Timothy Collinson wrote: "Did Marc Miller do such an excellent job of envisioning and describing a 57th century because of his background as a history major (IIRC)?" to which I responded, "I'm somewhat less enthusiastic with Traveller's future history than you are," to which he responded, "Oh? You've got me curious. Less enthusiastic about the detail?Or the scope? Or certain bits? (I know some struggle with TNE)" to which I am responding as follows:
Five Absurdities of the Official Traveller Universe
1. Grandfather
We are told that “grandfather” (aka Yaskoydray) was a supergenius born into a TL10 society who pretty much single-handedly led his people to the stars. From Adventure 12: “Secret of the Ancients”, page 42: “He decided that he needed help with his experiments, so he took over the world. He decided that he didn’t want to get old and die, so he found out how to live forever. He wanted to know some facts about the stars and about other worlds, so he invented the jump drive and went to visit them. Then he decided that the Droyne were not intelligent enough to help with the really important projects, so he decided to have children.” I don’t care how smart somebody is. You can be Einstein times ten. You are not going to be able to do this. Progress takes time, and there’s usually politics that gets in the way. One might argue that although this abbreviated history doesn’t make sense in a human context, it still might be possible in the context of an alien race with a very different socio-political system. Hence, maybe this is just a failure of imagination on my part, but just not buying it. For one thing, if he was able to find a way to live forever by using TL10 as a jumping off point, why hasn’t the Imperium been able to find the same at whatever its maximum tech level happens to be? No, there’s just too much here that doesn’t add up.
2. Humans/Earthlings being all over the place
Here, we are led to believe that “grandfather” in his infinite wisdom, took a liking to human beings and decided to bring them to various star systems where they were able to create their own star-spanning civilizations. This is so that the Imperial History can conform to the backdrop of the board game Imperium [
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperium_(board_game) ]. But how realistic is this? I mean, putting aside what I just said about “grandfather”, how realistic is it that humans would become the primarily beneficiaries of this sophont/slave transplant program? Consider that you get two human “empires” as a result of this, the Vilani and the Zhodani. Futhermore, the Vargr, albeit not human, began as earthlings, so out of the six major races, two of them just so happen to derive from Earth, and between them they control over half of known space. It just seems sort of incredible that humans/earthlings ended up being so lucky.
3, Solomani take-over
Speaking of the Vilani, how likely is it that the upstart Solomani would be able to defeat them? This has been talked to death on the list before, and the main arguments in favor of this was that the Vilani had been pushing their weight around for too long, and so the Solomani came around at just the right time to topple their house of cards. But if the Vilani Imperium was primed to collapse, then why was it the Solomani humans (the privileged race from the privileged planet) who got to end up being the benefactors of extraordinary timing and not some other race or society? Once again, we have to bear in mind that this whole history comes out of a board game. One could argue that I’m suffering from a lack of imagination, but to my way of thinking, the whole premise just seems terribly unlikely, as unlikely as, say, Boudicca’s army conquering Britain and then marching through France and Spain and on to Rome to conquer the Roman Empire. Granted, if GDW had adopted my mindset, Imperium (the board game) wouldn’t have been much fun to play. And when it comes to board games, I would agree that playability is definitely more important than realism. But when you port that same setting into an RPG, now you’re dealing a whole different animal, and so things sort of need to make sense.
4. Psionics
I know that psionics is a trope coming out of the pulp-SF literature, but it’s absurd. It feels to me like somebody was trying to wedge magic into science fiction, and the result is, predictably enough, science fantasy. That’s fine if that’s the genre you want, but just understand that that’s the genre you’re getting.
5. The Imperium
This last one is potentially a very long topic, and I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but my main premise is that even putting aside the unlikelihoods of “grandfather”, his human/earthling seeding program, and the Solomani takeover, you still have to deal with the final unlikelihood of there being a massive, star-spanning, mostly human-governed empire that lasts for over a thousand years but which still somehow manages to remain essentially hands-off with respect to the politics of its member worlds. Politically and historically, I find this final premise to be inconceivable. If there is anything we have learned from history, it is that power begets the use of power, and the use of power begets the abuse of power. Granted, not all empires throughout history have been the epitome of evil. One could argue that the British Empire, in particular, did a lot more good than evil, but, of course, this may have been a function of the increasing influence of parliament, something that has no analogue in the Imperium save for the largely toothless Imperial Moot that has but one power that it seems very unlikely to ever use.
Having said all this, I don’t think we can really fault the game designers. Traveller’s Imperium was birthed fairly early in RPG history, and so it probably wasn’t put through the sort of critical review process that a modern RPG would be subjected to prior to publication. Likewise, we have to remind ourselves that the setting grew out of a board game, and given the nature of board games, it doesn’t seem to me that you even need a critical review process. After all, board game settings are not typically explored and detailed to the same extent as RPG settings. Hence, I think we should respect the OTU as being remarkable for its time, sort of like we might view the 1st edition of Greyhawk. In short, it is a triumph of early RPG literature, but we should move beyond it, either by modifying it, which many have done, or by creating our own unique settings which may be substantially different in a number of ways. I think the biggest mistake that we have made as a community is our apparent determination to stick with the OTU for so long when the resources have long been available to create wholly new Traveller settings, each of which could have its own unique set of standards and assumptions. Granted, a proliferation of such alternate Traveller universes would substantially change the feel of Traveller, perhaps even spawning a variety of offshoots. Traveller purists and those longing for a sense of nostalgia would no doubt rue the day the fan-base fragmented, but I think that ultimately it would be for the good, as although Traveller has been kept alive by a succession of publishers, my sense is that it has grown increasingly out-of-touch with the changing face of science-fiction in the 21st century.
Now where did I put those asbestos skivvies?