ShawnDriscoll
Cosmic Mongoose
Just say you can't debate.F33D said:
Best Books on the Third Imperium
- Thread starter jscott991
- Start date
Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
When Role Playing Games were New Traveller was on the bookshelves right alongside the Dungeon Masters Guide. My question is what did TSR do to make Dungeons & Dragons a house hold name, which GDW didn't do? I think what it didn't do was restrain its role playing game designers from inventing new things instead of support the system it already invented with new material to keep people coming back for more. Each new edition you had to learn the basic mechanics all over again, if you had an established campaign under the old system, you had to relearn everything in order to convert your old characters over. D&D was one system; many different settings, Traveller was one setting; many different systems.ShawnDriscoll said:
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
1. Fantasy settings, or at least the possibility of splitting them into a multiverse, requires much less suspension of disbelief by the nature of the genre, so using one ruleset across so many setting seems more like a welcome feature.
2. Except when you start using them for modern or future settings, though GURPS managed to overcome that, by what seems a very barebones approach though backed by a very clear narration.
3. D&D invested in colour illustrations; the players could easily imagine themselves there, and the idea was that through your adventures, you improved and acquired useful toys. You were literally writing your own saga, like a multi-season television series. Like Game of Thrones. Except you can come back from a Red Wedding.
4. In Traveller, you've already lived half your life, and what you're doing is leveraging that accumulated cash and life experience in the next stage of your life. More like Firefly than Star Wars.
5. Star Wars has this great store of visual images that the players can access, and media that you probably were exposed to before you decided to play the RPG, so you have a very clear idea what you can and should expect. While the physics don't make sense, you can chalk that up to the fantasy aspect.
6. Traveller seems to try to appear plausible science, besides a few necessary quirks to allow interstellar travel within a convenient timeframe. But it feels very black and white. Stark. Spartan. Sparse. It may even be far more detailed than Star Wars, but Star Wars is colourful and dynamic.
7. D&D was rather colourful; after WotC picked it up, it exploded in colour. Would MtG be half as successful without their cadre of artists? It's just a bunch of cards with numbers and a little narration?
2. Except when you start using them for modern or future settings, though GURPS managed to overcome that, by what seems a very barebones approach though backed by a very clear narration.
3. D&D invested in colour illustrations; the players could easily imagine themselves there, and the idea was that through your adventures, you improved and acquired useful toys. You were literally writing your own saga, like a multi-season television series. Like Game of Thrones. Except you can come back from a Red Wedding.
4. In Traveller, you've already lived half your life, and what you're doing is leveraging that accumulated cash and life experience in the next stage of your life. More like Firefly than Star Wars.
5. Star Wars has this great store of visual images that the players can access, and media that you probably were exposed to before you decided to play the RPG, so you have a very clear idea what you can and should expect. While the physics don't make sense, you can chalk that up to the fantasy aspect.
6. Traveller seems to try to appear plausible science, besides a few necessary quirks to allow interstellar travel within a convenient timeframe. But it feels very black and white. Stark. Spartan. Sparse. It may even be far more detailed than Star Wars, but Star Wars is colourful and dynamic.
7. D&D was rather colourful; after WotC picked it up, it exploded in colour. Would MtG be half as successful without their cadre of artists? It's just a bunch of cards with numbers and a little narration?
Star Wars might be huge, but at least there are books I can pick up that explain what the Galactic Empire is. In fact, I remember West End's Imperial Sourcebook as being excellent (and I still think I have a beaten up paperback copy somewhere) as a source to just learn (largely obsolete) information about how Palpatine's empire operated.
I'm guessing there is no Third Imperium sourcebook beyond what I've already ordered and read. That's disappointing and surprising.
I strongly suspect GURPS Nobles might be the best book out there to just learn about the empire without having to deal with the super localized focus of the sector books.
Thanks for the help all!
I'm guessing there is no Third Imperium sourcebook beyond what I've already ordered and read. That's disappointing and surprising.
I strongly suspect GURPS Nobles might be the best book out there to just learn about the empire without having to deal with the super localized focus of the sector books.
Thanks for the help all!
GypsyComet
Emperor Mongoose
The larger scale structures of the Imperium are pretty spot on from GT Nobles, but the lowest levels of Noble have shifted since then. Worlds now all have associated Knights instead of there being a thin paste of Baron spread over everything. There are still a LOT of Barons, though.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Though if they had tied it more closely to the European model, each planet would have a baronet as representative, leaving knighthood as a lifetime award and/or obligation.
Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
Star Trek had a multiverse which included he mirror universe and the antimatter universe, and there was an episode in Star Trek the Next Generation where Worf kept bouncing from one universe to the next, so having a multiverse in a science fiction setting is very possible.Condottiere said:
Mongoose has 2300, but I believe it changes the rules instead of applying the same rules set. In D&D Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms use the same rules set.Condottiere said:
Traveller could have done that, problem is, they were always tweaking and remaking their game system, TSR left it alone, and with the exception of 4th edition, each edition was similar enough to the previous edition that you could convert your character from the last edition to the next one. Over one hundred years has passed in the Forgotten Realms, while varius games in Traveller have been up and down the timeline, GURPS did a parallel timeline. By the way, what is the latest point in the OTU timeline? Isn't there a Fourth Imperium? How is the Fourth Imperium different from the Third?Condottiere said:
quote="Condottiere"]4. In Traveller, you've already lived half your life, and what you're doing is leveraging that accumulated cash and life experience in the next stage of your life. More like Firefly than Star Wars.
5. Star Wars has this great store of visual images that the players can access, and media that you probably were exposed to before you decided to play the RPG, so you have a very clear idea what you can and should expect. While the physics don't make sense, you can chalk that up to the fantasy aspect.
6. Traveller seems to try to appear plausible science, besides a few necessary quirks to allow interstellar travel within a convenient timeframe. But it feels very black and white. Stark. Spartan. Sparse. It may even be far more detailed than Star Wars, but Star Wars is colourful and dynamic.
7. D&D was rather colourful; after WotC picked it up, it exploded in colour. Would MtG be half as successful without their cadre of artists? It's just a bunch of cards with numbers and a little narration?[/quote]
Reynard
Emperor Mongoose
"but that didn't stop Star Wars Novels from being written."
Star Wars is a movie franchise that was a big hit with zillions of fans. There is tons of merchandise of all kinds including novels and RPGs. Notice the half dozen or so RPGs don't fare well or last long compared to a 40 year run for Traveller? Same can be said for Star Trek and many, many other scifi movies that were made into RPGs and had novels.
The weird thing is so many of the source books read like novels. From all the books I bought over the decades, I know a decent amount about the Imperium and surrounding regions, both overall and all those adventures that have added their view of the universe than I often get from the few novels the other franchises have spewed. Maybe someday someone will come out with THE novel that will be a good representative of a star empire with 11,000 incredibly diverse worlds actually mapped out. It's going to be a big challenge.
Star Wars is a movie franchise that was a big hit with zillions of fans. There is tons of merchandise of all kinds including novels and RPGs. Notice the half dozen or so RPGs don't fare well or last long compared to a 40 year run for Traveller? Same can be said for Star Trek and many, many other scifi movies that were made into RPGs and had novels.
The weird thing is so many of the source books read like novels. From all the books I bought over the decades, I know a decent amount about the Imperium and surrounding regions, both overall and all those adventures that have added their view of the universe than I often get from the few novels the other franchises have spewed. Maybe someday someone will come out with THE novel that will be a good representative of a star empire with 11,000 incredibly diverse worlds actually mapped out. It's going to be a big challenge.
Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
The OTU is a shared universe just like the Star Trek and Star Wars franchieses, I wonder why it can't be used for anything else than playing a game in? There were Dungeons & Dragons movies after all, they weren't much good. Of them all, I liked the Dragonlance Cartoon, Dragons of Autumn Twilight the best, too bad they never finished it. the best fantasy movie series I can think of was the Lord of the Rings, and D&D was partly based on that, in generalities, though D&D is more magic intensive than LOTR. Wizards are few and far in-between in LOTR, whereas in D&D you can find them in every city! In role playing terms a wizard in LOTR is an NPC, most PCs are non magic using characters that sometimes have items of great power but which are hard and sometimes dangerous to use. most of LOTR is straight medieval with monsters added. LOTR makes a better movie than most of the D&D movies which tend to be formulaic, the D&D novels are better, especially the Forgetten Realms ones. I haven't seen any Traveller Novels or Movies, and it seems a shame to use the setting only for Role Playing.Reynard said:
The thing about Star Wars is that the writers tend to play it fast and loose with continuity and consistency, this is especially true for the writers of the movie scripts. the novel writers tend to be more educated than the movie writers. I doubt for instance a writer of a straight star wars movie would make up a planet like Naboo, where you can pilot a submarine right through the planet's core! Would you have a Naboo like planet in your Traveller campaign? Logic and consistency plays a much more important part when playing a game than when writing a movie script. The problem with a planet like Naboo is for one, if a planet was water all the way through, at some point when the pressure builds up enough, the water solidifies into an ice that you can't pilot a submarine through any more than you can go through solid rock.
Solomani666
Mongoose
Tom Kalbfus said:
Ice expands when it freezes and contracts when it melts so why would water near the core freeze solid?
GypsyComet said:
Well, this is a level of detail that I probably don't care about.
The system described in Nobles produces far too few nobles to be believable anyway, so I was just glossing over that.
The description in Nobles of how the Emperor operates, the ministries, the archdukes, Capital, etc. seems to be the best collection of this information anywhere. It still reads as incomplete (or, more accurately, as supplemental rather than primary information), but it was a passable intro to the Imperium.
The sector books have far too many pages detailing the subsectors to be all that useful for this kind of "research."
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Disney is going through the EU, and presumably exorcising the stuff that's too incompatible, especially as they start on the third phase of the saga that basically pushes into this fanfiction.
Solomani666
Mongoose
F33D said:
That's why ice floats, and you don't find ice at the bottom of the ocean.
GypsyComet
Emperor Mongoose
jscott991 said:
How thick on the ground do you want nobles to be? While the Landed are a relatively small group (only a few dozen per subsector, tops, aside from Knights), the other types, and specifically the Honor nobles, can occur in much higher numbers.
Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
It is not that kind of ice which I am talking about. This kind of ice can exist at room temperature under high water pressure, basically the water molecules get so squeezed together they cannot move or flow like a liquid, they become solid, if you do this to any liquid it will solidify while under pressure. Naboo is supposedly a water world filled with loose rocks piled on top of each other, they edges of which rise above the surface to create land for the planet, while a lot of empty spaces exist between these loose rocks so you can pilot a submarine through the planets core. Now some asteroids are piles of loose rocks and dust, but not an Earth-sized planet! But I guess your average Star Wars Movie goer is not expected to know this. What about the average Traveller player? I wonder why Star Wars doesn't have cube-shaped planets? If we can suspend the laws of physics, why not have planets of various shapes besides spheroids?F33D said:
GypsyComet said:
Just as an example, nobles in France were 1% of the population around the time of the Revolution. That means a planet with 1 billion people could be expected to have about 10,000,000 nobles. That's way more than described in Nobles. In Hungary, aristocrats made up 5 percent of the population (in Castile, it might have been as high as 10 percent). Wiki says that nobles in Europe were probably about 2 percent of the 18th century European population. That's a lot more than 1 baron per world.
It's unrealistic to think that nobles would have any effect on a system as large and complicated as the Third Imperium if they number only in the thousands (which is the implication of the numbers in Nobles, if you extrapolate for 11,000 planets). That doesn't even begin to consider the major legitimacy questions that would arise if imperial citizens rarely ever interacted with or even saw the aristocracy. No one wants to be ruled (or influenced or dominated by) by a class that is almost a myth. Plus, it undermines the symbolic effect of their so-called unifying influence on imperial culture.
