal with something that's a bit more fantastic, and see how the rules can help run a very fun gaming session with players using everything from revolvers to FGMPs.

I think I mentioned Whipsnade had a story where his players were near the event horizon of a black hole, and he was using the Traveller rule set to run that game. Was it set in the OTU? I can't remember. But if it were, then his players had some pretty high-falutin tech to keep them from getting sucked in and crushed. But that's the magic of great story telling

Thanks for the replies. I may post more, but I think I'm done for now.

 

[creativehum]

I think the "fantastical" dial is something that can be turned up at any table.

I was looking at a randomly generated UWP a couple of nights back, and after staring at it for a while I realized I was looking at a warring, Tech 1 populace who live on mountainsides above plains and valleys of tainted atmosphere and ride small dragon-like creatures to raid each other. The LBBs provide the PCs with rules for primitive weapons, learning the new skills of a dragon rider, a flexible system for using that skill in combat or crisis situations. And so on.

That's not only Traveller by the rules, it's Traveller in the spirit of the original three LBBs. I would insist, however, you'd be hard pressed to find such a world in the setting that got built up around the game.

I'm going to be hard here -- but this is the thread's subject -- but I think the Third Imperium's structure crushed a lot of the freewheeling fun that should have been available out of the box. The fictional framework works hard to iron out strangeness. Again, it need not, but when you take the basic assumptions of the game and couple them with all-controlling, utterly efficient Imperium (which certainly how the setting read to me years ago) there's not a lot of breathing room for the strange.

That said, of course, as has been said many times before, the players at the table can do whatever they want. (And they do! I think it would stun some people here how many people play Traveller wrong, wrong, wrong.)

Now, that all said, Blue Ghost, I think you're suggesting that with some licensed properties, Traveller would really fly.

I think there are two things to consider:

When Marc said you could do anything with Traveller, I think he meant you could establish all sorts of specific stories, situations, and imaginative shenanigans on the worlds the Travellers travel to. That is, the game structure wasn't designed to recreate the entire universe of a particular setting. (The Jump technology, for example, is very specific and works against lots of other settings.) But the PCs, living within the framework of the implied Traveller setting, could end up on a Barroom-like planet, meet a time traveler, and so on. I think this was the expectations of the game. Or, rather, it was one expectation. Your Travellers could go from one outlandish situation after another. Or the group could build a much more consistent SF universe with no setting-breaking ideas at all. And, most probably, the dial could be turned between these two poles.

But here's a point I have to make: Licensing is often seen as some sort of marketing grail by folks in the hobby. But the fact is...no. Having the Star Wars license didn't guarantee West End Games success. And I can promise you, chasing those licensing fees (and dealing with all the endless product review by LucasFilm) takes up time and money that doesn't guarantee any payoff.

I think all sorts of Setting-Packs that show off how flexible the system might be a good idea. I get the feeling Mongoose is kind of walking this line. (Maybe not! I haven't kept up with it!) But they already have a dial within the core rules for Hard SF and Space Opera. But you could go further and have the Planetary Romance Sourcebook. The Exploration of New Worlds Sourcebook. The Tech of a Certain Level is Like Magic Sourcebook. People would get confused of course ("Are these official? Are they their own settings? Or do are they all in the Third Imperium?" But people get confused. And the older I get the less concerned I am with this fact. The answers to those questions are, of course, "Do what you want!")

Those are just some thoughts. But I think there are possibilities there with MgT. They are doing a good job of separating out Traveller as a game, and the Third Imperium as a possible setting with their books. I think the mistake they are making is chasing licenses. They could, GURPS-like, come up with books that show the application of the rules in different kinds of settings to show off the game. I think the kind of thing you are thinking about. But I think you should think about tweaking it a bit.

Edit, for a final thought:

Dune, of course, showed us how to marry the Vast Interstellar Empire with the Fantastical SF. Something to keep in mind. Certainly, it's something I'm going to keep in mind!

 

[rnadams2]

This entire discussion is pretty fascinating. I started playing Traveller in the late 70s, when there were only three LBBs, so I know the feeling of wide-open possibilities that comes with a game that leaves the setting entirely up to its players.

How would the game have evolved if the Third Imperium setting had been marketed separately from the rules, similar to the way Greyhawk and The Forgotten Realms are presented for D&D? Would there have been tie-ins, Like Star Wars, Aliens, Battlestar Galactica, et. al.? Would there have been more creative original settings made available, more opportunities for licensees to produce original content and tie it to the Traveller game system? None of that really matters now, of course. Since MegaTraveller, game and setting have been presented as one and the same. But the underlying fact remains, and always will: the people actually playing the game are free to make the game fit into whatever setting they desire.

But I've always kept Traveller and the 3I separate in my mind anyway--to me they're two different things; Traveller can exist without the 3I and the 3I can exist without Traveller, as evidenced by the GURPS/d20/Hero incarnations of the setting.

I guess that's why, at the heart of it all, I find the many discussions over the minutia of canon to be ridiculous. Yeah, I get it, if you're going to play within the setting, you ought to be true to it, but what if your players have high aspirations to alter the course of major events? What if they succeed in, say, foiling the assassination of the Emperor?

As I said, this is a fascinating topic. I like the 3I setting, but I don't ever want to be stifled by it. I'd love to see where Traveller⁵ could take the game if given a little separation from the Third Imperium--remove references to the setting from the rulebook and produce a setting sourcebook for the Third Imperium.

Then produce another sourcebook set in a completely different setting and see what happens.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Well, we're obviously thinking along the same lines.

One of the first adventures I ran was Shadows, and that was after a friend of mine took me through some D&D sessions to show me how RPing was done. Prior to that it had been Dwarfstar's solo adventure series (great fun, very cinematic, and I really wanted to film those...).

The second adventure I ran was taking some players in a small smash and grab on a research station on some far flung planet. This was before we really knew all of the setting, and we were still feeling our way around the then loosely defined OTU. Long story short, my players had fun. Then I ran Death Station, and they had a blast. And so it went.

But for all those adventures I or someone else ran, we never really referenced the OTU much, if at all. I think I actually did toss in some artifacts from films, like a light saber, or the gyroscopically mounted LMG from "Aliens" (great fun).

Like Aramis said, Loren had a vision for Trav all those years ago, and it seemed to veer towards a SW-ish / Honor Harrington kind of venue. Not that that was bad, but like you say, for the future of Traveller, perhaps "original intent" is what's called for for future supps.

T5 seems to address some of the higher technologies, but it still feels weighed a bit by the OTU. Just my gut impression.

Okay, now I'm really off for a bit. Great responses.

 

[Timerover51]

Just a couple of thoughts about technology spread. The 3rd Imperium is a bit over 1100 years old, with prior to that the Rule of Man, and the First Imperium. Jump Drive has been around for a few thousand years, same with star and space ships. That also means that fusion power plants have been around for a few thousand years, along with maneuver drives of one form or another.

Now, think about how many plans for ships have been made over those years, along with ships being built and power plants being built. Do you really expect that all of that information is going to simply vanish, or somehow stay locked up somewhere? The time between the collapse of the Rule of Man and the founding of the Third Imperium is over 1700 years. From the First Imperium founding, you are looking at over 5000 years.

Add into the mix in the OTU the Vargr, a loosely organized race of basically pirates; the Sword Worlds, a much more organized group of pirates who do not like the Imperium; the Solomani, who bear no love whatsoever for the Imperium; the Darrians, who had a very advanced civilization until the Solar Flare, and in whose Alien Module it is specifically stated that there are data caches that have been deserted for centuries; along with the Aslan, always hungry for more land; and the Droyne as somewhat of a Wild Card due to Ancients technology.

All of those are potential sources of information on ships, drives, power plants (although the nature of much of future society is going to depend on large amounts of power), weapons, and pretty much anything else you can imagine. And that is just the official OTU.

Case in point in the Real World. Phosgene was the most lethal chemical agent in World War 1. Mustard agent caused more casualties, but Phosgene killed more people. The manufacturing process for both of them is widely available at the present time. That for Phosgene appears in a standard text book for chemical engineers. A plant capable of producing a least a ton a day of either substance can be erected in a tall two-car garage.

Multiply the above by several thousand years and several thousand planets.

Would anyone care to speculate on what might happen if a Droyne Sport with Leader skill or a Droyne Leader finds one of those Ancient sites on Fulacin with the result that the base does not self-destruct? If you want to really have a wild OTU, let that happen. Or maybe let someone find the Control room on the satellite of Victoria, and let them check out the asteroids that can be commanded to crash into the planet. Care to think of the power plants and drives on them?

 

[Timerover51]

The Alien from the movie "Alien", appears in JTAS No. 4, page 28. It is referred to as the Reticulan Parasite.

John Carter of Mars appears in in Supplement 1, 1001 Characters, page 43, with a full Traveller Universal Personality Profile. Note, do not allow your character to challenge him to a sword fight.

 

[rancke]

I hadn't realized I had said anyone could be refused service in the above posts.

You didn't. I used it as an example.

You stated, as a fact, that starships could only be built on worlds with class A starports. I contradicted you, citing an HG rule in support. You replied that you were only using Book 1-3. I pointed out that interpreting Book 1-3 to mean that you can only build starships on worlds with class A starports led to a self-contradiction in such cases as the one I posited.

I was, however, not clear in my post that the twist of the patent on a ship loan was a specific twist on the rules I was coming up with for my Traveller game.

I thought that as you hadn't posted in the IMTU forum, you were making a more general argument/suggestion and were interested in more general replies.

That said, the rules only say, regarding the loan, "The bank." And since Basic Traveller is a toolkit when it comes to setting, there's no reason to think that it couldn't be a Noble House running the loans on ships.

It's hard to get a monopoly on money. If a shipbuilder can force the customer to take his loan from a specific source, it needs some sort of leverage. Such as owning the shipyard.

It is worth noting that with the Book 3 world generation system, a lot of worlds are not run by nobles. A setting where all worlds are under the sway of monarchs is certainly conceivable, but you can't get it by using Traveller RAW.

There are reasons that someone might not get a mortgage.

Certainly. But is the refusal to kowtow to the local ruler one of them or can the hopeful shipbuyer just go somewhere else?


Hans

 

[creativehum]

We're about to go down a rabbit hole far from the fields of this thread, so I'll respond to timerover's solid points here:

1) As mentioned a few times upthread (and in keeping with the spirit of this thread) the premise of the posts I've made so far involve jettisoning any concerns for the Third Imperium or the Official Traveller Universe. So... no Vargr, no Alien Modules, and so on. I'm addressing what happens when you use LBBs 1-3 as if you were using the books from the Original D&D to make up your own Universe, still sticking with the tools in the books. There's no right answer of course. The permutations are infinite. I'm offering an example of where my imagination is going these days. I'm saying, "Yes, there's a cool game called Basic Traveller that is not at all hardwired to the OTU." And so, any concerns about tightly guarded monopolies on interstellar technology (back up with violence if the tech leaks) can't be torpedoed by OTU canon. Because I don't care about OTU canon.

2) Second, yes... I'm saying the knowledge can be lost through generations of societal collapse.

Here's an example: The Lost Art of the Saturn V

But on the other hand, building the rocket at such a rate and with so many subcontractors means the people who oversaw and understood the actual assembly and overall working of the Saturn V were few. Each contractor recorded the workings of their stage and records survive about the engines used, but only a handful of engineers from the MSC knew how Saturn V puzzle fit together.

It is possible to work backwards to recreate individual aspects of the technology, but the men who knew how the whole vehicle worked are gone. No one alive today is able to recreate the Saturn V as it was.

Worse is the lack of records. Without a planned used for the Saturn V after Apollo, most of the comprehensive records of the rockets inner workings stayed with the engineers. Any plans or documents explaining the inner workings of the completed rocket that remain are possibly living in someone’s basement, unknown and lost in a pile of a relative’s old work papers.

Two Saturn Vs remain today as museum pieces, but it is likely that the rocket will never see a rebirth and reuse in manned spaceflight.

Yes, NASA put men on the moon with 1960s technology, but that technology doesn’t exist anymore. By default, neither does the possibility of a manned lunar or Martian mission for that matter without a new launch vehicle. A new heavy lifting vehicle will eventually come about – it will have to for NASA to pursue its longer-term goals. Until then, NASA is bound to low Earth orbit and minimal interplanetary unmanned spacecraft.

Note, the loss of how to make a Saturn V wasn't because of societal collapse. It just happened. Give me the equivalent of a Long Night or two, with people scrambling just for survival on their given worlds, over many, many decades or centuries, and I'm sure I can justify the loss of high-end, non-essential engineering knowledge.

Now, let me be clear:

Any number of people can show up now and provide lots of explanation for redundancies in keeping record and justify how there's NO WAY the records for making starships could be lost across the rise and fall of empires.

All I'm going to say is, "Yup. That sure can be justified."

And then I'll point out, "And I could build a fictional universe where those in power will ruthlessly destroy anyone who tries to step on their monopoly. And since I am not concerned about the OTU, I probably will." Because it can be justified by working through a new history and new framework for technology.

***

But here's an important follow up point:

Are the monopolies always held? Of course not.

Now, keep in mind, I'm not trying to make a frozen bit of canon. I'm looking for a living, breathing environment ripe for adventure.

In canon the goal is to create a piece of fictional environment where everyone knows the rules. And it's done. If someone reads the sourcebooks, then they know what the "reality" is.

I have no use for that, since, by definition, it precludes change at the game table.

So, let's say some people try to control information -- first by protecting the data, and then by seeking out and destroying A class ports being built "off the grid."

What can happen?

• The monopolies succeed partially (info gets out, but the ship building facilities are destroyed).
• The monopolies fail. (Ships are built outside of the monopolies)

The second option is more than viable. In fact, one must assume (in the fictional environment I'm concocting) that several of the current monopolies grew exactly out of this.

But iets say this happens during play (and my focus, always, is building an environment during play)...

What can happen?

• A war starts up between the monopolies and the upstart.
• The monopolies accept the upstart without war (for whatever reason)
• The monopolies crush the upstart.
• The upstart stands strong, joining the monopolies after conflict.
• The upstart stands strong, and the conflicts continue.

Again, this has happened before. It will happen again. Sometimes the upstart succeeds. Sometimes he fails.

So, the fact that keeping a monopoly isn't a perfectly sustaining system isn't a bug. It's the point.

***

This all touches on on rnadams' point:

Yeah, I get it, if you're going to play within the setting, you ought to be true to it, but what if your players have high aspirations to alter the course of major events? What if they succeed in, say, foiling the assassination of the Emperor?

One of the most pernicious parts of canon is that it precludes a living, breathing fiction at the game table.

I want politics and conflict in my Traveller universe, and I don't possibly have time to worry about when or if someone is going to publish something that goes against what my Players and I have concocted in a wonderful interstellar Great Game.

By building monopolies that will by definition be challenged I'm bringing instability into the fictional setting. And in terms of adventure, few things can be better then having tension between having people and institutions who want things to tay the way things are and those who want to change them.

 

[creativehum]

It is worth noting that with the Book 3 world generation system, a lot of worlds are not run by nobles. A setting where all worlds are under the sway of monarchs is certainly conceivable, but you can't get it by using Traveller RAW.

This question is going to come of much harsher than I intend, but I don't know how else to ask this:

You are aware that there is no way to play Basic Traveller "just by the book," yes? The GM is going to have to, by definition, overlay other elements of culture, history and society to create the fictional setting.

in fact, the text constantly states this will have to be done in almost every aspect of the game.

So, yes. One rolls the worlds. And yes, there is a star spanning nobility of some kind implied in the character creation section. But at some point the GM is going to have figure out what that means. The easiest assumption is that the nobility is overlaid over the governments created by the random UWPs. This might be quite peaceful. There might be tensions. But one never needs to imagine that one needs to roll a monarchy government to make a planet part of the interstellar empire. (Certainly the OTU doesn't.)

Or, to put it better: One is going to decide this. The OTU makes one decision about it. But a GM with just LBBs 1-3 is on his own on the matter and is told he he will be sorting this out. To make such decisions isn't contradicting anything in the game. It is the game.

To keep coming back and trying to trap me in the LBBs implied setting when the setting must be expanded is beginning to bewilder me. I'm running out of runway to see where you're going with this line of thinking.

***

I'm relatively new to the forums. If one must assume the use the existence of the OTU and canon in any forum except the IMTU forum, I apologize. Certainly, the specific discussion of this thread would seem to be the exception to this rule (if it exists). But if I'm doing it wrong, I apologize and I'll let a mod advise me.