On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 3:53 AM, <> wrote:
>
>
> > [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.]
>
> We probably didn't spend a lot of time on that, because I don't really
> remember it, except maybe vaguely,
It sprang from Loren's "Sworn to secrecy" assertion years ago. It was
pretty much taken care of when you emerged on the Citizen's board almost a
decade ago now and explained as much as you could remember, and finally put
to bed completely at Celesticon. No worries.
> > 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.
>
> Sounds neat, less homogeneous, more "neighborhoods." I know nothing in
> particular about it. How long does it take you to get over that sense of
> dissonance that you're playing in the past with a fixed conclusion and
> that "freedom of action" is not what you're used to?
>
> I would imagine not long, all game settings are fictional constructs
> constrained by their non-reality, not by whether they're in the pretend
> past or the pretend future. So the illusion of freedom in fictional 1201
> is really not that different from the illusion of "less freedom" in Mileu
> 0. However, there must be some kind of rules preventing you from blowing
> up worlds that become Capital, Hub, etc., killing Cleon, destroying all
> the Cymbeline chips... :-)
>
>
I gained an interesting perspective on this from, of all things, a time
travel novel called "To Say Nothing of the Dog" by Connie Willis, in which
a future time travelling society labors to save historical artifacts from
Earth's past without altering history in the process. They do so by only
grabbing things with have become "lost" to history, often at the last
second of their known existence.
The Imperium has, by virtue of being so big and spanning 11,000 years of
history, a LOT of lost history. What has been established about the Long
Night is its length, the agencies that started and ended it, and the
existence and location of a handful of polities that existed during it
because they were either conquered or absorbed at its conclusion. There
are multi-sector swaths of Imperial space with no records. Lost history.
1700 years can cover a lot of sins, mistakes, and possible Canon breakers.
For most other things we have Nuclear Dampers...
>
>
> > [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.]
>
> We probably didn't spend a lot of time on that, because I don't really
> remember it, except maybe vaguely,
It sprang from Loren's "Sworn to secrecy" assertion years ago. It was
pretty much taken care of when you emerged on the Citizen's board almost a
decade ago now and explained as much as you could remember, and finally put
to bed completely at Celesticon. No worries.
> > 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.
>
> Sounds neat, less homogeneous, more "neighborhoods." I know nothing in
> particular about it. How long does it take you to get over that sense of
> dissonance that you're playing in the past with a fixed conclusion and
> that "freedom of action" is not what you're used to?
>
> I would imagine not long, all game settings are fictional constructs
> constrained by their non-reality, not by whether they're in the pretend
> past or the pretend future. So the illusion of freedom in fictional 1201
> is really not that different from the illusion of "less freedom" in Mileu
> 0. However, there must be some kind of rules preventing you from blowing
> up worlds that become Capital, Hub, etc., killing Cleon, destroying all
> the Cymbeline chips... :-)
>
>
I gained an interesting perspective on this from, of all things, a time
travel novel called "To Say Nothing of the Dog" by Connie Willis, in which
a future time travelling society labors to save historical artifacts from
Earth's past without altering history in the process. They do so by only
grabbing things with have become "lost" to history, often at the last
second of their known existence.
The Imperium has, by virtue of being so big and spanning 11,000 years of
history, a LOT of lost history. What has been established about the Long
Night is its length, the agencies that started and ended it, and the
existence and location of a handful of polities that existed during it
because they were either conquered or absorbed at its conclusion. There
are multi-sector swaths of Imperial space with no records. Lost history.
1700 years can cover a lot of sins, mistakes, and possible Canon breakers.
For most other things we have Nuclear Dampers...