>I've also studied history (BS degree) and I seem to always been the one who usually ends up GMing in any RPG group I join. There is likely at least some degree of corelation, there.
>As to whether this helped in assembling the future history of Traveller, I would say that's fairly certain. The structure of the OTU and even that of individual adventures seems to have been inspired by >elements from both Roman and British imperial histories.

I do vaguely recalled Decline and Fall being an inspiration but I can't remember where I read it.  Or if I'm just getting muddled up with Asimov's well-known inspiration from DaF for his Foundation series.

>If one assumes that the basic nature of humanity will not change drastically in the future (e.g. transhuman memes such as the technological singularity and/or humanity "ascending" to an "better" stage >of existence via nanotechnology do not occur)

I do find this kind of future quite hard to imagine - even after reading some Stross.
(Without have read him or it beforehand, I chose 'Accelerando' from the (limited) list we get for our Library book group.  I had assumed I was just inflicting some bog-standard SF on them.  As it turned out, even I struggled to follow it and six years later hardly a monthly book group meeting goes past without 'Accelerando' being brought up as the most unreadable, ununderstandable, unenjoyable book we've ever tackled!  (I didn't think it was *that* bad, but novice SF readers had a different view.  Perhaps quite fairly).

> then study of the past is an excellent source of ideas for what may happen in the future. As the old proverb goes "there is nothing new under the sun."

I do occasionally ask myself if I should write *anything*  given it sometimes feels like we've been here before.  But it's all in the telling.  Felbrigg Herriot recently ran a really excellent online chat game of Traveller called The Experiments (which I think he has just published on DriveThru - must check).  It had certain features in common with a game Ed Quick ran a few years back at TravCon but between our characters and the exact detail, the experiences were different enough that I now have two great memories of waking up in some disorientation, in an unfamiliar 'facility', with 'things' out to get me... :-)

>>Would I be better at the future if I read and studied more
>>history (which was never a favourite at school but is becoming increasingly
>>interesting to me now a little late in the game)?

>I think so. See above.

As noted just now, I'm on the case.  I recently picked up a history of World War II by Hart and have dipped briefly into a couple of bits and am finding it immensely readable.

>>Do I need to get my ideas for adventures/characters/whatever
>>down now, l as quickly as possible, before the ability to envision the future
>>begins to fade?!  (Or is this kind of fictional invention different to imagining what could be a 'real' future?)

>While our brains do tend to get less flexible as time goes on, there are ongoing experiements with delaying or even reversing this effect. For example,  luminosity.com . Also, there will always be >newspapers (or the electronic equivalent). If you find yourself stuck for adventure ideas, just pick a real world story about something particularly stupid that criminals actually did, then think to yourself, >"Alright. What were the steps which led my PCs to this particular bit of insanity?"

will check out luminosity.com  thank you.
And I do like the newspaper idea.  In my once a year Traveller lecture I take the day's newspaper headlines and 6 'typical' Traveller character types and invite the students to pick one from one list and one from the other (and one from a UPP string list) and come up with their own three sentence adventure seed.

cheers

tc