Retrospective: The Argon Gambit

Today, I make good on a promise I made two weeks ago to write a retrospective on the other adventure included in GDW’s Double Adventure 3 for Traveller, The Argon Gambit. Compared to its companion, Death Station, it rarely receives much attention, even among dedicated Traveller fans. That’s understandable to a degree, since it is more closely tied to the Third Imperium setting and therefore less easily adapted to other contexts. Even so, The Argon Gambit is a solid scenario that plays to Traveller’s strengths as a more “serious” science fiction RPG. Rereading it, I was struck by how influential it must have been on me when I was younger, as its overall structure closely resembles many of the scenarios I’ve written or refereed over the years.

The Argon Gambit is very explicitly set in the Solomani Rim, far removed from the familiar Spinward Marches. This sector is defined primarily by human conflicts, especially the ideological tensions between the Solomani and the Third Imperium. Solomani belief in the superiority of Terran humans casts a long shadow here, shaping the sector's politics in ways that The Argon Gambit exploits for their adventure potential. 

In terms of structure, the adventure begins simply, in a way that familiar, almost clichéd, for longtime players of Traveller. The characters, in need of money, are hired to steal a set of genealogical documents from a villa in the titular city of Argon on the planet Janosz. Like all such jobs, it appears straightforward at first, but, as it turns out, the documents in question are being used for blackmail and their contents carry explosive political implications, since the Solomani Party places great emphasis on the genetic "purity" of its members. 

After the initial job, The Argon Gambit becomes a political mystery involving a three-way struggle within the local Solomani Party. A hardline supremacist, a moderate rival, and an ostensibly neutral power broker all maneuver for advantage. Behind them lurks a deeper game. The patron who hires the characters is himself an Imperial agent, seeking to manipulate events so that both major factions are discredited, leaving his own puppet in control.

It's a terrific set-up for an adventure that could only really work within the context of GDW's Third Imperium setting. That's both a blessing and curse, depending on how wedded one is to the game's official setting. For me, it was great, but I can easily imagine people less enthused with the setting finding it too obscure or focused on setting-specific minutiae to be useful. That's why I suspect The Argon Gambit doesn't get as much love as Death Station.

At the same time, the adventure, designed by Frank Chadwick, makes excellent use of the classic Traveller adventure components, like rumors, which it categorizes by source and ties to the characters’ backgrounds (e.g. Navy, TAS, noble title, etc.). These rumors are essential to understanding the situation on Janosz, though their presentation is frustrating. The referee must piece together the scenario much as the players do, only really understanding the full scope of what's happening after reading explanatory notes at its very end. That's not a problem as such, but it means the referee probably needs to read the adventure several times before attempting to run it (yes, yes, I know, that's only common sense ...).

More interesting, I think, is the moral ambiguity of the scenario. Everyone involved is compromised in some way and acting according to their own best interests. There's no obvious "right" way to proceed. The characters begin as pawns in someone else’s scheme, but, as they uncover more of what's actually happening, they, in turn, have the opportunity to bring about a conclusion that they think is best and the adventure passes no judgments on that. Consequently, it's a very open-ended and heavily reliant not just player choice but referee implementation. This is the kind of adventure that could kick off an entire campaign – or complicate an existing one.

It's a shame that The Argon Gambit isn't better known and appreciated. As I said at the beginning of this post, I hadn't realized the extent of its influence over my own personal style and preferences as a referee until I re-read it in preparation for writing this. I tend to include lots of moral ambiguity and compromised figures in my games. While I don't favor "edgy" or "dark" content, I likewise shy away from clear "good guys" and "bad guys," preferring NPCs whose motivations and actions are more muddled and, dare I say, human. I'm not sure I picked these tendencies up solely from The Argon Gambit, but there's no question the adventure played a role in my doing so, hence my continued affection for it after more than four decades.

D&D and Traveller

I think we tend to underestimate just how old Traveller is.  

Consider that original Dungeons & Dragons, the very first roleplaying game ever published, was released sometime in late January 1974. Traveller first appeared less than three and a half years later, in late May 1977 (before the wide release of Star Wars, which is a very important fact to bear in mind).  Less than a dozen other RPGs were published between these two dates and, of those that were, almost none of them are still published today. That alone sets Traveller apart from its contemporaries. 

I mention this because, as I was thumbing through my 1977 Traveller boxed set, I was struck by just how similar in format and content the game is to the 1974 OD&D boxed set. This is not an original thought and indeed it's one that I've had before. I nevertheless think it's worthy of further examination. We are, after all, closing out D&D's semicentennial year and, while I'm reducing the attention I'll devote to that game for the foreseeable future, there really is no escaping its gravitational pull. Like it or not, discussions of almost any roleplaying game will inevitably lead back to Dungeons & Dragons. 

In the case of Traveller, the most immediately obvious connection to D&D is its format. Like OD&D, Traveller was initially released in a boxed set containing three digest-sized booklets. Each of these booklets focuses on a different aspect of the overall game rules. OD&D's first volume is entitled "Men & Magic" and provides the rules for character generation, combat, and spells. Traveller's first volume is called "Characters and Combat" and covers very similar ground. The second volume of OD&D is "Monsters & Treasure," while that of Traveller is "Starships." The difference between these two volumes is stark, since there's not much commonality of subject matter here and not merely because OD&D has no need of rules for space travel. However, the obvious connections between the two games return with the third volume of each. OD&D has "Underworld & Wilderness Adventures" and Traveller has "Worlds and Adventures." 

As I said, there's nothing novel about these observations. They've been made for years on OSR blogs and forums and were probably noted at the dawn of the hobby, too. I would not be at all surprised if Marc Miller and/or other notables at Games Designers' Workshop made them as well. When I attended Gamehole Con in October, one of the many amusing stories Marc Miller told about the early days of GDW concerned the release of Dungeons & Dragons. He said that the company's staff was so taken with the game that they soon spent all their time playing it. So enamored were they with this weird new game that Frank Chadwick, GDW's president at the time, established a rule: "No playing D&D during office hours."

It's a very funny story in its own right, as well as a reminder – as if we needed one – that the appearance of Dungeons & Dragons on the wargaming scene in 1974 forever changed the face of that hobby and, in the process, created an entirely new one. Though primarily a historical wargames publisher, GDW was no stranger to science fiction. Prior to the release of Traveller, the company had already published two science fiction games: Triplanetary in 1973 and Imperium in 1977. The latter game initially had no connection to Traveller, which, upon its release, included no setting whatsoever. It was only later that the background of Imperium. with its series of Interstellar Wars between the Vilani and the Terrans, was folded into the much more successful Traveller. 

OD&D was thus a significant inspiration for Marc Miller in creating Traveller, since it showed him not just what was possible with a roleplaying game but also the form such a game might take. Admittedly, this is likely true of nearly every RPG published in the last half-century, but, in the case of Traveller, it's especially so, since, by his own admission, he and the other designers at GDW were playing a lot of D&D in those days. Miller even contributed some D&D comics to The Strategic Review, which testifies to his early devotion to the game. When I spoke to him in October, he repeatedly emphasized the debt we all owe Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson for having created a form of entertainment unlike any that came before. Miller even included Gygax in his deck of cards as a "king" of GDW, since the company published his Dangerous Journeys game in the '90s.

The connections between D&D and Traveller were not apparent to me in my youth, in large part because I didn't come across a copy of OD&D '74 until I was in high school, by which point Traveller was already well on its way toward becoming MegaTraveller – a much more mechanically complex game published, like AD&D, in a conventional 8½ × 11" format. Now that I am aware of the myriad connections, they're impossible to un-see. To be honest, I'm glad of that. As I have no doubt written here dozens of times, Dungeons & Dragons was my first love, but Traveller is my true love. They're both very special to me and, while there's no question which one is my favorite, I would prefer not to have to choose between them. For the moment, though, Traveller has my attention. I very much look forward to sharing my thoughts and memories of this great roleplaying game.

Kings and Aces

Marc Miller, creator of Traveller, and one of the three founders of Game Designers' Workshop also attended Gamehole Con this year, as he does most years. I first met Marc many years ago, at the Origins Game Fair in 1991, which was, I believe, the last time the con was held in my hometown of Baltimore. I was a member of a Traveller fan organization called the History of the Imperium Working Group (HIWG) and several of us present at the con wanted to pitch some ideas to GDW for (Mega)Traveller adventures and supplements. We wound up going out to dinner with Marc, Chuck Gannon, and the Japanese translators of Traveller. We didn't succeed in our quest, but I did have the chance to meet several wonderful people, including Marc, with whom I've stayed in contact over the years.

Marc held several panels, one of which was devoted to the history of GDW. Every person who arrived in the conference room was given a deck of cards Marc had printed through DriveThruRPG. He's a big fan of specialized decks of cards and often brings them for sale at conventions. The decks he gave us were devoted to the topic of the panel. The face cards all featured important people in the history of the company, like Marc Miller, Loren Wiseman, and Frank Chadwick, while the number cards all featured games it had published, like Traveller, Twilight: 2000, or Space: 1889 (along with lots of wargames, of course). 

During the panel, Marc would go around the room, point to someone and ask them to draw a card randomly from the deck they'd been given. After doing so, the person would then read what was on the card and Marc will talk for a while about the person or game in question. In this way, the cards provided some focus for the discussion rather than relying solely on audience questions. Another benefit is that light was often shed on individuals or games that might otherwise not get discussed, like Chaco, a wargame about the 1932–1936 war between Bolivia and Paraguay. The game is one of Miller's earliest designs and was created, in part, as an educational tool to teach about South American history.

All the panels at Gamehole Con were too short – only an hour. They were all held in the same room, with a new one starting every hour on the hour, all day, every day. That meant that there was often a rush toward the end of each panel that caused a fair bit of disruption, as overzealous gamers tried to enter an ongoing panel before it was actually ended. I would have much preferred fewer, longer panels, so that we could luxuriate a bit in the stories and memories of the guests. 

In the case of Marc Miller, he has so many stories. He's now 77 years old and has been involved in the hobbies of wargaming and roleplaying for more than half a century. Yet, his memory is incredibly sharp and, with age, I think he's acquired a perspective that's refreshing in its humility. He talked a lot about how, as in the case of TSR, no one really knew what they were doing at GDW. They were making it all up as they went, having fun as they explored new ideas and took chances on making them reality. Some ideas were better than others and some approaches worked, but they learned a lot from each project, whether it proved a success or a failure. Marc expressed several times how blessed he'd been to have had the career he had, making games and making people happy. 

Not a bad legacy, eh?

Retrospective: Space: 1889

Seeing Frank Chadwick's letter in issue #75 of White Dwarf reminded me that he was one of GDW's top designers during that storied game company's nearly quarter-century of existence. While he's probably best known for his work on board and miniatures wargames like Command Decision and Europa, he was also responsible for, either solely or in part, many of GDW's roleplaying games, starting with En Garde!. 

I first encountered Chadwick's name in connection with Traveller and, later, with Twilight: 2000, both of which I played a great deal in my younger days (and nowadays too, as it turns out). In addition, Chadwick designed another of GDW's RPGs, Space: 1889, which first appeared, ironically, in 1988. This is only a year after SF author K.W. Jeter first coined the term "steampunk," though I don't recall its being widely used at the time. Certainly, Space: 1889 never makes use of it, instead referring players to the works of Verne, Wells, and other late 19th century science fiction pioneers as its sources of inspiration.

The premise of the game is that, in 1870, Thomas Edison succeeded – somewhat accidentally – in demonstrating the possibility of navigating the "luminiferous ether" between the planets of our solar system. In doing so, Edison not only opened up new frontiers for exploration (and exploitation), he also made possible contact between human beings and the intelligent inhabitants of Venus, Mars, and even the Moon. By 1889, the Great Powers of Earth were vying with one another for control of these new worlds with a zeal that made the scramble for Africa seem halfhearted by comparison. 

One of the things that makes Space: 1889 so interesting is that its setting isn't merely an alternate history where space travel is possible in the Victorian Age. Rather, it's a full-fledge alternate reality where the 1887 Michaelson-Morley experiment did not suggest, as it actually did, that there was no such thing as ether. Chadwick makes use of earlier, now-rejected scientific theories to construct an alternate model of physics for the game's setting, one conducive to the great tales of scientific romance whose echoes can be heard even today in the pulpier corners of science fiction and fantasy. This approach gives Space: 1889 an oddly "grounded" feel to it, because it's clear that thought went into its idiosyncratic "scientific" principles, which are used to good effect throughout.

Indeed, it's the setting that made Space: 1889 so compelling to me at the time of its release – and it's the setting that continues to fascinate me, even today. Like all good wargamers, Chadwick knows his history and the game does a good job, I think, of presenting the late 19th century, warts and all, as an interesting place for science fiction adventure. The rivalries of the Great Powers, for example, serve as the backdrop to much of what happens in the setting, albeit from a decidedly Anglocentric perspective. For instance, Germany is portrayed in a negative light, as is, to a lesser extent, Belgium. That said, the British Empire is not presented in an unambiguously positive light. Like any honest portrayal, its vices are as significant as its virtues.

Even more interesting than the game's use of real aspects of the 19th century is its use of purely imaginative one, such as the various non-human beings that dwell on other worlds. Mars gets a lot of attention in the game, no doubt due to its importance in early science fiction. As often the case in those tales, the Martians of 1889 are an ancient, dying people, heirs to 35,000 years of civilization, at once contemptuous of Earthmen for their comparative barbarism and envious of their expansionist vigor. During the few short years that GDW published Space: 1889 – 1988 to 1991 – Mars received a fair bit of development through adventures and supplements. One of the best, Canal Priests of Mars was written, amusingly enough, by Marcus L. Rowland, the man responsible for the scathingly negative review of Chadwick's Twilight: 2000 in issue #68 of White Dwarf. Rowland would later go on to produce the Forgotten Futures series that looked at Victorian SF as potential settings for roleplaying.

Unfortunately, the cleverness and promise of Space: 1889's setting was hampered by a less than stellar system that, by turns, is either too simplistic or too complex for its purpose. This was something I recognized immediately upon reading the book; it was confirmed in multiple attempts to play the game with friends who were just as enthusiastic about the setting as I. It's a great shame, because the game's setting is well done and ripe with potential, but the game's mechanics were actively off-putting – so much so that I never succeeded in playing Space: 1889 for very long. I understand that, in the years since, there have been a couple of attempts to revive the setting with new rules, though I know nothing of how successful these attempts proved.

In the end, Space: 1889 is one of those roleplaying games that comes along every so often that grabs my attention because of what I see as its promise, but which I eventually discover is somehow inadequate to it in some way. Calling it a "disappointment" is not completely fair, since I nevertheless find many aspects of it genuinely praiseworthy. At the same time, I can think of no other way to sum up my feelings toward it without damning it with faint praise. A pity!

White Dwarf: Issue #75

Issue #75 of White Dwarf (March 1986) sports a horror – or I should I say Call of Cthulhu? – themed cover by Lee Gibbons, whose work appeared several times in the past few months, most notably issue #72. This issue marks a changing of the guard at the magazine, with Ian Marsh taking over its reins from Ian Livingstone. In his inaugural editorial, Marsh admits to "an element of trepidation" about his new job, especially at a time when WD is "mutating slowly into a different beastie." He elaborates on this, explaining that there is a "shift away from the usual formulaic style" of the magazine, by which I think he means an end to the regular, monthly columns and other features that have defined its content since the beginning. Regardless, the times, they are a'-changin' at the Dwarf.

"Open Box," for example, consists almost entirely of reviews of Games Workshop products, starting with the Supervisors Kit for Golden Heroes (8 out of 10) and Terror of the Lichemaster (9 out of 10) for use with Warhammer. There's also a review of Judgment Day (9 out of 10), an adventure for Judge Dredd – The Role-Playing Game. Rounding out the GW products covered this issue is its edition of the venerable science fiction boardgame Cosmic Encounter (also 9 out of 10 – I'm sensing a theme here). Finally, there's a look at Chaosium's second Call of Cthulhu companion, Fragments of Fear, which earns 7 out of 10. While it's inevitable that a periodical published by a company involved in the industry it's covering will include reviews of products it also publishes – TSR's Dragon certainly did – I nevertheless can't help but feel a line was crossed this issue, given the preponderance of Games Workshop releases reviewed. Perhaps next issue will be better?

I feel like a bad person for only enjoying Dave Langford's "Critical Mass" when he snarks about books about books and authors I, too, dislike. This month he brings the hammer down on the Darkover novel, Hawkmistress:

There will no doubt be hordes more 'Darkover' tales from Marion Zimmer Bradley: publishers love issuing books very similar to previous ones. Hawkmistress ... despite its veneer of science-fantasy, seems hauntngly familiar. Heroine Romilly wears breeches and gets on well with animals, but Daddy wants her to don girlish clothes and marry. One knows instantly that the chap Romilly finds most loathsome is Daddy's intended bridegroom: and so it proves. With hawk and horse our heroine to find her way in the world.

The interesting thing about Langford's critique of the novel is not that he thinks it's bad – he calls its "a readable yarn" – but that it is essentially a romance novel in very thin science fantasy dress, which I think is a fair criticism of her oeuvre (and that of Anne McCaffrey, come to think of it).

"Getting the Fright Right" is this month's installment of Colin Greenland's "2020 Vision" column. It's a collection of reviews of then-current horror movies, broadly defined, ranging from The Return of the Living Dead to Fright Night to Teen Wolf. Greenland's reviews of these films is interesting, because, as the article's title suggests, he takes some time to talk about the proper balance of thematic elements within a horror movie to make it enjoyable for him. I like this approach to reviews, since, even when I disagree with them, I at least understand where the reviewer is coming from and that's quite useful.

"Thrud Gets a Social Conscience" is this issue's installment of "Thrud the Barbarian," humorously addressing the claim that the comic (and, by extension, the entire genre of sword-and-sorcery) is sexist. This leads to an amusing exchange between Thrud and his occasional female guest star, Lymara the She-Wildebeest, about how her attire reinforces negative sexual stereotypes.

There are also new installments of "Gobbledigook" and "The Travelles," but they're not nearly as amusing.

Oliver Dickinson's "RuneQuest Ruminations" is a look at the third edition of RQ (published by Avalon Hill) with a special focus on those parts of its rules that he found vexing or inadequate in some way. A lot of the article is very "inside baseball" to someone like myself whose experience with RuneQuest is limited. What most comes across, though, is how much of a shock and disappointment this edition of the game was to many of its long-time fans, particularly in the way that it downgraded Glorantha to the status of an afterthought. 

"How to Save the Universe" by Peter Tamlyn is a lengthy and thoughtful look at "the delights of superhero gaming." Tamlyn's main point seems to be that there are a lot of different styles of play within superhero RPGs – more than enough to satisfy almost every preference. Consequently, one should not dismiss the entire genre as "kid's stuff." "Gamesmanship" by Martin Hytch is an oddly titled but similarly lengthy and thoughtful look at "injecting a little mystery" back into AD&D adventures. The overall thrust of the article concerns the way experienced players treat so many of the game's challenges in a procedural fashion, quoting rules and statistics rather than entering into the fantasy of it all. It's difficult to summarize Hytch's advice in a short space; suffice it to say that it's mostly quite good and filled with useful examples. I may write a separate post about it, because I think he does an excellent job of addressing the many questions he raises.

"Mass Media" by Andrew Swift looks at the nature of communications technology at various tech levels in Traveller. It's fine for what it does but nothing special. On the other hand, Graeme Davis's "Nightmare in Green" AD&D adventure is phenomenal. Aimed at 4th–6th level characters, it concerns the threat posed a collection of nasty, plant monsters crossbred by a mad druid. I'm a big fan of plant monsters, so this scenario immediately caught my attention, all the more so since some of the monsters are inspired by the works of Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. 

That brings us to another highlight of this issue. You may recall that, back in issue #68, reviewer Marcus L. Rowland gave a very negative review to GDW's Twilight: 2000. This led to a flurry of letters in issue #73, both pro and con Rowland's review. With this issue, Frank Chadwick, designer of the game weighs in and he pulls no punches.

"The Heart of the Dark" by Andy Bradbury is "an illuminatingly different" Call of Cthulhu scenario, because it does not directly feature any encounters with the Mythos or its associated entities. Indeed, the adventure includes no game statistics of any kind "since it is doubtful that they will be needed." This is a pure, roleplaying scenario filled with lots of investigation, social interactions, and red herrings. It's intended as a change of pace 

"Local Boy Makes Good" by Chris Felton looks at character background in AD&D, with lots of random tables for determining social class, birth order, father's profession, and so on. I suppose this could be of interest to others, but not to me. Finally, Joe Dever begins a new series on preparing and using oil paints for miniature figures. I know nothing about this topic; despite that, I find it weirdly fascinating, like all of Dever's articles in his monthly "Tabletop Heroes" column.

Issue #75 of White Dwarf continues the recent trend of feeling slightly "off" to my sensibilities. There's still plenty of excellent content, but there's also an increasingly detectable undercurrent of change and not for the better. Perhaps I am simply hypersensitive to this because I know that WD will soon be little more than a house organ for Games Workshop and I am constantly one the lookout for signs – any signs – of this imminent transformation. Regardless, I will keep plowing ahead, though, for how much longer, I don't yet know.

Retrospective: Beyond

GDW's roleplaying game, Traveller, was first released in the summer of 1977. Given this relatively early date in the history of the hobby, it's no surprise that Traveller's creator, Marc Miller, looked to Dungeons & Dragons as a model for how to present an RPG. An obvious debt that Traveller owes to OD&D is its format: three digest-sized books. Another is that Traveller presents no setting of its own. Like its predecessor, it's a toolkit intended to allow the referee to create a setting of his own using the game's rules and his own imagination. 

Nevertheless, the first hints of an "official" setting for Traveller started to appear about a year after the game's publication. Book 4: Mercenary mentions "the Imperium" for the first time, though designer Frank Chadwick's introduction suggests that he intended this name simply to be a convenient placeholder for "a remote centralized government … possessed of great industrial and technological might, but unable, due to the sheer distances and travel times involved, to exert total control everywhere within its star-spanning realm." 

Fans of the game were quick to pick up on this reference and it wasn't long before GDW presented a pre-generated sector of space for use by the referee who didn't wish to roll up his own, along with some details on the Imperium (now dubbed "the Third Imperium") of which it was a part. The Spinward Marches and the Third Imperium both proved very popular with Traveller fans and soon became inextricably linked with the game, even though Traveller was still perfectly usable as the basis for a SF setting of one's own creation. By the time I started playing the game in 1982, by which point GDW had already published a second pre-generated sector, I encountered almost no one who played Traveller in any setting other than that of the Third Imperium.

Though The Spinward Marches and other GDW products began to fill in the details of the Third Imperium and its interstellar neighbors, these details were initially quite sketchy and open to interpretation. During the period between 1979 and 1982 (or thereabouts), several third parties, like Judges Guild, were licensed by GDW to produce their own pre-generated sectors to fill in the larger map of "Charted Space" that the Third Imperium occupied. Many of these non-GDW sectors were quite idiosyncratic in their contents and would later be partially or wholly excised from the Traveller canon, as it solidified into something more definite.

One of the better examples of these third-party sectors was Beyond, written by Donald P. Rapp and published by Paranoia Press in 1981. Located "beyond the Great Rift, beyond the Imperium and beyond the law," the titular sector is a wild place, consisting of nearly 500 worlds inhabited by a mix of humans, Droyne, Aslan, and several unique alien species. It's also home to a number of interstellar governments that are independent of the Imperium and the other great empires of Charted Space. Consequently, Beyond is presented as a region of space that's perfect for adventurers who wish to avoid any "imperial entanglements," to borrow a phrase. 

Beyond mimics the format and presentation of The Spinward Marches, being a 32-page digest-sized booklet, with each of Beyond's sixteen subsectors having a single page for its listing of world data. There are also six pages at the back of the book dedicated to "library data," Traveller's term for background information presented in a series of brief, faux encyclopedia-style entries. It's in the latter that we learn about the Church of Resurgent Anthropomorphic Philosophy, Starbase Arcturus II, the Zydarian Codominium, and more. The library data also describes Beyond's unique alien races, such as the arachnid-like Sred*Ni and the flying Mal'Gnar. 

As you can see, Beyond is filled with a plethora of hyphens, apostrophes, and asterisks, not to mention lengthy names with convenient – or "humorous," as in the case of the aforementioned Church – acronyms. Taken together, this gives the sector a very different feel than the more sober, even stolid, approach GDW took with its own pre-generated sectors. That's not necessarily a bad thing and it certainly gives Beyond a distinct flavor that sets it apart – a flavor that might not be to everyone's taste. I know that, when I was a younger man, I didn't think much of Beyond (or its companion from Paranoia Press, Vanguard Reaches), precisely because it was less "serious" than GDW's own efforts. Nowadays, I'm a great deal more tolerant of Beyond's oddities, perhaps because I better appreciate the need for different styles and approaches within established settings, such as Traveller's Charted Space.

Mostly, though, Beyond is a relic from an earlier time in the history of Traveller, before the game had evolved to the point where one needed to know a large amount of background information scattered over multiple books to be able to understand its setting. Fond though I remain of the Third Imperium and its richly detailed history, I recognize that it can be very off-putting to newcomers, who simply want to engage in "science fiction adventures in the far future," to quote Traveller's longstanding tagline. Supplements like Beyond facilitate that pretty well and we could probably use more like it.

Different Worlds: Issue #9

Issue #9 (August/September 1980) of Different Worlds features a quite striking cover by Luise Perrine that seems to tie into an article appearing later in the issue. If so, that's the first example of this I've seen in Different Worlds. Typically, the covers of gaming magazines seem to bear little connection to the issue's contents, no doubt due to the circumstances under which they're commissioned. Still, I've admired Perrine's artwork ever since I first laid eyes on her illustrations for RuneQuest, so it's a treat to see her given the cover here.

The issue begins with "Flippancy in FRP" by my old nemesis, Greg Costikyan. The article advocates, in a tongue in cheek way, for more "silliness" or "flippancy" in roleplaying game sessions and campaigns. Costikyan covers multiple areas where he thinks a bit more "chaos" would help a game, such as handling alignment, religion, money, and character names. While his overall point is fair enough – we could all do with a little less lightheartedness from time to time – the article is, in my view, delivered with the obnoxiousness typical of a young man who thinks he knows it all (Costikyan would have been 21 years-old at the time of this article). 

"Boardgames to RPGs" by Glenn L. Williams is much more interesting (and certainly less annoying). Williams examines the expectations RPGs and boardgames create in their players and the techniques employed in their design to fulfill those expectations. With that in mind, he suggests that it would be possible to use boardgames as the basis for roleplaying games. To prove his point, he takes Steve Jackson's Ogre and develops from it the outline of a RPG. What's interesting – but also slightly baffling – is that Williams makes the Ogres themselves the focus of he RPG, with the player taking on role of the artificially intelligent war machine rather than, say, a human soldier in the world the Ogres inhabit. 

John T. Sapienza presents an extensive review of the Zargonian Figures produced Bearhug Enterprises. These figures are cardboard stand-ups to be used in place of miniature figures. I'd never heard of these specific figures but I am very familiar with the concept. Sapienza thinks very highly of the figures, both for their quality and their price, which he thinks will make them popular with gamers, Later, he reviews actual metal figurines by McEwan and Citadel. I find it fascinating how lengthy these reviews are. I've said before that I never used miniatures much back in the day (or now), so it's good to be reminded how important they were in many quarters of the hobby.

 "The Imperium – A Traveller Campaign" by Marc Miller and Frank Chadwick is a five-page article, describing what would become the official GDW Traveller setting. Though I am deeply familiar with the Third Imperium as a setting, it was nevertheless a joy to read these. It reminded me of how much fun I had with Traveller and my own early days as a writer, creating adventures and setting material in the pages of Challenge. Anders Swenson reviews Judges Guild's Verbosh, which he considers a good investment for the money. Swenson also positively reviews Chaosium's Gateway Bestiary.

David F. Nalle's "Variable Alignment System" is yet another take on this venerable topic, this time presenting two point scales (Karma and Loyalty) to track a character's progress along the Good/Evil and Law/Chaos axes. It's fine, I suppose, but seems unnecessary for most people. Steve Perrin's "Cult of the Tiger" is another Gloranthan cult for RuneQuest (and the source of the issue's cover, I believe). Lewis Pulsipher's "Place for Adventure" is a short article, outlining nine unusual locations that might serve as adventure locales, such as animal burrows or giant bee hives. 

This month's Gigi D'Arn column includes some intriguing tidbits. There's a lot of talk about movies, such as the shelving of plans for a D&D movie, along with rumors about Dragon Slayer, The Last Unicorn, and Conan the Barbarian. The comments from the latter are somewhat dismissive, though it's fascinating, from a historical perspective, to learn that filming on Conan was delayed due to the death of Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia, where the movie was to be shot. There's also talk of a supposed "D&D/AD&D Companion" that will include lots of historical information on weapons and armor. I have no idea what Gigi is referring to here and it makes me wonder if there was ever any basis for the rumor in the first place.

Inspiration from Tony Bath?

One of my current projects is reading Tony Bath's Setting Up a Wargames Campaign, a classic in the field of miniatures wargaming and originally published in 1973. Not having been a wargamer, of either the hex-and-chit or miniatures variety, I would never have thought to pick up this book. Fortunately, a friend with whom I have regularly roleplayed for nearly a decade now recommended Bath's book highly to me and I am so glad I did. There are innumerable insights to be found within its pages, particularly if you're interested in the prehistory of roleplaying. 

Bath is perhaps most famous for Hyborian Age campaign, set in Robert E. Howard's eponymous prehistoric world. This campaign started in the late 1950s, long before any of the people recognized today as "founding fathers" of the hobby had started down the path that would culmination in the publication of OD&D in 1974. For that reason, I have come to believe his writings on wargaming are of immense value (though others were way ahead of me in this). Over the next few weeks, I'll likely have multiple posts about Bath and his books, but, for the moment, I'd like to focus on just a single section of the aforementioned work, because it's not only fascinating – and possibly useful – in its own right but because it might shed light on the origins of a procedure found in GDW's Twilight: 2000 (and other games derived from it).  

Chapter 6 of Setting Up a Wargames Campaign is entitled "Characterisation" and discusses multiple methods for generating the personalities of the various leaders, both political and military, of a fictional setting to be used for miniatures wargaming. Bath proposes the following:

So, for each person's character you deal out seven cards. The first card dealt will decide upon his or her most outstanding characteristic: a Heart will indicate Good Nature, a Diamond Love of Wealth, a Spade Ambition, and a Club Love of War in a man, Patriotism in a woman. The value of the card will determine the depth of this passion, a high card being very strong, a low card relatively weak. The rest of the cards are used individually, and each has a value of its own

He then enumerates personality traits based on each card. For example, an Ace of the Spade or Club suits indicate a disloyal intriguer, while a Diamond is a loyal intriguer, and a Heart possesses an exceptionally good nature. Meanwhile, a Six indicates laziness in Spades or Clubs or Charm in Hearts or Diamonds. It's a straightforward little means of generating character details and I was immediately impressed with it and the other systems he offers (about which I shall write later) precisely because it does something similar to what I'd been seeking recently.

In reading this section, though, I was immediately reminded of a section in the Referee's Manual of the 1984 edition of Twilight: 2000. In the section discussing non-player characters, it's suggested that

To determine the motivation of an NPC, draw two cards from the standard deck of playing cards. The highest value card is the NPC's primary motivation, the other is his secondary motivation. The particular motive is determined by the suit of the card.

The section goes on to associated Clubs with Violence, Diamonds with Wealth, Hearts with Fellowship, and Spade with Power. As you can see, these associations are very close to those of Tony Bath. Now, one might reasonably suggest that the suits suggest obvious correlations; there's nothing unique about associating wealth with diamonds, for example. That may well be true, but my hunch remains that Frank Chadwick, the designer of Twilight: 2000 and many military simulations published by GDW would have been familiar with Bath's writings and took inspiration from them. Even if I'm mistaken about this, that doesn't change the fact that Bath's system is simple and useful and could be profitably employed, either in its original or altered form, by referees looking for a way to introduce some randomness into even their world building.

Retrospective: Mercenary

During the "Classic" Traveller era (1977-1986), Game Designers' Workshop produce three types of support products for the game: books, supplements, and adventures. The meaning of "adventure" is clear enough to need no explanation. A "supplement" was (generally) intended as an aid to the referee in running a Traveller campaign, such as pre-generated characters (1001 Characters), patron encounters (76 Patrons), or sector data (The Spinward Marches and The Solomani Rim). A "book" was an expansion of some aspect of the original three little black books that comprised the game. In a sense, they were an early example of the "core rules" concept lately championed by several contemporary RPGs -- later additions to the game elevated to the status of being equal in importance to its initial rulebooks.

I didn't discover Traveller until 1980 or '81 by which point there were already several examples of all the categories of support material. I had only a spotty collection of both adventures and supplements, but I owned every single book produced for it. That's because, unlike adventures and supplements, I viewed books as Official™ and thus absolutely essential for running and playing a "proper" Traveller campaign. In retrospect, it's an absolutely foolish notion, but, having read one too many editorials by Gary Gygax on the importance of buying and using only official AD&D products, the mentality was very easy to adopt with regards to other games.

Fortunately, when I started playing Traveller, there were only two additional books beyond the three that started the game. The first of these was Mercenary, published in 1978 and written by Frank Chadwick and Marc Miller. Mercenary was 52 pages long and provided lots of new rules and information for ground forces, both Army and Marines. So you got lots of news military equipment and vehicles, a discussion of mercenary work, and a bunch of sample adventure outlines for such characters. But the big draw of Mercenary (and its immediate successor, High Guard) was its expanded character generation rules.

For those of you who don't know Traveller well, here's a brief overview of character generation. Characters can enlist in one of six services, three of which are explicitly military (Army, Navy, Marines). They then go through 4-years terms of service during which rolls are made to see what skills, if any, they acquire during that term. The most skills a character can acquire in a single term is four (in his first term if the player rolls very well), but most terms grant only one or two skills. Once the character musters out, he'll have a handful of skills that reflect his time in his chosen service.

Mercenary changes this somewhat by providing lots more detail about a character's terms of service. Each term represents a four-year block, but Mercenary lets the player roll for each year within that term, to see not only what a character's specific duties were during that time but also provides many more opportunities to gain skills. The result is that a character generated under the rules of Book 4 are almost always much more talented than those generated under the original three LBBs.

It's no surprise, then, that, by the time I started playing Traveller, nearly everyone I knew used Mercenary (and High Guard) to create their characters. This meant almost no one played Scouts or Merchants, at least until they, too, got expanded character options later in the '80s. After all, why wouldn't you use these rules? Not only did they generate better characters but they were also official. By calling Mercenary "Book 4," GDW had placed it on the same footing as Books 1-3 that came in the boxed ruleset. Unless you were explicitly trying to get a reputation for stubbornness, the pressure on the referee to allow Mercenary was significant.

At the time, I don't remember having any qualms about allowing Book 4 into our campaigns, despite the weird way it warped them into focusing almost exclusively on mercenary tickets and the like. Of course, this may explain why some of my players wanted to move on to play a "real science fiction game" like Star Frontiers, since its adventures weren't just about traveling from world to world fighting local insurgencies. Nowadays, though, I have a less positive feeling about Mercenary, feeling that it inaugurated not only power inflation in Traveller but a cult of the official that was common enough that a little pushback against it was much needed -- especially by guys like me whose natural tendency was to look to a game's designer/publisher for guidance rather than relying on my own judgment. Oh, the follies of youth!