Quote from: wombat1;1009915I offered a couple of my players, who were at hand, four choices:

1. Using an updated form of Privateers and Gentlemen (conformed to BRP system more fully) a sailing campaign set in the 1790s Med.  
2. Another installment of my Cthulhu Invictus game set in ancient Rome
3. A continuation of a medieval fantasy game I did using essentially Cthulhu Dark Ages/BRP, set in the old Avalon Hills Perilous Lands map
4. A BRP-ized Traveller, with less lethal character generation.

Somewhat to my surprise, they chose the 4th.

Why the surprise? I'd also have chosen the last option;)!

Quote from: ffilz;1009859I haven't run into players who would only play if it was 3I, but I have had players try to pull in too much 3I, I just gently correct them or ignore their input...

Christopher Kubasic, myself, and others have been waging a war to separate Classic Traveller from the 3I...

Frank

I don't understand why CT has to be seen as a Third Imperium game. I always felt like there are features of the assumed setting that would be hard to get rid of completely, but it is also quite adaptable to a wide range of possibilities. Dial up the psionics and add light sabers and you are playing Star Wars with slow ships. Turn off the psionics and nobility and add a gooey monster and you are playing Alien. Turn up the nobility and psionics and add shields and you are playing Dune. I just never took the details of the 3I history and geography terribly seriously.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1010468I don't understand why CT has to be seen as a Third Imperium game. I always felt like there are features of the assumed setting that would be hard to get rid of completely, but it is also quite adaptable to a wide range of possibilities. Dial up the psionics and add light sabers and you are playing Star Wars with slow ships. Turn off the psionics and nobility and add a gooey monster and you are playing Alien. Turn up the nobility and psionics and add shields and you are playing Dune. I just never took the details of the 3I history and geography terribly seriously.

I wholeheartedly agree, and the dogged conflation of the two is what makes it so frustrating to hang out at places like Citizens of the Imperium or the various Traveller FB/G+ groups.  I'm homebrewing a CT+* version of Fading Suns at the moment, and it's ridiculously easy to dial certain elements up or down for the desired setting.  It seems that in the last year or so there's been more pushback against the equation of Traveller and the 3I, but maybe it's just me discovering the various Proto-Traveller musings around the web and Christopher Kubasik's excellent "Traveller: Out of the Box" posts on his Tales to Astound blog.

*CT Books 1-3 + Supp 4 + additional mechanics borrowed from Barbarians of Lemuria, Blades in the Dark, and elsewhere

Our new game will be The Condemned in CoC 6th edition and after that BRP / Magic World.

Quote from: nightlamp;1010544I wholeheartedly agree, and the dogged conflation of the two is what makes it so frustrating to hang out at places like Citizens of the Imperium or the various Traveller FB/G+ groups.  I'm homebrewing a CT+* version of Fading Suns at the moment, and it's ridiculously easy to dial certain elements up or down for the desired setting.  It seems that in the last year or so there's been more pushback against the equation of Traveller and the 3I, but maybe it's just me discovering the various Proto-Traveller musings around the web and Christopher Kubasik's excellent "Traveller: Out of the Box" posts on his Tales to Astound blog.

*CT Books 1-3 + Supp 4 + additional mechanics borrowed from Barbarians of Lemuria, Blades in the Dark, and elsewhere

I can attest that Christopher Kubasik's blog was the impetus for me to go Classic Traveller Books 1-3 non-3I. I had started considering an SF campaign about 7 1/2 years ago, Traveller inspired, heavily inspired by Paul Gaziz's Eight Worlds and The Lair of Evil Dr Ganymede and his work on 3-D star mapping. I was planning on extended character generation, and collecting extended character generation careers across the web. But as I dug into things, I started asking more and more questions about why the heck would anyone trade. I started to consider that maybe the right way to do "Traveller" was to go back to the 1977 game with all it's assumptions, and having found Deciphering the Text Foundations of Traveller I started to consider running Traveller with 1970s sensibilities of future tech. And then Christopher Kubasic started posting this TRAVELLER: Out of the Box – Introduction... I had read others such as Victor Raymond's The Other "Three Little Booklets".

So the various blogging, that really took off with Christopher Kubasik's blog I think is very relevant to the revival of Classic Traveller Books 1-3 based games. Google+ having a Classic Traveller group with folks very friendly to the Books 1-3 game helped pull folks together (it's where I recruited originally for my game), and the growth on the odd74 board/ and Ruins of Murkhill board/ provided places to do Classic Traveller play by post.

BTW, I provide links to much of the material here: Traveller Reading

Frank

The Third Imperium is basically like Greyhawk: Sure, in principle someone out there thinks there is some sort of official history and story line, but really it is just a cool map and some starter ideas for when you are feeling lazy, and you can point it off in more or less any direction you like.

Frank, thanks for that link to Traveller Reading. Lots of neat stuff there I want to peruse. I also play using Books 1 through 3 (1977 edition) plus some material from 4 and Suplements 2, 4, 6, and 7. I've found it's all I need for my taste in sci fi gaming, actually probably even more than I need.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1010571The Third Imperium is basically like Greyhawk: Sure, in principle someone out there thinks there is some sort of official history and story line, but really it is just a cool map and some starter ideas for when you are feeling lazy, and you can point it off in more or less any direction you like.

Would that folks would let it be that. Sadly, like other "big" settings, there's a crowd of folks who want to armchair the setting, and if you try and talk about Traveller is anything else, they torpedo your discussions.

Frank

Quote from: Dumarest;1010577Frank, thanks for that link to Traveller Reading. Lots of neat stuff there I want to peruse. I also play using Books 1 through 3 (1977 edition) plus some material from 4 and Suplements 2, 4, 6, and 7. I've found it's all I need for my taste in sci fi gaming, actually probably even more than I need.

Always glad to see more folks be interested, and I'm always happy when people find the resources I've pulled together useful.

Frank

The next campaign I'm going to run (that I'm not running yet) is definitely Lion & Dragon.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1011327The next campaign I'm going to run (that I'm not running yet) is definitely Lion & Dragon.

Did you playtest your new RPG?

Quote from: FeloniousMonk;1011363Did you playtest your new RPG?

Lion & Dragon is based on the houseruled OSR mechanics I developed over the course of the original Dark Albion campaign. So it's had about 6 years of playtesting.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1011327The next campaign I'm going to run (that I'm not running yet) is definitely Lion & Dragon.

Will it be gonzo with genocidal robots and talking mushrooms?

1st edition WFRP is waiting in the wings with my own campaign world rather than the Old World.

Quote from: Dumarest;1012680Will it be gonzo with genocidal robots and talking mushrooms?

I don't care, if it's a play by post I'm signing up for it by Pundit. o_O