ShawnDriscoll said:
Tom Kalbfus said:
There is a whole shelf in the book store on the Forgotten Realms, lots of books on Star Wars too, but I have yet to see a Third Imperium Novel. I wonder why? The Forgotten Realms, the Greyhawk Setting seems to have branched out into Novels, there is Star Trek, but no Third Imperium, that itself seems to be strictly a game setting with no branching out into Novels, not even a comic book setting, and Traveller has been around as long as D&D. The novels you site are some of those that Traveller is based on, but I have not seen a Traveller Novel. So tell me what it is about the Traveller setting that does not lend itself as well to Fiction writing as well as settings like The Forgotten Realms, Star Wars, and Star Trek? There is a lot of material, but mostly game setting material, I've seen Battletech Novels, I've seen Spelljammer Novels, even some Alternity Novels, and I think Alternity is in many respects similar to Traveller, but Traveller is strictly a RPG setting, I have not seen any branching out into novels.
There is a book or two. But nothing to write home about. D&D and Star Wars are household names. Traveller is no where close to that. It's not a franchise.
I seem to remember picking up those black books a little after I bought D&D Basic, Expert and AD&D in 1979-80 I think it was. Seems Traveller is almost as old as D&D, and at the time it was called the "D&D" of science fiction, and like Dungeons & Dragons it was largely generic, Dungeons & Dragons had a setting later known as the "Known World", Traveller had the OTU, so they both started out similarly in their respective spheres. Both in Traveller and D&D players played in the official setting and their own homebrew version of it, but from there the two RPGs parted ways. D&D split into Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons gained a setting called the World of Greyhawk, while Traveller continued on in its one setting the OTU. Later on there was Dragonlance, Ravenloft, The Forgotten Realms, the Dark Sun, all basically using the same rule set, there was even Planescape, and Spelljammer. GDW by contrast continued its original setting for Classic Traveller, but in invented entirely new game systems for each new edition of Traveller, then GDW started new game lines, One was Twilight 2000 and the other was originally called Traveller 2300, each one had its own separate and different game system, even the game systems of Twilight 2000 and Traveller 2300 which were set in the same universe, had different game systems. While TSR stayed consistent with only slight modifications to its game system with each new edition, until it made a mistake with the 4th edition by inventing a new game, which made it hard for the old experienced gamers used to the previous 3 editions, I bought the 4th edition and then became disgusted with it, as I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to play it, as nothing I learned before seemed to apply. I think the game rules mechanics people got too creative and should have saved their creativity for a new setting rather than try and reinvent the wheel as they did with the 4th edition, in the 5th edition, they pretty much went back to the original with a few tweaks, I bought Pathfinder, which I think should have been the 4th edition instead of what TSR put out, but I think they learned their lesson.
What did Traveller do during this time, they had a number of editions, each one incompatible with the previous one, I played the classic, but Megatraveller had lots of lookup tables for resolving conflict and skills checks, 2300 required a deck of playing cards, which I didn't like, I liked T20 very much, too bad it died. T20 like D20 takes a long time to roll up a character, creating NPCs was involved and time consuming. I think MGTraveller is more streamlined, you roll up skills during character creation rather than having to decide how your going to spend your skill points and pick feats. One think I always liked about Dungeons & Dragons, they had their own series of D&D novels. Dungeons & Dragons, unlike Star Wars or Star Trek RPGs were based on a movie or a television series. Traveller is Generic unlike Star Wars which is a specific setting, There could be multiple official classic traveler settings but there is not until recently that is, but one thing that is missing is a series of Novels, lots of authors write their own novels in their own settings which they create, but very few have wrote in the Traveller setting while many have written Dungeons & Dragons Novels in all the published D&D settings, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, etc.
