The Core Expeditions - on PDF and Pre-Order!

[Grognardia]

The Wave is not only in TNE but also in Agent of the Imperium, so it's definitely a part of Charted Space lore and it will not be retconned.

The Wave is not only in TNE but also in Agent of the Imperium, so it's definitely a part of Charted Space lore and it will not be retconned.

Fortunately we're free to ignore that. No Virus, Empress Wave, Rebellion, Hard Times, or even Singularity in my Traveller universe.

 

[Grognardia]

Famous Merchant Prince Lord Blackadder when first told of the Empress Wave;

 

[Arkathan]

I'd suggest that few of these are even arguable: they split the fan base in ways that echo down to today, and they shrunk the market for the game in ways that Mongoose - the best custodians of the game in forty years - are even now having to work hard to try and reverse.

I know that I stopped buying Traveller stuff when TNE arrived. That, after significantly reducing spending on Rebellion specific MT products. And it was only in MgT2 that I started buying again.
We either used the LBBs or RP'd BattleTech in the interim.

 

[CordwainerFish]

View attachment 7607

Tinfoil, shiny side out, you'll be fine.

 

[Vormaerin]

I'm pretty sure everyone has things they don't like.

Some people hate that Foreven is a non-published sector.
I don't like USMC style combined armed Imperial Marines or Grandfather.
Some people don't like the Rebellion (but not all for the same reasons)
Some don't like Virus or The Empress Wave or this thing or that thing.

That's what you get when you have someone else doing the work for you. Sometimes they don't make the same decisions you would. You have to decide for yourself if, on balance, the things you like work for you more than the effort of removing the things you don't like.

My problem with GDW's material was not that they were telling a story per se, but rather with the products they released. If they had written the material as "Stuff you can have your players do" instead of "Things that are happening and you can't actually use any of it because you don't know where they are going and none of it is at a player character scale," it might have been okay. GDW didn't release a "how to use this to make your game interesting" until Hard Times. Which was way too late. T:NE, of course, should have just been its own setting. And maybe had a bit more support for "What if I don't want to be a Star Viking?".

I have the same problem with the Mongoose 5FW too. Where's the Naval Campaign Guide to the Fifth Frontier War? Where's the Hard Times equivalent for campaigns that aren't Honor Harrington?

And, to get back on topic, I would have liked more on cool things to have your players do as part of the Core Expeditions than we got. It's pretty cool, but still a bit too "what happened" and not enough "cool things you can do in your campaign!". But it does have some of that stuff.

 

[hopsnbaer]

His first decade in charge of his setting was brilliant. He made a very specific setting with a very specific feel. That setting is still in use today, largely unaltered, having resisted many decades of mistakes that Marc made.

Some mistakes were in those he entrusted with the game (leading to such obvious and broadly-accepted mis-steps as Virus, the Black Curtain, the Empress Wave) as writers who naturally had a job and were of course not bound to in any way love the product they'd been told to write for next "exercised their creativity" and made mistake after mistake with their development of the setting. Meta-plot was the fashion and they wanted to shake things up. "How on earth do we create adventure in this setting? Let's destroy it and build anew in the chaos!"

Some mistakes were in the technical implementation of his own ideas: T4 was a shambles and T5 was intellectual onanism.

I'd suggest that few of these are even arguable: they split the fan base in ways that echo down to today, and they shrunk the market for the game in ways that Mongoose - the best custodians of the game in forty years - are even now having to work hard to try and reverse. Most of this post is just my opinion, and de gustibus non est disputandum. But the sales don't lie, and at a time when the rest of the TTRPG industry went through a gentle, albeit ultimately doomed renaissance, Traveller sank.

Some mistakes were due to his own boredom with the setting: see his approval of some of the above decisions when he was paying attention rather than focusing on - quite naturally - putting food on his table. And then there was AOtI - absolutely clearly a result of him reading Altered Carbon and thinking "I'm having that!" - which introduced changes that would wreck most Traveller campaigns if people actually thought through the consequences.

Those consequences, importantly, are something you are really the first to systematically demonstrate in a Traveller game product (maybe without even the "Traveller" qualifier), and you do so very well, I believe. By the end of Singularity a thoughtful reader can see just how complete the replacement of the 1105 Traveller in the light of those changes would really be (which, again, you explicitly state).

That's just like your opinion... man