The Borderland: Errata

[GabrielGABFonseca]

I've spotted a few things, some which have been pointed out before, some which have not:

• Page 27, 'The Wildeman Cluster' table, Wildeman's UWP: The UWP is incorrect.
• Page 30, 3rd Paragraph: "Coming not long after the Peace of Fhtair, which ended the Imperial-Aslan wars on the other side of the Great Rift, this report was considered credible." — 'Ftahalr' is misspelt.
• Page 35, Acrid system map: Planet 12, 'Outer', is mistakenly has a UWP whereas it should be labelled 'Large Gas Giant' (see page 38).
• Page 41, 'Agrivoyager Stellar Meadow', last paragraph: "Without them, the main hull is capable of jump-2 and 2G acceleration, reduced to half that with both pods in placed." — 'both pods in placed.' should read 'both pods in place.'

I have only just finished reading the Wildeman system breakdown, so I'll write follow-up posts if and when I spot any mistakes as I read.

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That aside, I'd like to offer my thoughts on the book so far; I'll start with the high points: I think this book has some of the best art in any Mongoose 2nd edition book so far, which has been a recent trend and is beautifully exemplified here. Despite coming from different artists it has so far all felt cohesive, and feels like there's a distinctive vision guiding it instead of disparate ones doing their own thing. This is very good, and I hope it keeps up going forward!

I'd also like to congratulate Sandrine on the layout work, which I think she did very well and should be proud of. I'm a fan of the diagrammatical system layouts, even if my inner astro-nerd wishes they contained more actual information rather than a qualitative (but very purdy!) representation.

Now onto the low points of the book so far; I'd rather like to echo what @Geir said on the original post about the book seemingly playing a bit too fast-and-lose with the UWPs. While I don't hold that all planets should slavishly adhere to their UWP profiles, especially those outside the Imperium where out-of-date or just plain incorrect data can easily be accounted for by the IISS failing to keep close tabs to them, the Borderland is an area of interest to the Imperium which regularly sees both Navy and Scout traffic, and this rationalisation has much less leeway.
I find it a very hard pill to swallow that the IISS, which takes a 'Write What They Do, Not What They Say' approach to classifying worlds via the UWP would classify the 20,000 '''transient''' indetured-servitude workers as such, not including them in the world's population. I also find it hard to believe they would not have slapped a Government Code 1 unto it, considering how little Civil Service there is in this very clearly Corporate Bureaucracy, but I digress.

Another thing that bummed me out a little was that the book made next to no use of the concepts and formats introduced in The World Builder's Handbook when expositing the system and planetary data. Furthermore, the 'Travelling in the Borderland' (Pages 21-24) gives some advice on how to use UWPs that flies face-first against some of the WBH's points. I understand that, by virtue of being written by different authors from Mongoose's roster, there'll be differences, and I do think this is an asset to the line at large, but not when they slowly start to step on each others' toes.

That aside, I am quite enjoying the book.

 

[wintertraveller]

In the map on page 2, the Byrni system is spelled incorrectly as Bymi.

 

[CordwainerFish]

In the map on page 2, the Byrni system is spelled incorrectly as Bymi.

Keming strikes again!

 

[GabrielGABFonseca]

I found another thing which is greatly frustrating me; I don't really like to make posts wherein the only thing I do is complain, I like to have something positive to say as a rule, but I really do feel the need to address this, and I'll make my best effords to be constructive about it.

Can someone please, please inform Mr. Dougherty that the "Worlds" entry in the UWP includes ALL planets in a given star system, across all of its stars?

This is something I've noticed before — it happened in Behind The Claw as well with the Regina system. I'll spare you the full T5 Format UWP string, but if we go on TravellerMap and have a look at Regina, we see that it has:

• 3 Gas Giants
• 0 Planetoid Belts
• 5 Other Worlds
• Regina itself (a moon)

Coming up to 8 planets (plus Regina, a moon of one of the gas giants). This is in agreement with the system as shown in Book 6: Scouts (Classic Traveller) on page 55, and the partial system example shown in Book 3 of Treaveller 5.1 and Imperialines #6 (Both T5 publications).
Let us have a gander at the system as presented in Behind the Claw, now:


Around Lusor & Speck orbit a total of 7 planets, three of which are gas giants. Around Darida orbit a further 4 planets, one of which is a Gas Giant. The system total is now up to 11 planets, of which 4 are gas giants. (And by the way, from a graphic design standpoint, I love these system representations, they're extremely pretty and I'd love to see their return).

It seemed to me at the time that this system layout stemmed from a misunderstanding of what the UWP 'Worlds' parameter means, as if it only applies to the system's primary. And so Martin did his best to reconcile the two seemingly incoherent datasets, Travellermap's and the one in Book 6: Scouts, not realising they are one in the same.

I never mentioned anything about it before because it's just an isolated incident that, quite frankly, only someone really anally retentive would raise a fit about, but then The Borderland comes out and I see this mistake repeated again:

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Arinusiir's planetary data:

• 3 Gas Giants
• 0 Planetoid Belts
• 10 Other Worlds
• 1 Mainworld

Totalling 14 planets.



In the book, the system correctly has those 14 planets, however, the distant Apho Secondary has a planetoid belt (as described on Page 59), which would bump the Planetoid Belts of the system to 1.

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Tanith's planetary data:

• 5 Gas Giants
• 0 Planetoid Belts
• 5 Other Planets
• 1 Mainworld

Totalling 11 planets.


The system description this time checks out, as it states on Page 91: “Pylkoe Secondary is not known to have planets but the databases are rather vague on whether it was ever properly surveyed.”, though the way it is portrayed in the map seems to imply the presence of a planetoid belt around it, which if true would carry the same connotations as mentioned for Arunusiir.

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Argona, despite being a binary star, sidesteps this problem altogether by being a close binary and therefore having all planets orbit both stars at the same time. I will thus skip it.

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Inurin's planetary data:

• 4 Gas Giants
• 0 Planetoid Belts
• 8 Other Worlds
• 1 Mainworld

Totalling 13 planets.

This system is the singular worst offender and the one which prompted me to write this post, as it is the perfect example of what I've been talking about:



Notice how the Primary System has exactly the number and types of planets as the UWP data: 13 planets total, 4 of which are gas giants and 9 terrestrial planets.

The secondary systems, however, add a further 2 Terrestrials, 3 Belts, and 3 Gas Giants to the system. This bumps the system's UWP values to 7 Gas Giants(!), 3 Planetoid Belts, and 11 'Other Worlds', plus the Mainworld itself.

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Now, I would like to emphasise that I am not saying 'yOu DiD iT wRoNg, YoU hAvE tO rEmAkE tHe BoOk!!1!', not at all; my intent here is not to winge and whine that these systems disagree with the UWP data; rather I want to point out the reason why they disagree — that being that Martin Dougherty has been operating under a misunderstanding as to how the UWP 'Worlds' entry works. This post is precisely to bring it to your attention so that it can be avoided in future. Neither should this, by the way, be construed as me lambasting MJD's work, quite the contrary; I find him to be a very competent and skilled writer, and is partly due to my high opinion of his work that these discrepancies unsettled me enough to make this post, as they really stand out against the overall quality of the rest of the text.

Now, like I said before, I don't believe in just complaining about things, so I'm going to give a suggestion as to how you could proceed given the discrepancies; unlike Regina, which is an extremely high-profile system with a lot of baggage in Traveller lore (and which, if Behind the Claw were updated, I'd personally suggest reverting it back to its original layout — but I digress), the Borderland systems are not sufficiently relevant that it'd be the end of the world to update the T5 Second Survey Data to reflect their new layouts.

That said, as good practice, every effort should be made in future to avoid having to change the T5SS data for Sectors already made "Official", as it kinda defeats the point of having one immutable database from which all future Traveller products can draw from for consistency. This should be considered a remedial measure, not standard practice.

If this is agreed upon, I'll go and edit the T5SS repo on github to reflect all of this. I'm also letting @InexorableTash see this, so he has a heads-up in case this is moved forward with.

As an aside, the Inurin system might be a bit of a pickle as I don't think either the T5 system creation rules nor the WBH ones can create a system with 7 Gas Giants. A possible solution would be downgrading the "Dovyo Subgiant" around Dovyo to a Terrestrial Planet with an atmosphere code of H, as shown on Page 79 of the WBH; this allows you to maintain the writeup for it basically unchanged, while also reducing the number of Gas Giants from 7 to 6, which is possible under the WBH rules. I'd like to request @Geir's opinion on this, too.