On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 12:51 AM, <> wrote:
>
> (I also found out over
> the weekend that related to this, Leroy Guatney dislikes me for suggesting
> that we do something similar with "X" starport ratings in his Hiver world
> generation, I'm pretty sure that was related to the Wilds thing above, and
> perhaps even my suggestion to Terry McInnes that he merge 2300 into WTH.)
>
>
Leroy dislikes a lot of people. Evidence suggests that he is no longer
relevant.
> 3. Guidance/input/Demands from distributors and the retailers they claimed
> to represent (often the distributors would screw us, and by extension the
> gamers, but that's a different discussion) and the information they
> gathered from the retailers. We would talk to them all the time as they
> made their regular orders.
>
The "Great Magic Shakeout" happened in games distro about the same time GDW
was shutting down, and the two may be more related than is normally given
credit. The drive into general bookstore distro that bit both GDW and TSR
was likely catalyzed by the utter failure of the games distributors in the
mid-90s to *be distributors*. "X is a great game; it's a shame nothing has
been released for it recently" was a common refrain heard by active,
producing companies who could get no traction with the Magic: the Gathering
addicted distributors. The WWW coming along *right then* probably saved a
lot of companies.
> Once you start a storyline, you set up an
> expectation that you will follow through on it, that is part of the
> contract that you explicitly make with your players: "if you buy into this
> game, we will tell you an interesting story that you can play in." By 1991
> the players were telling us that GDW had broken that contract with MT. MT
> was released in 1987 with the three-book boxed set. Rebellion SB was 1988,
> and it was a GREAT
> supplement. But it was the last one that advanced the WHOLE storyline
> until Hard Times at the end of 1991. So by the time I got there, GDW had
> put out 8 MT products in five years, but the last one that advanced the
> plotline was three years prior. (Ref's Companion 1988, COACC 1989 was
> aircraft design, Fighting Ships 1990 was a ship catalog, Knightfall 1990
> was set in the Rebellion, but was an adventure and not a full supplement
> that told us how the war was going elsewhere, and moreover was set in the
> no-man's land of Massilia sector so did not really cover a faction. DGP
> also put out four books in the period 1988-1991, or one per year, but only
> one of these, Flaming Eye, was a Rebellion faction sourcebook, covering
> Vland; the two races books covered a couple races which coincided with
> factions.) So, in five years of MT, GDW had only put out 1.6 books a year,
> none of them covering a faction or the storyline since 1988. GDW and DGP
> together put out 2.4 books a year, but since 1988 only about 1/3 of the
> ~9-11 factions (which were counted sometimes varied) had been covered in
> any detail. (Jim, check my math, I may be missing something.) The players
> said, "this is not enough, you gave us this great new rebellion, told us
> to pick sides, and now you've left us hanging. Most of us have had no
> information on our factions for three years. (There was stuff in Challenge
> and DGP's magazine, but that's not the same.)
>
I'm beginning to think that DGP's balancing act, between showing us the
"Imperium that was" with their Four Troublemakers and myriad supporting
articles, and the "Death By Rebellion" of the following decade, may have
been pumping up more anti-Rebellion sentiment than they realized.
>
> In the meantime, around the time MT came out, Marc established HIWG. I was
> not a HIWG member so will not pretend to know how that all worked, I can
> only say what my impression was. There were a bunch of really dedicated,
> serious Traveller guys who wanted to be involved in the game, most of whom
> were also regular Challenge contributors, and Marc knew that MT/Rebellion
> was going to require a lot of detailed work, so he set these guys up as
> the "History of the Imperium Working Group," and they divided up Charted
> Space (not "Known Space," a common error, "KS" is Larry Niven, "CS" is
> Traveller) into areas which were assigned to HIWG members who would work
> up their details and histories, work together to sort out higher-level
> plots, and principles, etc. However, the HIWG work was not official
> ("canon") until it was published as an official Traveller product.
> (Challenge articles were similar, they were not necessarily considered
> official.) Why is that? To try to run a coherent game/story, you need
> centralized direction which also needs to be pretty detailed. A whole
> bunch of energetic HIWG guys can produce way more material than one
> central guy (some called him the "guru," I preferred the more pedestrian
> "line manager") can read, comprehend, and hold in his head while still
> meeting his own production deadlines. I imagine that Marc set up HIWG not
> only because he knew he would want the detailed assistance, but also
> because he couldn't necessarily read, understand, approve, and use all
> their stuff at once, and he didn't want to just rudely fend them off. Marc
> valued the fans, and the enthusiastic ones that much more. Instead, he
> recognized their talents and efforts by making them this semi-official
> Traveller contributor group, which of course made them even more energetic
> in developing stuff. I suspect that being part of a semi-official group
> whose work had not yet been accepted as official was not that much more
> fun than the way it was before HIWG, and maybe less fun, given the higher
> expectations. Probably that was no one's fault, but the result of a decent
> impulse on Marc's part to let these guys get involved, but Marc couldn't
> necessarily use their stuff "as is" without reading and agreeing with it
> detail by detail, and that takes a lot of time, and the members probably
> got frustrated that their stuff wasn't getting used the way they had
> hoped. There is a huge amount of information that goes into creating a
> sector with all its worlds, races, histories, relations with the one next
> door, meta-histories that you've worked out with the neighboring sector
> "analysts," etc., and there may be assumptions or ideas that the center
> guy won't want to pull into the official material, because it's probably
> tied in with a bunch of other stuff so he can't be sure what all of the
> downstream impacts will be. So creating HIWG may have been a case of, "can
> God create a rock so big he can't lift it?"
>
> (Note that I said HIWG was KINDA similar to the BBS/mailing lists. Similar
> from the standpoint that these guys were MONSTROUSLY self-selecting,
> dedicated, detail hounds, so were the antithesis of the "no history
> homework for the new players" principle we were trying to open up the game
> with. NOT similar in the sense of Flame Wars. These guys were gentlemen,
> and were as helpful as they could be. They even paid their own way to come
> out to GDW for a Traveller writer's conference to prepare to start writing
> TNE adventures and Challenge material. But as I said, the sort of thing
> that they specialized in, highly detailed settings and histories, was hard
> and time-consuming to assimilate, and given the fact that we had a lot of
> work to do on TNE that was not centered on that level of detail, it was
> difficult for us to know how to use their input, as much of it as there
> potentially was. Add to that that their working relationship had been with
> Marc, so Frank and I didn't know them, so didn't have an existing ability
> to know who to reach out to for stuff. And as I've said innumerable times,
> I was trying to keep lots of balls in the air and tried to be careful to
> not add more to my plate than I could handle. Working with free-lancers is
> pretty labor intensive. I'm sure these guys do not remember "working" with
> me fondly, as there was not a whole lot of it, and it was probably not
> like it was working with Marc. I'm sad about that, I wish I could have
> figured out a way to use them better, but I also can't go back and change
> anything. As a final frustration for them, Harold Hale wanted to do a TNE
> Solomani thing, and I told him to go ahead, knowing that we may not be
> able to use it as he intended. In the event, Frank took on that project
> and decided to go in a different direction, so "Children of Earth" was
> published by Sword of the Knight.)
>
> Jim, you were in HIWG, maybe you can check my impressions, correct them,
> tell me on their behalf that I'm lucky you didn't kill me when you met me
> in 2012. And I may be mistaken above, and a lot more of their stuff was
> pulled in officially than I realize, but I got the sense that it was not
> as much as they would have liked. Roger was in HIWG as well, and maybe
> some other people on this list, so if I have paraded my ignorance, fix me
> up.
>
>
[Aside: I'm on record in several venues as disliking you for "taking the
future of Traveller with you". That is no longer the case, as you and I
cleared up at Celesticon 2012. Old archives might still turn up that
vinegar, though.]
A lot of us were in HIWG, which was already under way when I stumbled into
the GEnie community after seeing references from DGP. I became member
#200, but I don't know how much further the membership expanded, since that
number already included the most ardent. As with all such organizations
that don't filter their memberships, only about 10 to 15% were visibly
active participants, with the rest being the play groups around those
active writers. Most of the "who is this guy?" Traveller articles in
Challenge came from HIWG members, current or former, but even that list was
only four or five people. Those who had been bitten by the writing bug and
had the talent for it.
My own contributions under the HIWG umbrella were limited to one sector and
bits of another. Those led to my one piece for GDW, that never actually
got to final publication (in Imperiallines #3/4). That involvement kept me
in the loop, which is why my name kept popping up on Credits pages,
including one I don't actually belong on (T4 Starships).
> So why did I bring up HIWG at all? I didn't want to leave them out of the
> discussion (someone would probably say, "did you ask HIWG?"), and they
> also provide an idea of the effort that is put into a storyline the size
> of Traveller's. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
>
HIWG was chartered and presented as a writer's group, and our various
drafts, meanders, and what-ifs got passed around as much as the USPS and
Royal Mail could handle. GEnie would also help with distribution, but only
a few of us had access. The idea was to have enough foundation in place
that *anyone* who wanted to write in, for instance, Corridor, or
Zarushagar, would not need to create the broad environment from scratch.
Worlds, local nobles, factions, etc would already be in place. As Dave
says, seemed like a good idea at the time.
Of course, the reality was different.
As any writer can tell you, getting attached to your work is near
inevitable. "I did all this work and you/GDW/DGP are just going to write
over it?" was a constant danger. Most of us realized that, but there were
exceptions. As GDW transitioned from MT to TNE, some of the membership
lapsed and made a point of taking their earlier contributions with them.
The two mid-to-late-Rebellion products that illustrate HIWG's role do so
by, as far as I can tell, being opposites. Flaming Eye was built on some
incredible HIWG work in Lishun Sector, though it directly used very little
of it. Knightfall, on the other hand, appeared to have been written in one
of HIWGs blind spots.
>
> And that is where we stood at the end of 1991, into 1992. And back to
> Jim's point, players have a right to hear how it turned out. They agreed
> to play in this, invested themselves, so...what now?
>
> Fast-forward to Celesticon 2011. Frank Chadwick was doing a Celesticon
> "War College" talk, maybe about Striker, but he did three that year. He
> was asked about TNE, if he would do anything differently if he had it to
> do over. He said that instead of 1200/Virus/collapse he would have set it
> in the Long Night.
>
I find the Long Night increasingly fascinating as a period to game in.
Unlike the Golden Age of the Imperium, every sector is different. Some had
sporadic sparks, a few had persistent flames, and many were, to outsiders
at least, filled with tales of surviving in the dark.
>
> (I also found out over
> the weekend that related to this, Leroy Guatney dislikes me for suggesting
> that we do something similar with "X" starport ratings in his Hiver world
> generation, I'm pretty sure that was related to the Wilds thing above, and
> perhaps even my suggestion to Terry McInnes that he merge 2300 into WTH.)
>
>
Leroy dislikes a lot of people. Evidence suggests that he is no longer
relevant.
> 3. Guidance/input/Demands from distributors and the retailers they claimed
> to represent (often the distributors would screw us, and by extension the
> gamers, but that's a different discussion) and the information they
> gathered from the retailers. We would talk to them all the time as they
> made their regular orders.
>
The "Great Magic Shakeout" happened in games distro about the same time GDW
was shutting down, and the two may be more related than is normally given
credit. The drive into general bookstore distro that bit both GDW and TSR
was likely catalyzed by the utter failure of the games distributors in the
mid-90s to *be distributors*. "X is a great game; it's a shame nothing has
been released for it recently" was a common refrain heard by active,
producing companies who could get no traction with the Magic: the Gathering
addicted distributors. The WWW coming along *right then* probably saved a
lot of companies.
> Once you start a storyline, you set up an
> expectation that you will follow through on it, that is part of the
> contract that you explicitly make with your players: "if you buy into this
> game, we will tell you an interesting story that you can play in." By 1991
> the players were telling us that GDW had broken that contract with MT. MT
> was released in 1987 with the three-book boxed set. Rebellion SB was 1988,
> and it was a GREAT
> supplement. But it was the last one that advanced the WHOLE storyline
> until Hard Times at the end of 1991. So by the time I got there, GDW had
> put out 8 MT products in five years, but the last one that advanced the
> plotline was three years prior. (Ref's Companion 1988, COACC 1989 was
> aircraft design, Fighting Ships 1990 was a ship catalog, Knightfall 1990
> was set in the Rebellion, but was an adventure and not a full supplement
> that told us how the war was going elsewhere, and moreover was set in the
> no-man's land of Massilia sector so did not really cover a faction. DGP
> also put out four books in the period 1988-1991, or one per year, but only
> one of these, Flaming Eye, was a Rebellion faction sourcebook, covering
> Vland; the two races books covered a couple races which coincided with
> factions.) So, in five years of MT, GDW had only put out 1.6 books a year,
> none of them covering a faction or the storyline since 1988. GDW and DGP
> together put out 2.4 books a year, but since 1988 only about 1/3 of the
> ~9-11 factions (which were counted sometimes varied) had been covered in
> any detail. (Jim, check my math, I may be missing something.) The players
> said, "this is not enough, you gave us this great new rebellion, told us
> to pick sides, and now you've left us hanging. Most of us have had no
> information on our factions for three years. (There was stuff in Challenge
> and DGP's magazine, but that's not the same.)
>
I'm beginning to think that DGP's balancing act, between showing us the
"Imperium that was" with their Four Troublemakers and myriad supporting
articles, and the "Death By Rebellion" of the following decade, may have
been pumping up more anti-Rebellion sentiment than they realized.
>
> In the meantime, around the time MT came out, Marc established HIWG. I was
> not a HIWG member so will not pretend to know how that all worked, I can
> only say what my impression was. There were a bunch of really dedicated,
> serious Traveller guys who wanted to be involved in the game, most of whom
> were also regular Challenge contributors, and Marc knew that MT/Rebellion
> was going to require a lot of detailed work, so he set these guys up as
> the "History of the Imperium Working Group," and they divided up Charted
> Space (not "Known Space," a common error, "KS" is Larry Niven, "CS" is
> Traveller) into areas which were assigned to HIWG members who would work
> up their details and histories, work together to sort out higher-level
> plots, and principles, etc. However, the HIWG work was not official
> ("canon") until it was published as an official Traveller product.
> (Challenge articles were similar, they were not necessarily considered
> official.) Why is that? To try to run a coherent game/story, you need
> centralized direction which also needs to be pretty detailed. A whole
> bunch of energetic HIWG guys can produce way more material than one
> central guy (some called him the "guru," I preferred the more pedestrian
> "line manager") can read, comprehend, and hold in his head while still
> meeting his own production deadlines. I imagine that Marc set up HIWG not
> only because he knew he would want the detailed assistance, but also
> because he couldn't necessarily read, understand, approve, and use all
> their stuff at once, and he didn't want to just rudely fend them off. Marc
> valued the fans, and the enthusiastic ones that much more. Instead, he
> recognized their talents and efforts by making them this semi-official
> Traveller contributor group, which of course made them even more energetic
> in developing stuff. I suspect that being part of a semi-official group
> whose work had not yet been accepted as official was not that much more
> fun than the way it was before HIWG, and maybe less fun, given the higher
> expectations. Probably that was no one's fault, but the result of a decent
> impulse on Marc's part to let these guys get involved, but Marc couldn't
> necessarily use their stuff "as is" without reading and agreeing with it
> detail by detail, and that takes a lot of time, and the members probably
> got frustrated that their stuff wasn't getting used the way they had
> hoped. There is a huge amount of information that goes into creating a
> sector with all its worlds, races, histories, relations with the one next
> door, meta-histories that you've worked out with the neighboring sector
> "analysts," etc., and there may be assumptions or ideas that the center
> guy won't want to pull into the official material, because it's probably
> tied in with a bunch of other stuff so he can't be sure what all of the
> downstream impacts will be. So creating HIWG may have been a case of, "can
> God create a rock so big he can't lift it?"
>
> (Note that I said HIWG was KINDA similar to the BBS/mailing lists. Similar
> from the standpoint that these guys were MONSTROUSLY self-selecting,
> dedicated, detail hounds, so were the antithesis of the "no history
> homework for the new players" principle we were trying to open up the game
> with. NOT similar in the sense of Flame Wars. These guys were gentlemen,
> and were as helpful as they could be. They even paid their own way to come
> out to GDW for a Traveller writer's conference to prepare to start writing
> TNE adventures and Challenge material. But as I said, the sort of thing
> that they specialized in, highly detailed settings and histories, was hard
> and time-consuming to assimilate, and given the fact that we had a lot of
> work to do on TNE that was not centered on that level of detail, it was
> difficult for us to know how to use their input, as much of it as there
> potentially was. Add to that that their working relationship had been with
> Marc, so Frank and I didn't know them, so didn't have an existing ability
> to know who to reach out to for stuff. And as I've said innumerable times,
> I was trying to keep lots of balls in the air and tried to be careful to
> not add more to my plate than I could handle. Working with free-lancers is
> pretty labor intensive. I'm sure these guys do not remember "working" with
> me fondly, as there was not a whole lot of it, and it was probably not
> like it was working with Marc. I'm sad about that, I wish I could have
> figured out a way to use them better, but I also can't go back and change
> anything. As a final frustration for them, Harold Hale wanted to do a TNE
> Solomani thing, and I told him to go ahead, knowing that we may not be
> able to use it as he intended. In the event, Frank took on that project
> and decided to go in a different direction, so "Children of Earth" was
> published by Sword of the Knight.)
>
> Jim, you were in HIWG, maybe you can check my impressions, correct them,
> tell me on their behalf that I'm lucky you didn't kill me when you met me
> in 2012. And I may be mistaken above, and a lot more of their stuff was
> pulled in officially than I realize, but I got the sense that it was not
> as much as they would have liked. Roger was in HIWG as well, and maybe
> some other people on this list, so if I have paraded my ignorance, fix me
> up.
>
>
[Aside: I'm on record in several venues as disliking you for "taking the
future of Traveller with you". That is no longer the case, as you and I
cleared up at Celesticon 2012. Old archives might still turn up that
vinegar, though.]
A lot of us were in HIWG, which was already under way when I stumbled into
the GEnie community after seeing references from DGP. I became member
#200, but I don't know how much further the membership expanded, since that
number already included the most ardent. As with all such organizations
that don't filter their memberships, only about 10 to 15% were visibly
active participants, with the rest being the play groups around those
active writers. Most of the "who is this guy?" Traveller articles in
Challenge came from HIWG members, current or former, but even that list was
only four or five people. Those who had been bitten by the writing bug and
had the talent for it.
My own contributions under the HIWG umbrella were limited to one sector and
bits of another. Those led to my one piece for GDW, that never actually
got to final publication (in Imperiallines #3/4). That involvement kept me
in the loop, which is why my name kept popping up on Credits pages,
including one I don't actually belong on (T4 Starships).
> So why did I bring up HIWG at all? I didn't want to leave them out of the
> discussion (someone would probably say, "did you ask HIWG?"), and they
> also provide an idea of the effort that is put into a storyline the size
> of Traveller's. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
>
HIWG was chartered and presented as a writer's group, and our various
drafts, meanders, and what-ifs got passed around as much as the USPS and
Royal Mail could handle. GEnie would also help with distribution, but only
a few of us had access. The idea was to have enough foundation in place
that *anyone* who wanted to write in, for instance, Corridor, or
Zarushagar, would not need to create the broad environment from scratch.
Worlds, local nobles, factions, etc would already be in place. As Dave
says, seemed like a good idea at the time.
Of course, the reality was different.
As any writer can tell you, getting attached to your work is near
inevitable. "I did all this work and you/GDW/DGP are just going to write
over it?" was a constant danger. Most of us realized that, but there were
exceptions. As GDW transitioned from MT to TNE, some of the membership
lapsed and made a point of taking their earlier contributions with them.
The two mid-to-late-Rebellion products that illustrate HIWG's role do so
by, as far as I can tell, being opposites. Flaming Eye was built on some
incredible HIWG work in Lishun Sector, though it directly used very little
of it. Knightfall, on the other hand, appeared to have been written in one
of HIWGs blind spots.
>
> And that is where we stood at the end of 1991, into 1992. And back to
> Jim's point, players have a right to hear how it turned out. They agreed
> to play in this, invested themselves, so...what now?
>
> Fast-forward to Celesticon 2011. Frank Chadwick was doing a Celesticon
> "War College" talk, maybe about Striker, but he did three that year. He
> was asked about TNE, if he would do anything differently if he had it to
> do over. He said that instead of 1200/Virus/collapse he would have set it
> in the Long Night.
>
I find the Long Night increasingly fascinating as a period to game in.
Unlike the Golden Age of the Imperium, every sector is different. Some had
sporadic sparks, a few had persistent flames, and many were, to outsiders
at least, filled with tales of surviving in the dark.