Speaking of Don's work and Classic Traveller here is the last version of Consolidated Errata for Classic Traveller Don put together before he passed. I never knew the man, but I was grateful for the work he did.

As for the errata it is relatively slight and can be scribbled into any text version one has.

Also of note: Frank Filz has done an amazing thing and created a side-by-side comparison of the text of the 1977 version of Traveller Books 1-3, the 1981 version of Traveller Books 1-3, and the The Traveller Book (1982).

This might be too far into the weeds for some people! But it's been useful for me. There are lots of changes from the 1977 version -- some large, some small, and some have rather far reaching implication about how to play the game that I think a lot of people blow past without really thinking them through.

Wow! Thanks for sharing all that. Quite interesting, even though my foray into Traveller was quite limited.

Don's difference table is interesting. I studied it until I could figure out that I had the 1981 edition. There sure was a quite a number of fiddly but significant differences in the details between the versions and the errata.

I just had books 1-3 and rolled up & mapped out a couple of generic sectors and planets, made a few ships and NPCs and ran adventuring long enough for the PCs to get in some fights, sign up as crew on a ship, take over the ship, and get in a spaceship battle. I liked the vector-based ship movement in combat, but the players started to get concerned that I was enjoying the naval combat resolution while they felt a bit helpless and out of their depth as crew aboard a ship that could get blasted based on what other ships were like and how they moved in space.

I also had GDW's Imperium board game which covered war between Terra and Imperium, and I wondered if it was supposed to be the same setting as the Traveller setting which I had no books for, or if it was just a coincidence of naming. In the board game, the Imperium is relatively generic and since it was distant to Terra, I assumed it was mainly non-human space aliens (yes?). It looks like from the comment chatter on Board Game Geek, which I've only skimmed, that the answer is that it is sort of the same Imperium, perhaps as an afterthought to original Traveller, but that the map is 90 degrees off, flipped, with a few stars and jump lines removed, moved, or renamed.

So... the Imperium is non-human space aliens who developed before Terra and fought a long-distance war or several with Terra... and then eventually Terra joined the Imperium, and that's where the human PC's come from? Is this "Spinward Marches" (I always read it as Marshes - LOL) part of the Imperium map?

Quote from: Skarg;944091So... the Imperium is non-human space aliens who developed before Terra and fought a long-distance war or several with Terra... and then eventually Terra joined the Imperium, and that's where the human PC's come from? Is this "Spinward Marches" (I always read it as Marshes - LOL) part of the Imperium map?

The Imperium game takes place in the Sol sector. Traveller was eventually placed in that game's setting, two Imperiums later.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943950I 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.

This is amazing! Thanks for sharing.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943950I 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.

This is amazing! Thanks for sharing.

Quote from: The Butcher;944170This is amazing! Thanks for sharing.

Quote from: Skarg;944091Wow! Thanks for sharing all that.

You are welcome!

Quote from: Skarg;944091Don's difference table is interesting...

To clarify, Frank Filz created the difference in edition table.

Quote from: Skarg;944091So... the Imperium is non-human space aliens who developed before Terra and fought a long-distance war or several with Terra... and then eventually Terra joined the Imperium, and that's where the human PC's come from? Is this "Spinward Marches" (I always read it as Marshes - LOL) part of the Imperium map?

Shawn has the right of it in terms of the history. Also: the Imperium has always been human based. The Ancients in the OTU scattered human genetic material across the stars a long, long time ago. Humans (or human-based stock) are at war with each other in the board game Imperium. (I owned it, too. Loved it.)

GDW tended to cram things together (again, ad hoc). They had been working on a much larger board game for interstellar war and used that game's background (involving the Vargr, the Aslan and so on) to create the background for their Traveller RPG. From everything I've read all of this was built up on the fly... which is why you can find Traveller mailing lists and forum boards filled with people arguing about how to make all the contradictory bits of the setting make sense.

But as this happens you can see how the Classic Traveller's game line shifts focus from RPG support to being more about a board game, whether shifting para-military personal combat to skirmish combat; PCs on board a ship starships combat to flee combat (Adventure 5: Trillion Credit Squadron); and the shift of away for material focused on the concerns of adventuring PCs to generating fluff about the politics and concerns of running an interstellar Imperium.

Given the original premise of Traveller (ex-military with a particular set of skills head off to worlds beyond to carve their own fate and fortune) this shift is, in my view, pronounced.

The Imperium is a solution.
The problem with the future that the past doesn't have is agreement.
Once something has happened, it can be agreed upon to be a certain way.
With the future there are an unlimited number of directions things can go.
This fragments peoples vision and makes it hard to get people into a "shared" image of how things are.
History and popular fantasy doesn't have this problem.

Star Wars and Star Trek provide shared visions of the future but, if you don't want to play in those, it is much more difficult to get agreement.
In 1977, Star Wars had not yet swept popular culture so it wasn't something Traveller could depend on as a unifier, besides being an owned property.
Without The Imperium and Spinward Marches, I don't think the game would have survived till now.
=

Quote from: Greentongue;944206The Imperium is a solution.

Without The Imperium and Spinward Marches, I don't think the game would have survived till now.
=

Eh? Only two times have I used the Imperium and the Spinward Marches for my Traveller game.

The first was in 1981, When I ran a game for awhile that was set in the Spinward Marches. I had purchased The Fifth Frontier War, and was using that game as a campaign setting for my players. The other was in 2015, When I started a Spinward Marches campaign for my son.  So, for thirty-eight of forty years I was using one of my various homebrew Traveller game settings. Traveller didn't survive because I played in the Imperium. Traveller survives because I like the game.

Quote from: Simlasa;943744My 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.

Psionics was an obsession of Astounding's editor John W. Campbell and if one wanted to be published regularly there you had to accomodate his quirks. Many of the better writers tired of his demands and restrictions (eg. humans must always be better and defeat the aliens). So while psionics was a popular idea in 50s sci-fi that accounts for the overabundance of psionic stories in Astounding.

In 70s scifi it feels like psionics were often a rebuke to materialism and a metaphor for the psychedelic experience (note all the drugs that allow psychic powers, most famously Dune's spice).

Quote from: Greentongue;944206Without The Imperium and Spinward Marches, I don't think the game would have survived till now.

Traveller has still survived after all the various settings that each edition used. The two most popular editions of Traveller to this day are just core books with no setting in them.

Thanks, Kubasik, that was a very informative breakdown, and one that effectively makes your argument for underlying changes in assumption.

The next bit I guess is why?  Both OD&D and Traveller, which seemed to start from the assumption that GMs would create their own campaigns/milieus with them moved towards having a sort of "default setting" as a example/explanation of the rules, but really, you could argue the settings changed the rules more than the rules changed the setting (an example of Vreeg's Rule).

So where did the "setting shift" come from?  Were people specifically asking for it? Does a specific setting make for more concrete examples?  We kind of see the same thing with the Perrin Conventions merging with White Bear, Red Moon and becoming the very setting specific RuneQuest.  Did RuneQuest have a market effect on injecting more system into Traveller and D&D?

Quote from: CRKrueger;944278So where did the "setting shift" come from?

My own theory, as suggested in the follow up post:

It began as GDW began finding more and more ways to build out the setting to handle board games (Snapshot, Dark Nebula, Mayday), miniatures games (Striker), and war games (Fifth Frontier War, Invasion:Earth). Given the scope that started with, I could imagine someone in the GDW offices hoping to end up with something on the scale of their Europa series, but in space.

A rules set and implied setting designed for awesome RPG play (the value of communication moving at the speed of travel can never be oversold as a terrific conceit for an RPG setting) slowly left the focus of Player Characters and stretched itself to the strategic concerns and political operations of an emperor of 11,000 worlds.

I think it's right there.

Quote from: GameDaddy;944222Eh? Only two times have I used the Imperium and the Spinward Marches for my Traveller game.

I was not implying that it was _required_ for play just that to give a framework for diverse players to have a shared vision of assumptions.
Sci-Fi is so diverse a genre that it is hard to establish a mutually agreed framework without the players studying the GMs personal setting in depth.
With an established background, it made it a lot easier to recruit players.
Without players, games die.
Looks at how Pathfinder does compared to rule systems without established setting.
=

Quote from: Greentongue;944435Looks at how Pathfinder does compared to rule systems without established setting.

Pathfinder had the advantage of using a D20 die, and the hate for D&D4e. To most "role-players", a 20-sided die means that a game mechanic is awesome.

As the guy who probably kicked off this sub-topic, I want to say a few things:

I have nothing against GDW having a house setting. Greyhawk helped D&D, and it makes sense for a publisher to create more material for sale.

D&D managed to have multiple settings. Traveller could have done this as well. I'm baffled as to why this did not happen.

The setting of the Third Imperium, while grand and intriguing in many respects, became too stale and bland for my taste. It began as a place of intrigue and adventure at its fringe and became (I'll repeat) pretty much 20th Century First World Europe in Space... which I will never find enticing. Note that they had to destroy it to make it feel like exciting things could happen.

The fact that the setting ultimately did not match the tone and the rules of Traveller Books 1-3 will always be a weird disconnect for me. Ultimately, I prefer the sense of danger, distance, and non-cosmpolitian feel of interstellar space implied in the original Traveller rules against the "Space Travel is Just Like Air Travel" text found in the Traveller Book and beyond.

Now, I get that any setting will have to tweak those rules. But in this case the house setting blew past the rules and implied setting I like and gave me something I didn't care about.

Moreover, given the conflation of the rules with the setting one often finds oneself trying to talk about Traveller the game online (which is a fun thing to do) and is constantly confronted by people declaring how you're doing everything wrong with Traveller the setting and going on at length about some supplement from Steve Jackson Games which one has never read and doesn't care about -- which is not as much fun.

Let there me a house setting! It makes sense. But how it all shook out... that as I'm not much of a  fan of.