Here's something I've often wondered over the years.
The argument has been made that one of the flaws of TNE is that it ruined
the Imperium. (A subset of that is that is was okay to ruin the Imperium,
but Virus was the wrong choice. We'll save that for a different
discussion.)
What do you think, or what do you think other Traveller players in 1993
think we should have done instead?
And I'll start with why we went the way we did.
For my money, we had no choice. When I sat down my first day at GDW, I was
presented with the finished maps of the "Hard Times" maps of the Imperium
spiralling down the toilet. Hard Times was already on the schedule, the
cover had already been printed, and 5000 copies of it were sitting in the
warehouse, and by the way, the book was due to the printers THE DAY AFTER
my first day. Obviously it wasn't going to make it, but just as obviously,
"Hard Times" was going to go out pretty close to the way it already was.
To me, it was not intellectually, emotionally, or ethically honest to
claim that somehow a Miracle Happens and it could be pulled back together.
More logically, the act had been done when MT was launched, and the Hi-Pop
worlds were being raped, and there would be no happy ending. So we had to
let man's foolishness run its course and then start again with a bunch of
plucky souls determined to build a better world. People accused that of
being a "dark setting," but again, I always felt like I had inherited a
"dark setting" and I had to figure out what to do with it. (And yes, as an
aside, Frank had already floated ideas of a computer virus and Star
Vikings, which is whence came DGP's theatrical announcement that they were
leaving. But for the moment, let's assume those were not givens.)
Short of the "shower scene" resolution, which we published in Challenge 59
1/2, and which SJG appropriated for GT, what is another way that we could
have, or should have moved forward? Because to me, the editions of
Traveller which keep moving into the past don't make a whole lot of sense.
The historicity is all wrong. How can characters "change the world" in a
history that is already written?
But that's my analysis, which I applied 20 years ago. What other good
options would you have liked to see, or do you think others would have
preferred?
Dave