A History of Traveller - coming early April!

[MongooseMatt]

"This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller" comes out early April. Written by Shannon Appelcline, it covers the entire history of Traveller!

Shannon has worked hard, scouring records, paging through dusty books and interviewing the great and the good of Traveller to come up with the definitive history of Traveller, from the earliest days of GDW to the present day. This is, frankly, fascinating reading for any fan of Traveller.

For chapter breaks we have commissioned new art reimagining covers of classic books and box sets.

View attachment 4454

 

[phavoc]

Cool! Will there be more info than what he wrote in the Designers and Dragons 2nd edition series of books?

 

[JoeKundlak]

Great!

 

[MongooseMatt]

Cool! Will there be more info than what he wrote in the Designers and Dragons 2nd edition series of books?

Much, much, much more...

 

[hughsieman]

As I'm new to Traveller I'm really looking forward to this. As well as grabbing all of the Mongoose 2E books bit by bit I've also be buying the odd book from older editions on eBay as I love diving into the history of games like this, especially when they've been going for decades.

Is the format of this the same as the other Mongoose 2E books?

 

[MongooseMatt]

As I'm new to Traveller I'm really looking forward to this. As well as grabbing all of the Mongoose 2E books bit by bit I've also be buying the odd book from older editions on eBay as I love diving into the history of games like this, especially when they've been going for decades.

Is the format of this the same as the other Mongoose 2E books?

No, this will look sufficiently different.

 

[hughsieman]

Intriguing...

 

[appelcline]

Cool! Will there be more info than what he wrote in the Designers and Dragons 2nd edition series of books?

As Matt said, much, much more.

I started from ground zero with the new book, spending the first four or five months simply reviewing and recording source materials before I wrote a single word. Over the course of a year and three quarters I worked my way through about 300 Traveller/GDW/Mongoose magazines, plus I have no idea how many interviews, podcasts, news reports, press releases, forum posts, and other sources. (They're all referenced on many, many pages.) Designers & Dragons was never used as a source, though I did check it here and there to make sure that my understanding was consistent and I wasn't missing anything. (But if I found something that needed more attention, I was out to other sources once more.)

Of everything, I feel like the DGP material might be the closest in content between the two volumes, but the word count is still likely 50% higher (it's a little hard to count because it's scattered amidst two chapters). Everything else is much more extensive. There's more on the origins of Traveller, there's more on its development at GDW, there's more on what caused the various crises in the line, there's much more on the development of the Imperium, there's material on fandom, on HIWG, and on a lot of smaller publishers during the "Long Night" that was never even touched on in Designers & Dragons, and there's more on Mongoose's two iterations of the game and some of their ups and downs (much of which postdated my finalization of Designers & Dragons over a decade ago). And, of course, it's all in cohesive singular narrative.

The new book came in at 112,000 words. In contrast the core histories in Designers & Dragons were 10,500 words for GDW, 3,500 for DGP, 4,000 for Imperium, and 8,500 for Mongoose (and of course the first and last of those contained discussions of lots more than Traveller).

I look forward to reviewers considering the book on its own merits, but personally, as a researcher, writer, and historian I think it's the best book I've ever produced. And I'm thrilled those stars aligned for a game that I have such a fondness for and history with (but that's probably why they did, it was a very fun project).

 

[phavoc]

As Matt said, much, much more.

I started from ground zero with the new book, spending the first four or five months simply reviewing and recording source materials before I wrote a single word. Over the course of a year and three quarters I worked my way through about 300 Traveller/GDW/Mongoose magazines, plus I have no idea how many interviews, podcasts, news reports, press releases, forum posts, and other sources. (They're all referenced on many, many pages.) Designers & Dragons was never used as a source, though I did check it here and there to make sure that my understanding was consistent and I wasn't missing anything. (But if I found something that needed more attention, I was out to other sources once more.)

Of everything, I feel like the DGP material might be the closest in content between the two volumes, but the word count is still likely 50% higher (it's a little hard to count because it's scattered amidst two chapters). Everything else is much more extensive. There's more on the origins of Traveller, there's more on its development at GDW, there's more on what caused the various crises in the line, there's much more on Imperium, there's material on fandom, on HIWG, and on a lot of smaller publishers during the "Long Night" that was never even touched on in Designers & Dragons, and there's more on Mongoose's two iterations of the game and some of their ups and downs (much of which postdated my finalization of Designers & Dragons over a decade ago). And, of course, it's all in cohesive singular narrative.

The new book came in at 112,000 words. In contrast the core histories in Designers & Dragons were 10,500 words for GDW, 3,500 for DGP, 4,000 for Imperium, and 8,500 for Mongoose (and of course the first and last of those contained discussions of lots more than Traveller).

I look forward to reviewers considering the book on its own merits, but personally, as an author, writer, and historian I think it's the best book I've ever produced. And I'm thrilled those stars aligned for a game that I have such a fondness for and history with (but that's probably why they did, it was a very fun project).

Thanks for the info. I read the 4 volumes of Designers 2nd edition so I'm looking forward to an expanded version. The history of the RPG companies is quite interesting.

 

[OriginalCaruso]

Hats off to you @appelcline - an amazing feat, well done!

I am very much looking forward to reading

 

[Sigtrygg]

So did you do "face to face" interviews with anyone - Frank, Dave, Joe, Chuck?
Or is all of this based on stuff I already have?

Did you read the entire Ask Dave thread at CotI?

Or the Ask Joe thread?

 

[appelcline]

So did you do "face to face" interviews with anyone - Frank, Dave, Joe, Chuck?
Or is all of this based on stuff I already have?

Did you read the entire Ask Dave thread at CotI?

Or the Ask Joe thread?

Definitely on the threads. There's also a good one on Chuck Gannon talking about his lost work.

I consider face-to-face interviews a last resort. Basically, the further you get away from the time period, the less reliable any accounts become. So, announcements, design notes, and news at the time tend to have the best fidelity, then interviews at the time, then interviews in most recent times, and then interviews you conduct yourself. It wasn't true for any of the Traveller authors that I remember, but definitely for some of the history writing I've done, I've come to the conclusion that some designers were very unreliable in their modern-day interviews. And, you never know when there's something who might be unreliable and you just haven't figured it out.

Nonetheless, I do go to that last resort when there's a gap in the record or a question I can't answer, in which case I ask them just that one thing. So, I did ask a few questions to Marc, Matthew, Joe, Chuck, and a few others while writing.

As for everything being based on stuff you have? Maybe. As an example of my list of core references for Chapter 7, on MegaTraveller, not including separate references for DGP or the computer games of the era, contains: production records from GDW, numerous Tiffany Star articles (mostly news), a few Travellers' Digest, Continuum & Challenge & MegaTraveller Journal articles (again, mostly news, but also some nice historical reports in Challenge #29), Chuck Gannon's CotI thread & more info on his home page, Dave Nilsen's CotI thread, Loren Wiseman's website (archived), Marc Miller's Escapist interview, and Marc Miller's Stargazer's World interview. There's a nice (often long) list of references on every chapter for folks wanting to look into some of the original discussions. 40 total for the core references in chapter 7. Then another 17 for DGP (covering the back third or so of their history) and the computer games.

 

[Sigtrygg]

That is excellent work.

I'm looking forward to it.

 

[apastuszak]

I assume this will be a "history" book? Any chance there will be an audiobook?

 

[collins355]

Commodore Bwana turned up on the TNE mailing list sometime in the middle of last decade. He sent a long series of emails I guess explaining things from his point of view. It was kind of a coda to that CoTI thread. It had some more tidbits, for instance, about the Big Secrets (TM) he was going to unleash in the Belly of the Beast adventure arc, and what was behind the Black Curtain.
I don't know if you were on that mailing list, Shannon, but certainly Dave poured out a lot over a period of a few months.

 

[appelcline]

I assume this will be a "history" book? Any chance there will be an audiobook?

This is Free Trader Beowulf is definitely the history of the game. 300 dense pages worth covering all the major iterations of the game, the publishers, the licensees, and the fandom.

Whether there will be an audiobook is a question for Mongoose. (We do have audiobooks for my main Designers & Dragons books, but that's because we had an all-star audiobook creator who asked if he could create audiobooks for the series. My best guess for this one is that we'd need someone to step up to do so, but I'll certainly mention them to Colby Elliott, who did an excellent job on the others.)

 

[appelcline]

Commodore Bwana turned up on the TNE mailing list sometime in the middle of last decade. He sent a long series of emails I guess explaining things from his point of view. It was kind of a coda to that CoTI thread. It had some more tidbits, for instance, about the Big Secrets (TM) he was going to unleash in the Belly of the Beast adventure arc, and what was behind the Black Curtain.
I don't know if you were on that mailing list, Shannon, but certainly Dave poured out a lot over a period of a few months.

I did use some of the various mailing lists on occasion, but they're real bears to search through, so it was mainly when I was looking for a very specific thing. I don't think I hit Dave's discussions on the TNE list, but then he was really talkative about why they were doing things in Challenge and then he gave lots of nice discussions afterward on CoTI, so I had a really solid basis for the era and wasn't looking for more. But, doubtless there were little tidbits here and there that I would have loved.

 

[RajunCajun3025]

"This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller" comes out early April. Written by Shannon Appelcline, it covers the entire history of Traveller!

Shannon has worked hard, scouring records, paging through dusty books and interviewing the great and the good of Traveller to come up with the definitive history of Traveller, from the earliest days of GDW to the present day. This is, frankly, fascinating reading for any fan of Traveller.

For chapter breaks we have commissioned new art reimagining covers of classic books and box sets.

View attachment 4454View attachment 1656

I have very fond memories of this game. Might still have it somewhere laying about.

 

[GabrielGABFonseca]

Do we perchance know how early in 'early April' early April really is?
I'd be lying if I said I'm not very excited for this book.

 

[MongooseMatt]

A week today!