Thanks. Yeah, I always thought the pocket empires would be really cool.
Me, personally, as a GM, I had never run a campaign in the Imperium. But
the idea of a pocket empire could have allowed someone like me to lift up
my bundle of worlds, drop them into the TNE universe as a pocket empire,
and be part of the big thing.
By the way, did you know your last name was the secret code name for the
Gygax Dangerous Dimensions--oops, I mean--Journeys project? "The Carpenter
Project." Loren has observed on his website, I think rightly, that the
Carpenter Project pulled a lot of energy away from GDW's own in-house
projects that could have made them more successful. Now, had DJ succeeded,
that point would be moot, its cash inflow could have buoyed up the rest.
But since it got swallowed up in litigation, it made all of that investment
of time and energy a net loss to us.
On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 01:50:29 -0400, Allen Carpenter
<> wrote:
> MHO
>
> I think there were probably few, if any real options available
> to you other than the one you made with the creation of RCES and the
star
> vikings with Virus as the overarching villain. Any other approach would
> have been in the nature of another long night scenario, which would have
> been very difficult to propagate with "The problems from A to Z" along
> all of the Imperiums borders. The Imperium might have suicided, but the
> vargrs are great scavengers and the Aslan are consumate land grabbers.
> The K'Kree wanted to save the galaxy from the evils of Meat, and the
> Hivers would have simply manipulated events around them for generations
> of AMUSEMENT! Not to mention the ,by then, cultural imperative for the
> Solomani to punish the Imperium for it's unforgivable occupation of
> Mother Terra generations ago, and grab back all of the old sphere and
> the vegan autonomous district in the process.
> The Only way hard Times could end is with a long night
> scenario in which humans were trying to escape domination by one of the
> bordering alien Empires.
> Virus was the external super threat that brought the galaxy to
> it's knees and preserved a gaming universe in which even little fish in
a
> vast ocean can have an influence on events that happen far beyond the
> scope of the players end of the universe.
> My greatest dis-like of classic Traveller (and I still love it
> BTW) was that even a group of players in which there was a Marquis and a
> Baron and 2 Knights had little or no direct impact on events beyond the
> scale of the local landmass, or at most a planetary scale.
> One of the things that I believe some people cried about in
> COTI was the inclusion of the concept of pocket empires, allowing for a
> wide deviation from "Empire as we like it"
> However, Pocket empires per se allowed for a GMs dream if
> they had a creative bent, total freedom to deviate from empire and
create
> an entire NEW dynamic in Interstellar Diplomacy. EVEN, if the players
> were ambitious enough, to found one of there own.
>
> On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 1:03 AM, wrote:
>
>
> 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