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
> Having gotten that out of the way, let me first ask specifically what
you
> mean by "would Virus stabilize?" I think I'll get at that below, but
maybe
> you have something specific in mind.
>
> First, the usual caveats and usual examples.
>
> These "plans" or "ideas" or "intents" are just that, concepts for where
we
> intended to go and how we thought we'd get there. As a practical matter,
we would try to come up with production schedules about a year out, but
even those were subject to great change if a new idea or opportunity
came
> up. Examples of this include Twilight:2000 Version 2.2 (T2KV2.2) which
we
> put together really fast to have a GenCon release, as having a GenCon
release was a big thing. The TNE stuff we had in the works wasn't going
to
> be ready in time, and we didn't want to rush those, and T2K was coming
due
> for a reprint but was still in the D10 system and updating it to be more
fully compatible with TNE was something we wanted to do. So we stayed up
for a week and knocked that out. Sometimes we'd have something on the
schedule being written out of house and it would come in in bad shape
and
> we'd have to push it back and put something else in. Also remember that
through much of this period we were also supporting Dark Conspiracy,
Dangerous Journeys, miniatures lines, etc.
>
> So ideas we had about storyline developments were generally "paced" by
products to be released, which mostly would have been the 64 or 80 page
book. 80 was about the usual target if I recall correctly, but you could
look at page numbers and tell me if that's true.
>
> In the long run, the idea was to tell a bunch of stories to about five
years out. By five years out we would have had the RC and Regency making
first contact, but it might perhaps have happened before that. I'm
pretty
> sure we moved up the Regency Source Book because we got the sense that
the
> Imperial fans needed to start seeing something for them, so that may
have
> pulled forward the RC-Regency meeting as well.
>
> Now, what year in game-time would that be? I don't know, we would have
calculated it out to be sensible. We didn't have a big timeline with
target years, and even if we had, we would have been changing it all the
time. And one of the reasons for changing it all the time was that
things
> would come up.
>
> For example, one day, probably a Monday, Frank came in. He had been
consulting the "ships per planet" algorithms we published somewhere, and
he had discovered, "Oh, crap! Solee! This RC expansion stuff isn't going
to be as easy as we thought." We could have hand-waved it away, but I
don't think we ever really considered that. Whether it was a commitment
to
> following the rules we had laid out, or that moment in a game when the
ref
> makes a die roll that really screws up the plan and he is tempted to
fudge
> the roll and go along with preconception but realizes, "no, this may be
more interesting," or the fact that we thought it was fun that the game
could surprise us, we never really considered hand-waving it out.
>
> But that realization led to at least three things.
>
> 1. The RC isn't going to be able to expand as fast, building up strength
to take on Solee is going to take some significant time. We're going to
be
> down here for a while. I think this probably led to moving up the RSB,
because it was going to be clear to players that things down in RC
territory were slowing down, so we had to open up the other setting for
those who wanted to play in the Regency rather than the RC.
>
> 2. Frank asked me how the heck the RC was going to beat Solee. I said
that
> the RC was going to eventually get itself some tame Vampire ships (in
order to eventually torque off the Regency) and these would provide a
great advantage in combat, as well as being a way to rapidly increase
available fleet tonnage. And that led to Vampire Fleets coming out when
it
> did, to set up that development.
>
> 3. That also led to my telling Frank about the Virus shipyard out in
(Diaspora?), which led to the Guilded Lilly (a deliberate corruption of
the common phrase in both words) "Epic Adventure" trilogy. You may note
that I said "telling Frank about," implying that he did not know about
it,
> because he didn't. Which is another insight into how we didn't have a
giant GDW blueprint. As Traveller line manager I spent the most time
researching and prepping TNE stuff, Frank spent the most time thinking
about Command Decision and boardgames, Les knew where he wanted to go
with
> Dark Con, etc., and there was never time to brief each other on all of
the
> details that we were working out. But obviously we'd bring each other up
to speed when it was a good time for it, and that was one of those
cases.
> Although we obviously practiced some specialization, when it was time to
start making things, we were self-consciously a "workshop" where we
tried
> to make sure everything benefited from inputs and suggestions from the
whole stuff.
>
> While I said above that we did not have a big blueprint or timeline on
the
> wall, what I did have on my wall was a floor-to-ceiling map of all of
Charted Space, photocopied out of Imperial Survey and taped together and
with all of the J1 "mains" colored in with magic marker so you could
spot
> traffic patterns. Similarly, I did the same thing for J2 access (but
only
> for about 6 or 8 sectors spinward of the RC because a J2 map is more
time-consuming to make), and that's how I found the isolated world where
I
> placed the Vampire shipyard. I think the J2 map was more useful because
it
> better exposed unusual gaps and chokepoints, and is closer to an average
jump.
>
> I'm going to break here, more later.
>
>
>> ( I'm a relative new comer to the group, and may have missed some of
> Dave's prior info on this topic, so feel free to point me to the proper
channels for finding old information. )
>> I would really like to know what the short range and long range (and
>> medium range, if you recall) timelines were for the New Era universe.
> Would the Imperium eventually reform? Would Virus eventually stabilize?
Inquiring Duke ('88) guys want to know. :)
>
>
>
>
>