Test 1--I haven't seen my last one come back through yet.
> Remember me?
>
> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
days
> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing a
.NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
running
> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this moving.
>
> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
myself of where I was and send it out.
>
> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still haven't
answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
damn)
> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5
Seniors
> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny "Where39;s
my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said of
them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
"They39;re
> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men."
>
> But on the topic, I've established
>
> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs,"
which
> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going to
be
> writing history
>
> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
we
> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about
>
> 3. Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the late
MT MSs
>
> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
going to be unsupported the way MT was
>
> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
affect
> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point I
may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
so
> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>
> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other things
I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>
> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the resumption,
if
> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XXX thing you said."
>
> More soon.
>
>> Anyway, I left us partway through "nuance," (between Star Vikings and
> Longships) mostly sitting around the conference table in the main room
where we held the production meetings. In many other organizations this
space would have been called something else, and I am pleased to say no
one at GDW ever uttered that term, because I dislike it.
>> Because my mind is there I am going to let it remain there, although
> this
>> is keeping us at the beginning of TNE rather than moving towards its
> "end"
>> as Bardbear asked. They feel related, and we'll get there. When I was
> talking about nuance that kind of skipped a logical step that I need to
re-insert, although to some extent they were concurrent.
>> These talks went on for a while, but not too long, really, maybe a
> couple
>> of months. Off the top of my head I'd say TNE won the GAMA award in
1994
> for best SF RPG rules of 1993 and that Survival Margin came out in 1992.
What I can no longer pull out of my head is when releases came out in
months of a year. And in one round of office moves I foolishly threw
away
>> all of my old production schedules and warehouse reports, so I can no
> longer reconstruct that. But I do know that I wrote Survival Margin over
my Christmas "vacation" in my little brother's old bedroom, so if it was
published in 1992 it was written during Christmas 1991. If not, and it
came out in 1993, then it could have been Xmas 92 as well. I know that
PLS
>> came out in 1992, the year after the war, because I spent that spring
> doing playtesting from my old house in Maryland (another act of mercy
from
>> Darlene File, you have no idea how hard it is to sell a house when you
> are
>> getting advice from realtors in IL and your wife is getting advice from
> realtors in MD). If you compared the SM and PLS ISBNs that might show
the
>> relative order of their release. On the other hand, we would sometimes
> assign an ISBN early to a scheduled product so they could get out of order.
>> When I was hired it was clear that there was going to be a new edition
> of
>> Traveller to replace MT, and in developing/editing Hard Times I wanted
> to
>> get a handle on where Traveller was intended to go. It turned out that
> there was a bit of a vacuum where you would expect a creative team. Marc
was no longer working at GDW (he was still an owner), DGP had already
announced that they were ceasing their Traveller support in favor of
their
>> own "A.I." nanotech/magic game (in a sad irony the DGP letter
announcing
> their departure from Traveller was already in circulation when I got to
GDW, but it didn't get published for a year or so, which made it look
like
>> a slam against TNE), and there was no one at GDW who knew the MT
system.
> GDW had apparently always been sending all of the rules questions to Joe
and Gary at DGP as they were the MT authors, and they were no longer
supporting that, which was another one of the reasons Frank wanted to
redo
>> Traveller with "House Rules" so we could support it.
>> When I asked, "what are our plans?" there were two answers, 1) a number
> of
>> ideas Frank had floated over the past year or so at Cons (a big event,
> like Virus, Star Vikings) which were not all well-received, especially
the
>> Virus thing, and 2) some manuscripts being written out-of-house, and HT
> was the first of these. Actually three answers, we did know that the
Core
>> system was going to the "House"(T2K) system--note that at that time the
> House System was still D10, the D20 system did not finally emerge until
later, after Les published an interim D20 system as a DC folio which we
discarded, I want to say that it was Les who came up with the key
concept
>> of uprating the D10 to the D20 system, the additional two named success
> levels, I remember the meetings around it, but I'm not sure--but that
didn't get at the "storyline" plans, so doesn't really count.
>> The out-of-house material was based on an arc following the maps of
> gradual destruction and decline in Rebellion Sourcebook, and had the
Imperium slowly dying with players trying to hold off the night. You can
see in HT that it was developing some new vocabulary, and it looked like
"starmercs" was going to be the term instead of "Star Vikings." In this
line things were going to bottom out at some point, maybe in the 1130s,
and then start climbing back up without there having been a "long night"
(appropriated from Poul Anderson). We were having significant difficulty
with out-of-house manuscripts and I began making the case that for
something as significant as a new edition of Traveller (in reality there
were a number of semi-generations in the CT "LBB" era, with changes that
were pretty serious, and were only identified by printing dates, as well
as re-combinations like The Traveller Book which pulled some of these
changes together, but these were not identified as "new editions") GDW
needed to have direct creative control of the direction of the new
edition
>> (at that point we had six full-time designers on staff, so we had the
> personnel to handle it). One of the main--and legitimate--complaints
about
>> MT was that GDW (or GDW and DGP) introduced this giant historical
change
> to arguably "open up" the game, but that this huge change was utterly
unsupported by material which would help refs and players run campaigns
in
>> it. (The other complaint was the extensive [excessive?] errata in the
> rules set, especially starship design [Fighting Ships of the Shattered
Imperium]. Also, arguably, the way the "Rebellion" "opened up" the
campaign was seen to work opposite to opening it up, by dwarfing the
players with these vast wars, or at least the way the Rebellion setting
was supported/not supported.) We were already hearing remarks from
players/fans, "They screwed up supporting MT, so they're going to screw
up
>> this next one too. Why should I trust them and buy this new one when
> they
>> didn't care about the last one?" For any new Traveller edition to be
> successful we had to clearly show the commitment of GDW to get behind it
completely, and the best way to do that was to put the force of
> extensive
>> in-house design behind it. Traveller, as a GDW flagship, deserved no
> less.
>> (I will not say Traveller was THE GDW flagship, it was not. GDW had
T2K,
> wargames, miniatures rules, etc. But Traveller certainly was A GDW
flagship. Contrary to Star Trek and cruise line ignorance, real fleets
have multiple flagships, not just one.)
>> Those were basically the arguments that I made that we needed to pull
it
> back in-house, and everyone agreed, so we did. (I think this decision
was
>> inescapable. For comparison, try the opposing arguments, "Traveller is
> really important to us. Let's have it designed by people out-of-house,
because we've got other things to do," or "Let's have it run by guys
that
>> don't work for us, because it's not important enough for us to take
> direct
>> leadership of ourselves.") But if anyone wants to blame GDW for reeling
> it
>> in, that was my doing.
>> And now, having filled the logical step (GDW is now writing it) at top,
> we
>> can go back to the "nuance" of "how are we writing it?"
>> Thinking back, I would say this decision would have been made by late
> 1991, so I wrote SM over Xmas 91, but I could be wrong. I know that all
of
>> the MT stuff we put out after HT (A:V, AGtD, AV) was setting the stage
> for
>> TNE, and I did those from pieces of the MS that would have come after
HT
> (I think it was maybe called "Diaspora"). One of the pieces of
>> conventional wisdom that I think was actually wrong was that "it's
> quicker/easier to rewrite something someone else has already written"
compared to writing from scratch yourself. I actually think it's the
reverse. When you're rewriting you always trying to "save" what's there,
and if it's built on a bad structure or a structure which no longer
applies, it's harder to figure out how to re-purpose the pieces than to
just write what you know you need. But there is also the counter-point,
which is "we've already paid for this, we need to get some value out of
the sunk cost." And the reason for pointing that out is this explains
why
>> the RC was where it turned out. The Diaspora work included all of that
> sector information, and UWPs are pretty time-consuming to proof and
edit.
>> It's what, 20-30 digits? In prose that would be 4-6 words which you can
> read in less than a second, but in UWPs you have to look at all of the
digits individually, interpreting what they mean, and making sure they
make sense together. So we kept the Diaspora data, accepted the fact
that
>> the products were "pulling the players' attention" down that direction,
> and I put the RC into Old Expanses to trailing. That also allowed us to
have them closer to the Hivers and bring the Hivers into the game which
is
>> something we really wanted to do.
>> So that brings us back up to where I can continue the "nuance"
> discussion
>> in the next installment.
>> End of section.
>>> So, with that as background to how the road to envisioned TNE future
> was
>> dynamic,
>>> 1. Yes, there would have been a reformed "Imperial" civilization. It
>> probably would have been named in the Imperial style. I think if you
> look
>>> at the various quotes from the "future" history books looking back at
>> the
>>> "Star Viking" era you can probably get a flavor of that civilization
>> from
>>> the names of the publishers or something. I think one of them was
>> "Imperial Press."
>>> That stuff, by the way, was to nuance some of the expectations from
the
>> rumors between MT and TNE. I got to GDW on September 29, 1991, a Sunday
> (actually would have gotten in the night before after a 10 or 12 hour
drive from Maryland) and playtested Sands of War. I actually began work
on
>>> Monday the 30th on Hard Times. The cover had already been printed and
>> all
>>> of the interior art had also been completed, but no one had looked at
>> the
>>> MS, except for the art director (Kirk Wescom, I think) who pulled out
>> some
>>> text blocks to send to the artist (Darryl Midgette, I think) for
>> inspiration. Frank and I began talking right away about the direction
> the
>>> Traveller line was to take. MT was a remnant from the period when the
>> Imperium was going to gradually decline but never have a defining
"boom"
> event, and then gradually climb back up.
>>> Frank described some of the ideas he had had and floated at some Cons,
>> most of them apparently to some negative response, especially Virus.
> Also
>>> at this time he still firmly liked the idea of the Star Vikings in
> their
>> Longships as a mythic sort of force for rebuilding. So what I tried to
> do
>>> was take the concepts he was already excited about and make sense of
>> them
>>> in my own head. "Star Vikings" was the first thing. While Scandinavian
>> "Viking" culture did do a lot of exploring and trade and economic
> expansion in Europe, and was therefore a "civilizing" force, the typical
idea that most people today have of "Vikings" is violence: raiding,
plunder, and burning Irish monasteries. To assert a more rarefied,
nuanced
>>> meaning of "Viking" in an interstellar civilization 6000 years from
now
>> when 99.99999% of the population doesn't live on Earth and could give a
> fig what the "Vikings" were REALLY like didn't make sense to me. Why
would
>>> they have a more fine-tuned sense of Earth history than we do today?
>> More
>>> likely they would have our 1991, degraded, caricatured sense of what
>> "Viking" means, i.e., a violent, anti-civilizing force. So "Star
Viking"
> had to be a pejorative term placed on them by someone else, either
contemporaries trying to discredit them, or later generations, happily
misunderstanding them. But that is NOT what they called themselves. In
quizzing Frank on his ideas, he explained the Star Vikings' results, he
described it as "a reformation." Being a Lutheran, that is a "name to
conjure with" (as Loren always said), so I took that and it became the
Reformation Coalition. "Reform" also has that sense, like "reforming
criminals," that there is something wrong with the status quo that must
be
>>> fixed. So that also became part of the RC ethic. "RCES" was easily
>> degraded as "Arses," which started to add some color and attitude to
> hang
>>> your hat on, and so on.
>>> So, back to the nuance. At this point it had already been decided by
> the
>> great rumor mill that the next edition of Traveller was going to be
> "dark"
>>> and post-apocalyptic, because "Frank is dark and apocalyptic, he wrote
>> T2K
>>> after all, and we don't like that." "Dark" games were all the rage
> then,
>> and we could have easily gone that way to try to tap into that, but I
> don't like dark games, and Frank doesn't like dark games. All of this
"evil is sexy" crap is annoying and trite. The sort of game we wanted to
make was where people striving for a higher cause could make a
>> difference.
>>> Sure, it could be against a darker background because that is when
such
>> acts are most needed, and when they can make the most difference, but
> that
>>> doesn't mean the game is dark. The game is about people in a dark
place
>> bringing light to it. And that is what we set out to do in TNE, and I
> think everyone on this list gets that. However, there were a lot of
people
>>> who had already made up their minds what their opinion of (Next
>> Traveller)
>>> was going to be, and they just stuck with that, never read it, and
> never
>> allowed their prejudices to be changed.
>>> BUT, as I said, we already knew that was the brush we were going to be
>> tarred with, so were trying to make some distinctions. So "Star
Vikings"
> is what they were called by their contemporary competitors, who became
the
>>> Guild, and future generations later who misunderstood them. Hmm, if
>> future
>>> generations misunderstood them, then that must mean that they are no
>> longer around to set the record straight.
>>> Also, I mentioned above about RC and RCES that you had to start
getting
>> "attitude" about an idea. One of the things I did back then was make
> music
>>> mix tapes for games I was working on, like little movie soundtracks
for
>> the story I was trying to tell. I had them for Assignment Vigilante,
> Raging Dragon (never finished, we did Phase Line Smash instead) and so
on.
>>> I thought that I would make a typical multi-artist mix tape for TNE as
>> well, but as it turned out, the touchstone for me for TNE/RC/Star
> Vikings
>>> was Pete Townshend's "White City" album. So "White City" is the Star
>> Viking soundtrack. If you listen to it you can probably hear where lots
> of
>>> stuff came from. Another aspect of attitude was creating characters
who
>> would speak different themes or points of view that you wanted the
> players
>>> to be hearing, like Norris for the Regency, Kuligaan (sp?) for the RC,
>> etc., Craig for another POV, and obviously all of that was starting in
> the
>>> late MT period, which is why I think of all of those as "transitional
>> TNE"
>>> products, because we were setting the stage.
>>> Let me also say that we established two groups in the early thinking,
>> and
>>> in the rules: The Guild and the Free Traders. These were holdovers
from
>> the Star Viking board game that we were going to put out. When GDW was
> still flush with all of the Gulf War Factbook money (which allowed me to
be hired and new Macs bought for us) our print buyer, Darlene File (Marc
Miller's wife) bought up a bunch of materials for hard-map board games,
which included several thousand map boards and plastic pieces. You can
see
>>> these map boards and pieces in Minion Hunter. The other game that was
>> supposed to be made with the remaining boards was Star Viking, a
> "strategic" board game of re-taking space. There would have been four
players: the Star Vikings (RC), a player who played all of the little
TEDs, The Guild, and the Free Traders, and they all would have had
different cross-cutting victory conditions. The pieces were supposed to
be
>>> injection-molded plastic. We persisted with the hope that we would be
>> able
>>> to do that, but the Desert Storm Factbook (what's the opposite of
>> windfall?) crater and the re-investment in "the Carpenter Project" (DJ)
> eventually took away the possibility of affording that.
>>> I say that not just because it happened, but because I'm thinking that
>> although we fully intended to put out a Guild sourcebook and Free
Trader
> sourcebook product to support those aspects of the campaign, I expect
that
>>> they would have fallen by the wayside due to all the other things we
>> were
>>> trying to show, and the FTs would have disappeared more so than the
>> Guild,
>>> which was showing up in other products, but mostly as an opponent
> rather
>> than a "campaign." And that's another example of "where we envisioned
> going" doesn't necessarily work out that way, as you find yourself
focusing on different things instead.
>>> I am going to break again, still partway through nuance. Do not expect
>> more of this until tomorrow.
>>> Dave
>
>
>
>
>
> Remember me?
>
> I'm conscious of the fact that I left us partway through this several
days
> ago, and don't want to let it get too stale. I'm in charge of testing a
.NET MVC project that has to be completed by March 31, and time is
running
> out, so I have to get back to that, but I also want to keep this moving.
>
> I think what I'll do now is say a couple of initial things to remind
myself of where I was and send it out.
>
> First, as Bardbear who asked the initial question (which I still haven't
answered yet--be careful what you ask for, apparently I don't give a
damn)
> and I are both Duke grads, wow, Mercer was good (or Duke isn't, your
call). If we were going to lose to anyone (in the first round) I'm
actually proud that it was to the only Div 1 school that started 5
Seniors
> all year. I think that's a wanted corrective to all this Johnny "Where39;s
my NBA Contract" stuff (I live in KY, home of the disease). As K said of
them with unfeigned admiration in his quickie halftime interview,
"They39;re
> old and they're old together, they know what to do. They're men."
>
> But on the topic, I've established
>
> 1. Where "Star Viking" came from and how we refined what it means, how
that implies other groups in the same time (Guild and Free Traders) and
how the RC is no longer around to tell people, "don't call us SVs,"
which
> implies that the pro-Imperial guys of the Regency are probably going to
be
> writing history
>
> 2. That we were trying to nuance things to make it clear that although
we
> were already accused of being "dark" that's not what this was about
>
> 3. Why the RC was in Old Expanses, built on repurposing some of the late
MT MSs
>
> 4. We decided that GDW was going to commit itself to writing TNE to
demonstrate our commitment to the new line and allay fears that it was
going to be unsupported the way MT was
>
> 5. Some stuff about the D10 to D20 system, but that doesn't really
affect
> the storyline, which is what the questions were about. (At some point I
may digress into "why a storyline at all?" but that's really off-topic,
so
> I will try not to go into it too deeply.)
>
> I think that's about it, but I'll probably remind myself of other things
I've recently said as I go, even if I forgot them above.
>
> So if any of you are reading this now before I send out the resumption,
if
> it looks like I'm about to forget to touch on something I said I'd get
back to, feel free to say, "Don't forget the XXX thing you said."
>
> More soon.
>
>> Anyway, I left us partway through "nuance," (between Star Vikings and
> Longships) mostly sitting around the conference table in the main room
where we held the production meetings. In many other organizations this
space would have been called something else, and I am pleased to say no
one at GDW ever uttered that term, because I dislike it.
>> Because my mind is there I am going to let it remain there, although
> this
>> is keeping us at the beginning of TNE rather than moving towards its
> "end"
>> as Bardbear asked. They feel related, and we'll get there. When I was
> talking about nuance that kind of skipped a logical step that I need to
re-insert, although to some extent they were concurrent.
>> These talks went on for a while, but not too long, really, maybe a
> couple
>> of months. Off the top of my head I'd say TNE won the GAMA award in
1994
> for best SF RPG rules of 1993 and that Survival Margin came out in 1992.
What I can no longer pull out of my head is when releases came out in
months of a year. And in one round of office moves I foolishly threw
away
>> all of my old production schedules and warehouse reports, so I can no
> longer reconstruct that. But I do know that I wrote Survival Margin over
my Christmas "vacation" in my little brother's old bedroom, so if it was
published in 1992 it was written during Christmas 1991. If not, and it
came out in 1993, then it could have been Xmas 92 as well. I know that
PLS
>> came out in 1992, the year after the war, because I spent that spring
> doing playtesting from my old house in Maryland (another act of mercy
from
>> Darlene File, you have no idea how hard it is to sell a house when you
> are
>> getting advice from realtors in IL and your wife is getting advice from
> realtors in MD). If you compared the SM and PLS ISBNs that might show
the
>> relative order of their release. On the other hand, we would sometimes
> assign an ISBN early to a scheduled product so they could get out of order.
>> When I was hired it was clear that there was going to be a new edition
> of
>> Traveller to replace MT, and in developing/editing Hard Times I wanted
> to
>> get a handle on where Traveller was intended to go. It turned out that
> there was a bit of a vacuum where you would expect a creative team. Marc
was no longer working at GDW (he was still an owner), DGP had already
announced that they were ceasing their Traveller support in favor of
their
>> own "A.I." nanotech/magic game (in a sad irony the DGP letter
announcing
> their departure from Traveller was already in circulation when I got to
GDW, but it didn't get published for a year or so, which made it look
like
>> a slam against TNE), and there was no one at GDW who knew the MT
system.
> GDW had apparently always been sending all of the rules questions to Joe
and Gary at DGP as they were the MT authors, and they were no longer
supporting that, which was another one of the reasons Frank wanted to
redo
>> Traveller with "House Rules" so we could support it.
>> When I asked, "what are our plans?" there were two answers, 1) a number
> of
>> ideas Frank had floated over the past year or so at Cons (a big event,
> like Virus, Star Vikings) which were not all well-received, especially
the
>> Virus thing, and 2) some manuscripts being written out-of-house, and HT
> was the first of these. Actually three answers, we did know that the
Core
>> system was going to the "House"(T2K) system--note that at that time the
> House System was still D10, the D20 system did not finally emerge until
later, after Les published an interim D20 system as a DC folio which we
discarded, I want to say that it was Les who came up with the key
concept
>> of uprating the D10 to the D20 system, the additional two named success
> levels, I remember the meetings around it, but I'm not sure--but that
didn't get at the "storyline" plans, so doesn't really count.
>> The out-of-house material was based on an arc following the maps of
> gradual destruction and decline in Rebellion Sourcebook, and had the
Imperium slowly dying with players trying to hold off the night. You can
see in HT that it was developing some new vocabulary, and it looked like
"starmercs" was going to be the term instead of "Star Vikings." In this
line things were going to bottom out at some point, maybe in the 1130s,
and then start climbing back up without there having been a "long night"
(appropriated from Poul Anderson). We were having significant difficulty
with out-of-house manuscripts and I began making the case that for
something as significant as a new edition of Traveller (in reality there
were a number of semi-generations in the CT "LBB" era, with changes that
were pretty serious, and were only identified by printing dates, as well
as re-combinations like The Traveller Book which pulled some of these
changes together, but these were not identified as "new editions") GDW
needed to have direct creative control of the direction of the new
edition
>> (at that point we had six full-time designers on staff, so we had the
> personnel to handle it). One of the main--and legitimate--complaints
about
>> MT was that GDW (or GDW and DGP) introduced this giant historical
change
> to arguably "open up" the game, but that this huge change was utterly
unsupported by material which would help refs and players run campaigns
in
>> it. (The other complaint was the extensive [excessive?] errata in the
> rules set, especially starship design [Fighting Ships of the Shattered
Imperium]. Also, arguably, the way the "Rebellion" "opened up" the
campaign was seen to work opposite to opening it up, by dwarfing the
players with these vast wars, or at least the way the Rebellion setting
was supported/not supported.) We were already hearing remarks from
players/fans, "They screwed up supporting MT, so they're going to screw
up
>> this next one too. Why should I trust them and buy this new one when
> they
>> didn't care about the last one?" For any new Traveller edition to be
> successful we had to clearly show the commitment of GDW to get behind it
completely, and the best way to do that was to put the force of
> extensive
>> in-house design behind it. Traveller, as a GDW flagship, deserved no
> less.
>> (I will not say Traveller was THE GDW flagship, it was not. GDW had
T2K,
> wargames, miniatures rules, etc. But Traveller certainly was A GDW
flagship. Contrary to Star Trek and cruise line ignorance, real fleets
have multiple flagships, not just one.)
>> Those were basically the arguments that I made that we needed to pull
it
> back in-house, and everyone agreed, so we did. (I think this decision
was
>> inescapable. For comparison, try the opposing arguments, "Traveller is
> really important to us. Let's have it designed by people out-of-house,
because we've got other things to do," or "Let's have it run by guys
that
>> don't work for us, because it's not important enough for us to take
> direct
>> leadership of ourselves.") But if anyone wants to blame GDW for reeling
> it
>> in, that was my doing.
>> And now, having filled the logical step (GDW is now writing it) at top,
> we
>> can go back to the "nuance" of "how are we writing it?"
>> Thinking back, I would say this decision would have been made by late
> 1991, so I wrote SM over Xmas 91, but I could be wrong. I know that all
of
>> the MT stuff we put out after HT (A:V, AGtD, AV) was setting the stage
> for
>> TNE, and I did those from pieces of the MS that would have come after
HT
> (I think it was maybe called "Diaspora"). One of the pieces of
>> conventional wisdom that I think was actually wrong was that "it's
> quicker/easier to rewrite something someone else has already written"
compared to writing from scratch yourself. I actually think it's the
reverse. When you're rewriting you always trying to "save" what's there,
and if it's built on a bad structure or a structure which no longer
applies, it's harder to figure out how to re-purpose the pieces than to
just write what you know you need. But there is also the counter-point,
which is "we've already paid for this, we need to get some value out of
the sunk cost." And the reason for pointing that out is this explains
why
>> the RC was where it turned out. The Diaspora work included all of that
> sector information, and UWPs are pretty time-consuming to proof and
edit.
>> It's what, 20-30 digits? In prose that would be 4-6 words which you can
> read in less than a second, but in UWPs you have to look at all of the
digits individually, interpreting what they mean, and making sure they
make sense together. So we kept the Diaspora data, accepted the fact
that
>> the products were "pulling the players' attention" down that direction,
> and I put the RC into Old Expanses to trailing. That also allowed us to
have them closer to the Hivers and bring the Hivers into the game which
is
>> something we really wanted to do.
>> So that brings us back up to where I can continue the "nuance"
> discussion
>> in the next installment.
>> End of section.
>>> So, with that as background to how the road to envisioned TNE future
> was
>> dynamic,
>>> 1. Yes, there would have been a reformed "Imperial" civilization. It
>> probably would have been named in the Imperial style. I think if you
> look
>>> at the various quotes from the "future" history books looking back at
>> the
>>> "Star Viking" era you can probably get a flavor of that civilization
>> from
>>> the names of the publishers or something. I think one of them was
>> "Imperial Press."
>>> That stuff, by the way, was to nuance some of the expectations from
the
>> rumors between MT and TNE. I got to GDW on September 29, 1991, a Sunday
> (actually would have gotten in the night before after a 10 or 12 hour
drive from Maryland) and playtested Sands of War. I actually began work
on
>>> Monday the 30th on Hard Times. The cover had already been printed and
>> all
>>> of the interior art had also been completed, but no one had looked at
>> the
>>> MS, except for the art director (Kirk Wescom, I think) who pulled out
>> some
>>> text blocks to send to the artist (Darryl Midgette, I think) for
>> inspiration. Frank and I began talking right away about the direction
> the
>>> Traveller line was to take. MT was a remnant from the period when the
>> Imperium was going to gradually decline but never have a defining
"boom"
> event, and then gradually climb back up.
>>> Frank described some of the ideas he had had and floated at some Cons,
>> most of them apparently to some negative response, especially Virus.
> Also
>>> at this time he still firmly liked the idea of the Star Vikings in
> their
>> Longships as a mythic sort of force for rebuilding. So what I tried to
> do
>>> was take the concepts he was already excited about and make sense of
>> them
>>> in my own head. "Star Vikings" was the first thing. While Scandinavian
>> "Viking" culture did do a lot of exploring and trade and economic
> expansion in Europe, and was therefore a "civilizing" force, the typical
idea that most people today have of "Vikings" is violence: raiding,
plunder, and burning Irish monasteries. To assert a more rarefied,
nuanced
>>> meaning of "Viking" in an interstellar civilization 6000 years from
now
>> when 99.99999% of the population doesn't live on Earth and could give a
> fig what the "Vikings" were REALLY like didn't make sense to me. Why
would
>>> they have a more fine-tuned sense of Earth history than we do today?
>> More
>>> likely they would have our 1991, degraded, caricatured sense of what
>> "Viking" means, i.e., a violent, anti-civilizing force. So "Star
Viking"
> had to be a pejorative term placed on them by someone else, either
contemporaries trying to discredit them, or later generations, happily
misunderstanding them. But that is NOT what they called themselves. In
quizzing Frank on his ideas, he explained the Star Vikings' results, he
described it as "a reformation." Being a Lutheran, that is a "name to
conjure with" (as Loren always said), so I took that and it became the
Reformation Coalition. "Reform" also has that sense, like "reforming
criminals," that there is something wrong with the status quo that must
be
>>> fixed. So that also became part of the RC ethic. "RCES" was easily
>> degraded as "Arses," which started to add some color and attitude to
> hang
>>> your hat on, and so on.
>>> So, back to the nuance. At this point it had already been decided by
> the
>> great rumor mill that the next edition of Traveller was going to be
> "dark"
>>> and post-apocalyptic, because "Frank is dark and apocalyptic, he wrote
>> T2K
>>> after all, and we don't like that." "Dark" games were all the rage
> then,
>> and we could have easily gone that way to try to tap into that, but I
> don't like dark games, and Frank doesn't like dark games. All of this
"evil is sexy" crap is annoying and trite. The sort of game we wanted to
make was where people striving for a higher cause could make a
>> difference.
>>> Sure, it could be against a darker background because that is when
such
>> acts are most needed, and when they can make the most difference, but
> that
>>> doesn't mean the game is dark. The game is about people in a dark
place
>> bringing light to it. And that is what we set out to do in TNE, and I
> think everyone on this list gets that. However, there were a lot of
people
>>> who had already made up their minds what their opinion of (Next
>> Traveller)
>>> was going to be, and they just stuck with that, never read it, and
> never
>> allowed their prejudices to be changed.
>>> BUT, as I said, we already knew that was the brush we were going to be
>> tarred with, so were trying to make some distinctions. So "Star
Vikings"
> is what they were called by their contemporary competitors, who became
the
>>> Guild, and future generations later who misunderstood them. Hmm, if
>> future
>>> generations misunderstood them, then that must mean that they are no
>> longer around to set the record straight.
>>> Also, I mentioned above about RC and RCES that you had to start
getting
>> "attitude" about an idea. One of the things I did back then was make
> music
>>> mix tapes for games I was working on, like little movie soundtracks
for
>> the story I was trying to tell. I had them for Assignment Vigilante,
> Raging Dragon (never finished, we did Phase Line Smash instead) and so
on.
>>> I thought that I would make a typical multi-artist mix tape for TNE as
>> well, but as it turned out, the touchstone for me for TNE/RC/Star
> Vikings
>>> was Pete Townshend's "White City" album. So "White City" is the Star
>> Viking soundtrack. If you listen to it you can probably hear where lots
> of
>>> stuff came from. Another aspect of attitude was creating characters
who
>> would speak different themes or points of view that you wanted the
> players
>>> to be hearing, like Norris for the Regency, Kuligaan (sp?) for the RC,
>> etc., Craig for another POV, and obviously all of that was starting in
> the
>>> late MT period, which is why I think of all of those as "transitional
>> TNE"
>>> products, because we were setting the stage.
>>> Let me also say that we established two groups in the early thinking,
>> and
>>> in the rules: The Guild and the Free Traders. These were holdovers
from
>> the Star Viking board game that we were going to put out. When GDW was
> still flush with all of the Gulf War Factbook money (which allowed me to
be hired and new Macs bought for us) our print buyer, Darlene File (Marc
Miller's wife) bought up a bunch of materials for hard-map board games,
which included several thousand map boards and plastic pieces. You can
see
>>> these map boards and pieces in Minion Hunter. The other game that was
>> supposed to be made with the remaining boards was Star Viking, a
> "strategic" board game of re-taking space. There would have been four
players: the Star Vikings (RC), a player who played all of the little
TEDs, The Guild, and the Free Traders, and they all would have had
different cross-cutting victory conditions. The pieces were supposed to
be
>>> injection-molded plastic. We persisted with the hope that we would be
>> able
>>> to do that, but the Desert Storm Factbook (what's the opposite of
>> windfall?) crater and the re-investment in "the Carpenter Project" (DJ)
> eventually took away the possibility of affording that.
>>> I say that not just because it happened, but because I'm thinking that
>> although we fully intended to put out a Guild sourcebook and Free
Trader
> sourcebook product to support those aspects of the campaign, I expect
that
>>> they would have fallen by the wayside due to all the other things we
>> were
>>> trying to show, and the FTs would have disappeared more so than the
>> Guild,
>>> which was showing up in other products, but mostly as an opponent
> rather
>> than a "campaign." And that's another example of "where we envisioned
> going" doesn't necessarily work out that way, as you find yourself
focusing on different things instead.
>>> I am going to break again, still partway through nuance. Do not expect
>> more of this until tomorrow.
>>> Dave
>
>
>
>
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