I think Kubasik is definitely on to something is that the additional rules changed some of the basic assumptions.  I wasn't playing Traveller, but I had read the Little Black Books, and later I heard people talking about this gigantic Imperium, and I thought "How the hell did they do that?"

Kind of like how you can't get The Forgotten Realms 3e directly from the Little Brown Books, only not that extreme.

So Chris, if you run with the idea that the LBBs are sort of an Ur-Traveller, and High Guard is more of an OTU specific supplement - what about the others?  Are there any more supplements that are on the LBB side of the "OTU Shift"?

Quote from: JeremyR;943706A lot of Traveller's concepts seem to have been taken from Sci-Fi books.

No FTL communication (and computer size) seems to be from H. Beam Piper's TerroHuman stories. Imperial Nobility seem to be from Poul Anderson's Flandry stories.  Space travel being expensive enough that people freeze themselves to travel cheaply and risking death is from E.C. Tubb's Dumarest novels.

In an interview from 1981 Marc Miller referenced many of the inspirations for Classic Traveller.

As far as I can tell Miller read voraciously. Several decades worth of pulp-adventure SF up until the time he wrote Traveller are mixed into a stew, with references that can be traced directly back to a dozen or more short stories and novels.

Importantly, Traveller was at the printer the summer of 1977 the weekend Star Wars was released. Star Wars was going to redefine SF in the minds of almost everyone (even as it was harkening back to the Flash Gordon serials). So what Science Fictions was before Star Wars is what inspired Miller. (That isn't to say people haven't used Traveller to run Star Wars campaigns. They have.)

Poul Anderson had nobility in his Flandry series. But the Dumarest books, King David's Spaceship as well as others, also had a noble class.

Significantly psionics, which many, many people think was shoehorned into Traveller as a sop to "D&D Magic" can be found in the Dumarest Books, The Stars My Destination, Jack Vance's Demon Princes books and the Planet of Adventure books and countless others. It was a given that there humanity would develop psionic powers in the future in much of 50s, 60s, and 70s SF.

Reading these books now, after having read Traveller, always provides me with an "Ah-ha" moment. The same found when one reads OD&D or Basic D&D and then reads the tales of say, Conan or the tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Everything clicks in a way that makes things that seemed either disconnected or extraneous fall into place.

Quote from: CRKrueger;943722I think Kubasik is definitely on to something is that the additional rules changed some of the basic assumptions.  I wasn't playing Traveller, but I had read the Little Black Books, and later I heard people talking about this gigantic Imperium, and I thought "How the hell did they do that?"

Kind of like how you can't get The Forgotten Realms 3e directly from the Little Brown Books, only not that extreme.

So Chris, if you run with the idea that the LBBs are sort of an Ur-Traveller, and High Guard is more of an OTU specific supplement - what about the others?  Are there any more supplements that are on the LBB side of the "OTU Shift"?

That's an interesting question. But work and meetings have me enslaved for a good part of the day. I will get back to you soon.

Quote from: JeremyR;943706A lot of Traveller's concepts seem to have been taken from Sci-Fi books.

No FTL communication (and computer size) seems to be from H. Beam Piper's TerroHuman stories. Imperial Nobility seem to be from Poul Anderson's Flandry stories.  Space travel being expensive enough that people freeze themselves to travel cheaply and risking death is from E.C. Tubb's Dumarest novels.

We (kids in the 70s) always figured computer size was based on the sizes of computers in the 60s and 70s. Even in the 80s, the space shuttle simulator computers (not the simulator, just the computers) at NASA's JSC still took an entire room. I know, because I worked on it. This was then replaced with a half filing cabinet sized computer, and then latter a desktop.

Quote from: David Johansen;943017You either need to stay away from advanced character generation or hand out four skills per term for other careers.

Book 4 expands the weapon list.

If I go beyond CotI, I go full MT, 'cause that's what it is: integrated Book 4 and integrated and balanced rework of the advanced CharGen.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943729Significantly psionics, which many, many people think was shoehorned into Traveller as a sop to "D&D Magic" can be found in the Dumarest Books, The Stars My Destination, Jack Vance's Demon Princes books and the Planet of Adventure books and countless others. It was a given that there humanity would develop psionic powers in the future in much of 50s, 60s, and 70s SF.

My collection of Astounding Science Fiction zines attests to that... stories featuring psi are common, as are non-fiction write-ups of its potential (though, I'm not sure other zines shared Astounding's degree of interest on the subject).
Scifi radio shows of the time also featured a good number of stories involving psionic characters. It was usually presented as a next step in technology or human evolution, not a rediscovery of ancient knowledge or magic.

Quote from: Settembrini;943739If I go beyond CotI, I go full MT, 'cause that's what it is: integrated Book 4 and integrated and balanced rework of the advanced CharGen.

But the errata, oh god the fucking long errata.

Quote from: estar;943746But the errata, oh god the fucking long errata.

LOL I have games that are smaller than the errata.

Quote from: estar;943746But the errata, oh god the fucking long errata.

71 Pages of Errata?  Mein Gott in Himmel.

Quote from: estar;943746But the errata, oh god the fucking long errata.

Quote from: Tod13;943748LOL I have games that are smaller than the errata.

Quote from: CRKrueger;94374971 Pages of Errata?  Mein Gott in Himmel.

Quick thread derail here.......

This is one of the many reasons why the Traveller Community suffered when it lost Don McKinney. Not only was he a great guy, but he was the one who spearheaded the efforts to create errata for all of the different versions of Traveller. That he was able to do so much is a testament to his dedication and ability.

Quote from: jeff37923;943821Quick thread derail here.......

This is one of the many reasons why the Traveller Community suffered when it lost Don McKinney. Not only was he a great guy, but he was the one who spearheaded the efforts to create errata for all of the different versions of Traveller. That he was able to do so much is a testament to his dedication and ability.

Did they ever do a reprint with those 71 pages merged in?

Quote from: jeff37923;943821Quick thread derail here.......

This is one of the many reasons why the Traveller Community suffered when it lost Don McKinney. Not only was he a great guy, but he was the one who spearheaded the efforts to create errata for all of the different versions of Traveller. That he was able to do so much is a testament to his dedication and ability.

Don McKinney will be missed. I never talked much with him but I appreciated all he did for the Traveller community.

Quote from: CRKrueger;943722So Christopher, if you run with the idea that the LBBs are sort of an Ur-Traveller, and High Guard is more of an OTU specific supplement - what about the others?  Are there any more supplements that are on the LBB side of the "OTU Shift"?

I was making this awesome graphic chart with columns separating Books, from Supplements, from Adventures... and then it became a "What the Fuck Am I Doing???" moment when I went too deep. So here are my notes.

This is not authoritative, and I am no authority. The following is how I see thing, filtered through my interests and obsessions.

Let's go:

I dived the Classic Traveller line into three broad categories or "phases":

• Original Traveller
  
• Proto-Traveller (a term developed by the gang at COTI)
  
• The Official Traveller Universe
  

Each grows from the one preceding it, but each is (in my view) distinct.

Original Traveller is playing without any concern for GDW's house setting at all. That means playing with:

• Books 1-3 (Either 1977 or 1981 editions. There are differences between the editions, but one can cobble together elements from each of them to taste. The real differences setting-wise are the Communication Routes and Travel Zones found in the 1981 edition but not the 1977 edition. Those two elements are concrete parts of the The Third Imperium I prefer to play without them. Meanwhile, the 1977 edition of the rules has Jump Routes, which I prefer.)
  
• If you want you add Supplements 1 & 2 (Setting agnostic and helpful for the Referee!); Supplement 4 (for people who like those new prior services and bow weapons); and maybe Book 4 (though I think this starts pulling the game away from it's rag-tag adventure paramilitary roots and makes it more straight up military game. I also think the expanded skill list and service generation is bloated and unnecessary. But whatever.)

Proto-Traveller is playing with Books 1-4, Supplements 1-4, and Adventures 1-4, using these for the rules and the sum total of what you know about the Spinward Marches and the Third Imperium. As noted below, the Imperium in the early Traveller materials was a long-lived political power in decline. It committed dark deeds, the distances between the Spinward Marches and Core mattered more, and all in all it is not the bright, shiny competent Third Imperium that came as it was developed in later decades.

When I talk about the Official Traveller Universe in this post I'm talking about the Classic Era history that was developed again and gain. As this history got developed over and over for different product lines the shadows that were part of the early Classic Traveller product line were removed. Travel became easier, and travellers were just any old tourist hopping onto starships. That simply isn't the feel if you look at the text and rules of the original three books. What started as a "large (bordering ultimately on the infinite) universe, ripe for the bold adventurer’s travels" (Traveller Book 1) felt pretty much like First World 20th Century Europe by the time GURPS was done with it.

A note: Keep in mind I'm all for people making up their own settings and tweaking to their hearts content. I'm not trying to trap anyone in any cannon issues. All of my rooting around in Traveller materials was my effort to see if there was still a game called Traveller if you took the Third Imperium out. There is! But it's amazing many people are utterly convinced that Traveller is the setting and I actually got confused enough after talking with them I thought I'd look into it.

A final note, and an important one I think: Until Book 6: Scouts (1982) not a single one of the Traveller Books mentions a specific setting or any details of the Imperium. All of that material is inside Supplements and Adventures. Thing change with Book 6. With Book 6 the implicit message is if you are playing with the Traveller rules it is assumed you are playing in OTU.

Finally, the OTU was an ad hoc creation. There was no plan to published more Traveller books, and certainly no plan for a grand 11,000 worlds. The fact that things had to be retconned over the years as ideas rubbed each other the wrong way isn't something I care about. My point is I preferred the way things worked in the Traveller material before the changes that required retcons came along.


ORIGINAL TRAVELLER
TRAVELLER BOOKS 1-3 (1977)
GDW publishes the book with no intention of publishing any more material for the game. Marc Miller and the GDW assume people will build their own settings and make adjustments to the game as they need for those settings. (Gary Gygax assumed the same thing about OD&D, for the record.)

General Notes:

• No mention of The Imperium or any specific setting
• “Generic” to the degree the Traveller draws on the countless 1950s- 1970s SF adventure novels and short stories Miller has read (Thus there are implied setting details drawn from these many sources)
  
• A few named details (Psionics Institute; TSA)

Pertinent to this discussion:

• Jump Routes rather than Communication Routes (Jump routes are concerns of PCs; Communication routes will rarely, if ever, be the concern of the PCs)
• No Travel Zones (In the implied setting of play the power and influence of the centralized government is weak)
  
• Play is assumed to be centered on one or two subsectors created by the Referee
• Ship size capped at 5,000Dtons
• Travel for civilian and commercial ships limited in part by the need for refined fuel, which is limited to A and B-Class starports
• Starship Critical Hit Tables have no “Explode” result (Space combat is a game of resource management for RPG play; ships can be horribly damaged, but not blown up. Later editions will move space combat toward the feel of a board game with “Explode” result

--------------------

SUPPLEMENT 1: 1001 CHARACTERS (1978)
Setting agnostic material to aid the Referee in using the Traveller rules

SUPPLEMENT 2: ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS (1979)
Setting agnostic material to aid the Referee in using the Traveller rules

************************

A BRIDGE TO PROTO-TRAVELLER
BOOK 4: MERCENARY (1978)
Setting agnostic expansion of the Traveller rules
Pertinent to this discussion:

• The phrase “The Imperium” is introduced, but as a placeholder for the Referee’s setting. From the text: “Traveller assumes a remote centralized government (referred to in this volume as The Imperium)”
• As noted in the quote above, an implied setting detail from Books 1-3 is made explicit: There is a centralized government but it is remote from the assumed setting of play
  
• Details of how “The Imperium” might function are offered within scenarios, but these are examples providing context for the scenarios and not proscriptive

*************************

THE IMPERIUM ARRIVES:
PROTO-TRAVELLER

SUPPLEMENT 3: THE SPINWARD MARCHES (1979)
Concrete details about The Third Imperium, including government structure, history, and alien races of the setting
A maps and quick-sketch details of the sixteen subsectors of the Third Imperium

SUPPLEMENT 4: THE SPINWARD MARCHES (1979)
Setting agnostic expansion of rules and new prior service  paths for Player Characters

Pertinent to this discussion:
The information is sparse, with an enormous about of room (and expectation) the Referee will fill in details

• The Imperium in described as “in decline”
• In many respects the Marches can be seen as a Frontier
• There are no Jump Routes (using rules established in Book 3)
• There are Communication Routes belonging to the Imperium
• The Imperium imposes Travel Zones to prevent travellers from reaching certain worlds

ADVENTURE 1: THE KINUNIR (1979)
Scenarios set in the Spinward Marches

Pertinent to this discussion:

• The Battle Cruiser described in the book use the High Guard rules for design, but is 1,200Dtons, keeping it within the ship size range found in Book 2
• The Library data and Rumors Matrixes describes a darker Imperium than what is later portrayed, with abuse of power against citizens of the Imperium and even members of the government
• In many respects the Marches is still a Frontier

ADVENTURES 2-4: (1980)
Scenarios set in the Spinward Marches and beyond

Pertinent to this discussion:

• Ships are built using the High Guard rules, but tonnage remains withing the range established in Book 2
• The Library Data and Rumor Matrixes continue to paint a darker, less powerful Imperium than what was portrayed later

DOUBLE ADVENTURES 1-6: (1980-1982)
Scenarios set in the Spinward Marches

Pertinent to this discussion:

• The Imperium remains dark and more dangerous that later material would suggest
• Ship sizes remain within the scope found in Book 2

***********************************

A BRIDGE TO THE OFFICIAL TRAVELLER UNIVERSE

BOOK 5: HIGH GUARD (1979 – 1ST  ED.; 1980 2ND ED.)
Almost setting agnostic expansion of the Traveller rules. “The Imperium” as a term is introduced exactly as in Book 4, but details of  naval structure are made explicit

Pertinent to this discussion:

• In Book 2 only military and scout vessels could use unrefined fuel without penalty. Book 5 introduces Fuel Purifiers that can be installed on any ship. This makes civilian travel and trade much easier for any interstellar civilization unrefined fuel can now be acquired at any C or D-class starport or any gas giant
• New rules for constructing ships that increase the possible size from 5000Dtons to 1,000,000,000Dtons
• Significantly, though the rules are supposed to be generic tools for any Referee to build ships of whatever size he wants, The Official Traveller Universe introduces ships of sizes well beyond those found in Book 2. In this way, the “Battle Cruisier” found in Adventure 1: The Kinunir clearly no longer makes sense due to its now relatively small size and limited armaments. (Countless years of retconning will be spent trying to explain why The Kinunir was ever called a “Battle Cruiser” in the first place. )
  
• The above point is tied to another important point:
• A shift away from Player Character driven play to a focus on the large scale strategic concerns of running an empire of 11,000. In other words, a shift from an RPG focused setting to a setting ready made for board games and large scale tactical deployments. (We can see this in the shift from Jump Routes to Communication routes; we can see this in the addition of “Destroyed” results for starship combat; we can see this the larger ships and ease of travel (and thus communication) introduced in Book 5.)
• The text introduces and formalizes the naval structure at the world, subsector, and sector level. The nature of The Imperium as an explicit setting is for the first time built into a Traveller Book.
  

****************************

THE OFFICIAL TRAVELLER UNIVERSE

SUPPLEMENT 5-LIGHTNING CLASS CRUISERS (1980)
A 60,000Dton Cruiser is now part of the . We have left the "small ship" setting of original Traveller behind. The 1,200 "Battle Cruiser" found in Adventure 1 now officially makes no sense.

TRAVELLER BOOKS 1-3 (1981)
The new edition of the rules are almost identical to the 1977 edition, although cleaned up and better laid out. The reason I bring it up is only to note that in this new edition the Communication Routes and Travel Zones introduced in Supplement 3 are now a standard assumption. My only issue with these items is that they make the default "remote, centralized government" a Traveller setting more intrusive and more involved with the setting of play -- even though the original, implied assumption was to put the PCs at the edges of the government (you know "remote"). There's nothing inherently wrong about these two items. But they do shift the dynamics of the setting of play.

So technically the 1981 edition mentions nothing about The Third Imperium and so is still setting free (apart from the implied setting details). But it adjusts the text to reflect certain elements of the OTU.

BOOK 6: SCOUTS (1983)
For the first time details about the Third Imperium (of the sort that had only appeared in Supplement 3 and Adventures (proper nouns, dates, and specific details of The Third Imperium)) are now in a Traveller Book. If you are playing with the Traveller rules, you are playing in the Third Imperium.

Quote from: CRKrueger;943910Did they ever do a reprint with those 71 pages merged in?

Unfortunately, no.

Quote from: estar;943914Don McKinney will be missed. I never talked much with him but I appreciated all he did for the Traveller community.

I talk to his son on Facebook, but Don was unique. He could hold several antagonistic opinions in his mind with a nod to them all which formed a consensus from that chaos.