Preview: World Builder's Handbook

[Geir]

Same, using my Dad's Vic 20

(Oh, great, now those old farts are going to go on and on about acoustical couplers, tape drives, and the days when they had all their teeth).
My roommate and I pooled our funds to get a Commodore 64 for freshman year of college. Even with a real live floppy drive (single sided, single density) and an Epson dot matrix printer (with some weird serial-to-parallel converter cable) it cost about half of what I just forked out for an emergency vet for Radioactive Cat(TM), one of our three non-standard felines.

But back to the point. I hope the WBH has a great cover when it comes out. I've only seen a little bit of the interior art and I gave no art direction whatsoever, except a few crappy diagrams.

 

[alex_greene]

Yeah, my early computer weighed in at just about 4 tons.

 

[MongooseMatt]

This book has checklists in it.

Just saying.

 

[GabrielGABFonseca]

That's how originally learned to write code... using Commodore Basic.

What I want to try and do once I have my hand on the book is implement it in a Jupyter Notebook that already feeds the generated system into an N-Body Simulation using the Rebound library.
Will I use it in my Traveller game? What!? No! That'd be entirely too clumsy and overkill for play.

Will I do it anyway for my own amusement? Absolutely!

 

[AndrewW]

(Oh, great, now those old farts are going to go on and on about acoustical couplers, tape drives, and the days when they had all their teeth).

Hey now, first modem I had wasn't an acoustical coupler (though it couldn't dial and had to dial up then get the modem to connect). At one time or another have had a number of the Commodore's (C64, C126, C16, Vic-20). Wrote a main world generation program (Classic Traveller) in BASIC on a Pied Piper (Z80B, CP/M) once upon a time.

 

[Galadrion]

Any Altair aficionados here?

 

[Geir]

This diversion is unfortunately confirming my fear that Traveller's peak demographic is males in their late 50s - or older. Good news: I know how to write for them. Bad news: we're not increasing in numbers.

Book is out. Go buy one.

 

[AndrewW]

This diversion is unfortunately confirming my fear that Traveller's peak demographic is males in their late 50s - or older. Good news: I know how to write for them. Bad news: we're not increasing in numbers.

Hey, not 'late' 50's just yet.

 

[steelbrok]

At my table last night, a player asked "What's Traveller?". He's in his 20s

 

[Vormaerin]

I'm the only one in my Traveller group that is in their 50s. Everyone else is 10 to 30 years younger.

 

[CordwainerFish]

I think my referee is a few years older than I am, but most (all?) of the other players are somewhat younger.

(Context: I remember when Seventies hair was just called hair.)

 

[Geir]

(Context: I remember when Seventies hair was just called hair.)

In the '70s I had all of my hair.
It's encouraging that there are a significant group of people playing Traveller who never had characters die during generation, and not just so I can keep writing Traveller stuff. Traveller in the 70's was already more of a homage to '50s science fiction*, what with psionics and of people dying of old age in their, well... even before their 70s. And the core reconstituted 2D6 system as in MgT 1 and Cepheus is adaptable to far, far more than the OTU. Or even just science fiction.

Of course, now Marc is in his 70s (there's a theme here, folks) so it's unclear how many more decades the OTU canon will keep coherence. Maybe there's a succession plan. Don't know. Haven't asked. Gygax died over a decade ago and D&D is still going strong, even if it is owned by Hasbro - and that new movie actually wasn't bad.

Somebody recently asked me how many people buy and play Traveller these days, and I don't know (haven't asked) but I guessed at least 5000, just from some very old historical GDW numbers and the 1000+ on the typical Kickstarter. Maybe that's low. How many sales does it take to be Mithral on Drivethru? - and that's not counting the direct sales or Amazon or somebody actually picking up a physical copy in one of the few remaining gaming or book stores.

*(Yes, I realize the Dumarest saga began publishing in the '60s, but - still haven't read it, It's on a list.)
Great, now I'm footnoting forum posts. And not getting my next project done. Time to adjust the meds.

 

[Arkathan]

This diversion is unfortunately confirming my fear that Traveller's peak demographic is males in their late 50s - or older. Good news: I know how to write for them. Bad news: we're not increasing in numbers.

Book is out. Go buy one.

Bought mine...
As to late fifties, one of the players in my current game is the adult son of one of my former Traveller players... in a group I ran before his parents were married.
He buys the books too, so there ARE some younger players.

 

[Sigtrygg]

[tongueincheek]
"Of course, now Marc is in his 70s (there's a theme here, folks) so it's unclear how many more decades the OTU canon will keep coherence."
Lol, lol, lol, and (note use of oxford comma) lol.
It has never been coherent. It has been contradictory from the very first adventures and supplements that didn't use the rules as written to detail the setting. Add paradigm shift in technology, different rules iterations, retcons, the owner of the setting detailing the setting in his own words being ignored, lack of canon literacy from authors and you have the Traveller setting. OTU (contradicting versions), ATUs (GURPS and Mongoose).[/tongueincheek]

I actually consider this a strength to be honest.

The adventures I am most looking forward to are the ones that shake up the setting a bit.

By the way, it is an excellent book, Geir you have done a first rate job.

 

[ProfGrizzlyJon]

Thank you! Between the new cutter module and the new deep space exploration software, I am a happy camper!

 

[Seffix]

Well I did a spreadsheet to test out the creation process. After way too much effort, it sort of works,...

If I may ask, how many systems were designed in the creation of this book, and how many of those will work their way into future books?

 

[GabrielGABFonseca]

This diversion is unfortunately confirming my fear that Traveller's peak demographic is males in their late 50s - or older. Good news: I know how to write for them. Bad news: we're not increasing in numbers.

Book is out. Go buy one.

If it's any reassurance, I'm half that old and positively, clinically obsessed about the OTU, so I think it has some wind in it still!

 

[Geir]

If I may ask, how many systems were designed in the creation of this book, and how many of those will work their way into future books?

The entire sector of Storr (2, -5) on Travellermap was created using my kludged spreadsheet mangled together to test the rules. Then it needed a Sector Construction Guide-like treatment - by hand - to work out interstellar states, minor race details and things like that. The book's example system is Zed Prime, Storr 0602.

I also started work on another sector, but got distracted, working on this new project which I still haven't finished, and somebody else completed a perfectly good version of it, so that get's abandoned.

 

[DigrizJB]

It has never been coherent. It has been contradictory from the very first adventures and supplements that didn't use the rules as written to detail the setting. Add paradigm shift in technology, different rules iterations, retcons, the owner of the setting detailing the setting in his own words being ignored, lack of canon literacy from authors and you have the Traveller setting. OTU (contradicting versions), ATUs (GURPS and Mongoose).[/tongueincheek]

I think kids today call this a "Multiverse" but that might be a registered trademark of Comicbook Movie Corp, a division of Mouse World Enterprises.
[/toungeincheek] indeed.

 

[DigrizJB]

@MongooseMatt - Geir piqued my interest, are you able to share any production data that might give us an idea of the number of Travellers on Terra? Roughly how many Core Rulebooks PDFs have been delivered?

Somebody recently asked me how many people buy and play Traveller these days, and I don't know (haven't asked) but I guessed at least 5000, just from some very old historical GDW numbers and the 1000+ on the typical Kickstarter. Maybe that's low. How many sales does it take to be Mithral on Drivethru? - and that's not counting the direct sales or Amazon or somebody actually picking up a physical copy in one of the few remaining gaming or book stores.

This is from the Traveller facsimile edition, p. 6?