OTU date?

[rust]

They'll be dead by time the Fourth Imperium happens...

Nah, just let them find a cache of anagathics. 8)

 

[Rick]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that Virus and the TNE recovery era was going to be rewritten? That the rebellion was going to be redone and ended slightly differently (probably without Virus?). Not too sure where I heard it though.

 

[rust]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that Virus and the TNE recovery era was going to be rewritten?

If something like this was announced, I must have missed it,
and also the debates it should have caused.

 

[Hans Rancke]

I don't have a problem with "but I can never be important!" arguments because they are, in Traveller, patently false. Sure, you can never be EMPEROR, but that job is frankly pretty boring in a gaming context. You want to be a Duke? We can swing that, even if certain *specific* Duchies aren't available. Business magnate? Pah, the Imperium is swimming in them, so there is always room for one more...

There are nondescript duchies enough to provide all the ducal titles you could ever need, but IMO a high duke would be pretty much as boring as the Emperor would be. Sure, you might be able to come up with an adventure that a duke could participate in, but only at the cost of blowing off his ducal duties (case in point, Norris' trip to Algine to fetch his warrant where he had to pretend he was seriously ill). I suppose an honour duke might work, but the celebrity status would be a heavy handicap. Just imagine Ex-king Constantine of Greece crewing a tramp freighter and multiply the incongruity by a couple of orders of magnitude.


Hans

 

[rust]

I guess one would have to design a plot with a character
somewhat like the historical queen Kristina of Sweden,
who abdicated in order to live a more adventurous life.
On the other hand, even after her abdication she was
accompanied on her travels by an entourage of "only"
255 people and 247 horses - the equivalent of a small
fleet of Traveller yachts for an abdicated duke ...

 

[Hans Rancke]

I guess one would have to design a plot with a character somewhat like the historical queen Kristina of Sweden, who abdicated in order to live a more adventurous life. On the other hand, even after her abdication she was accompanied on her travels by an entourage of "only" 255 people and 247 horses...

Did eight of them walk or did they ride double?

- the equivalent of a small fleet of Traveller yachts for an abdicated duke ...

Oh, I think an honour duke would have a BIG yacht. And possibly a couple of armed escorts.


Hans

 

[GypsyComet]

Let's move "how do you play/run a noble?" to its own topic, so we don't lose it...

 

[andreav]

My solutions to the "stuff happens" problem is to either setting my games *way* earlier (I'm a big fan of the Long Night and M0) or use the Faraway Sector solution. Take a group of colonists (fleeing the collapse of the RoM, the Terran conquest after the IW's or maybe the expansion of the Imperium in M0), send them about four or five sectors beyond charted space. Leave to stand for about a thousand or two years and hey presto an OTU game setting you can do pretty much what you like with.

 

[pasuuli]

I like the Faraway Sector home brew setting as well. It allows room for a little ATU/Firefly action.

The resources available for the Third Imperium are great though, and Mongoose has a lot of it gathered up and redone nicely. As a referee I consider it my duty to confound the timeline and move borders where needed, on a per campaign basis, but it's good to have the canonical data available so I can pick and choose my battles, so to speak.

 

[andreav]

I like the Faraway Sector home brew setting as well. It allows room for a little ATU/Firefly action.

The resources available for the Third Imperium are great though, and Mongoose has a lot of it gathered up and redone nicely. As a referee I consider it my duty to confound the timeline and move borders where needed, on a per campaign basis, but it's good to have the canonical data available so I can pick and choose my battles, so to speak.

If I'm playing a game set in the OTU (or at least the charted space bit of it) I always give the players a date and tell them that's when the universe got rebooted. Usually its the same date as the game starts, but sometimes not

Mind you, I've always assumed MgT was a reboot