Slashdot Mirror

Look at the Sci-Fi role playing games like Traveller out there.

I wanted to write a book about my Traveller character Orion Blastar since 1985, but I haven't gotten permission from GDW/FarFuture etc to use their tech and ideas and background in my books. So I might have to invent my own tech, ideas, and a different background.

There is a lot of Sci Fi stuff that hasn't been touched yet. Rush "2112" has a story about a Red Star of the Solar Federation and the Priests of the Temple of Syrinx that own all of the music and take away freedoms and rights in a Communist type future government, until a man finds a guitar and creates his own music. But the Priests smash his guitar and eventually he commits suicide. But near the end of the song the Elder Race of Man come back to assume control of the planets and free the people from the oppressive Communist government of the Temples of Syrinx. Or that is at least one take on the story. But I am sure it would make a great SyFy series or TV movie, or Hollywood Movie or series of Sci Fi books.

But Sci Fi does not need new and different technology, it just needs better characters, better plots, better stories, better dialog without stealing or borrowing from other Sci Fi elements, unless it is done in the way I wanted to do it in that it is different enough to be interesting. All Traveller Sci Fi books did was choose your own adventures and stuff that was boring. The RPG version is a lot more interesting than the fiction novels.

Well to be honest the Sci Fi writers are writers not scientists. They don't know too much about Science and anything they write they tend to make up.

But some things on the Star Trek show made it to reality. Spock was using floppy disks in one episode and then later the Floppy Disk was invented, on the show they looked like 3.5" floppys that Sony later invented. Also the Classic Star Trek communicators eventually lead to the invention of the cell phone, which almost everyone uses in modern day times.

Still no transporter, warp drive, phasers, human like androids, or even a Tricorder yet. But we don't know if such things are possible or impossible, we just don't know how they work, and the Science on Star Trek was imaginary and nothing like Real Life Science.

When you have a show in the future, with advanced science, you cannot make a plot based on science or technology without making stuff up. Once Sci Fi universe is the Traveller Universe in which they tried to make the technology and science as realistic as possible. But the Jump Drive is basically a Hyperspace Drive that enters another dimension and takes a shortcut in three Parsecs per Jump factor of the Jump Drive. But almost everything else uses formulas from Physics to explain how they work. Traveller could have made a good movie or series of books, but most Traveller writers didn't know how to write them or used a "Chose your own adventure" type book.

because it is cheaper to create a PDF and sell that, than print out a lot of paperback or hardcopy books.

The #1 reason why people pirate a book is cost, but a PDF book is relatively cheap next to a paper book, and Lulu.com knows that and helps people self publish ebooks in PDF format for really cheap, cheaper than a paper publisher would charge.

I am a big Traveller fan, and Far Future and Marc Miller are putting Traveller V5 in PDF format and selling the CD. Actually they have T5 in PDF format on the Citizens of the Imperium forums only available to people like me who paid for T5 in advance and let us become beta testers for the new gaming system and allow us to give feedback on the new T5 changes. Oddly enough, the T5 PDF files, while not copy protected or even watermarked, never found their way to file sharing networks unlike a lot of old RPG and Gaming materials already have. Most Traveller fans don't want Traveller to die out, so they refuse to pirate the PDF files for T5 and Mongoose Traveller, despite a lot of the Classic Traveller, etc stuff already been scanned and put on file sharing networks already.

In some cases, piracy of the Classic Traveller materials got enough people interested in the new T5 materials to buy them, and some even buy the Classic Traveller CD set from Far Future to support Traveller and make sure that it survives to the new settings and new T5 system.

Besides Google has Google Books that has a lot of books available online for free and while you cannot read a whole book you can search through it enough to find what you need so that you don't have to buy the book. Even if their are partial previews, they allow enough info to learn what you need and you can search through the book, chapter by chapter, and in theory read the whole book for free. I don't really see a difference between reading a book for free in Google Books or downloading it from a file sharing network for free before actually buying the book later to have a hard copy and see if you like the book enough to buy it. In a library or book store you can read the whole book for free anyway. Then decide to buy it or not, based on how you like it.

In that way Piracy actually helps people decide what they want to buy, provided they like it enough to buy it after previewing it. I myself have bought books for $20 to $55 or more, then finding out later that the book was useless or I didn't like it, but I was stuck with it and out of money and had to buy a different book that was better. Reviews really don't help, as people are paid to shill for a book and write a good review even if the book is horrible. Besides the person who liked the book and wrote a review, might not like the same things that I or anyone else likes to see in a book.

GURPS is, of course, an excellent system complete with more different worlds than you can shake a stick at. High fantasy? Low fantasy? Sci-fi? Spy? Historical? Alternate history? GURPS has it all. Heck, if you want to run a campaign with Jedi Knights running around Discworld, you can.

Then there are things like the Traveller reprints, worth getting not just for historical value but because Traveller was a damn fun system. Ditto for the Space:1889 reprints--if you can't see the fun of playing a subaltern in the British Army on Mars, I don't think RPGs are right for you...

And of course there are a lot of other systems out there. We live in a great time for RPGs, if you know where to look. It's not at the local game shop; it's not D20; it's online.

So you have the little black books? FarFuture reprinted them, Marc Miller is still "The Man". The have all the corrections in them now and bundle the books in a bigger format now. You can buy the reprints at the FarFuture web site. Traveller is copyright and trademark FarFuture Enterprises.

My Group still plays or gets online to discuss things.

So you have the little black books? FarFuture reprinted them, Marc Miller is still "The Man". The have all the corrections in them now and bundle the books in a bigger format now. You can buy the reprints at the FarFuture web site. Traveller is copyright and trademark FarFuture Enterprises.

My Group still plays or gets online to discuss things.

So you have the little black books? FarFuture reprinted them, Marc Miller is still "The Man". The have all the corrections in them now and bundle the books in a bigger format now. You can buy the reprints at the FarFuture web site. Traveller is copyright and trademark FarFuture Enterprises.

My Group still plays or gets online to discuss things.

Yes! I always loved the Traveller universe; it's so wonderfully open and interesting, and allowed a lot of latitude for different writers to add interesting new bits. I was very pleased to see the classic Traveller books being reprinted by Far Future Enterprises.

[1] I'm working on travtrack and travlib. Travtrack is a programme to manipulate a Traveller universe. Travlib is a library of functions and classes (using C/gtk+) which represent a Traveller universe. Traveller was a great old science-fiction game from the 70s which has been given a new lease on life with GURPS Traveller from Steve Jackson Games.

Yes, Traveller is still around ... its creator, Marc Miller, still owns the rights to it and is reprinting the original game books, plus all the supplements, adventures, alien modules etc, in single volumes (eg all the rules booklets in one book). Great for a nostalgic Traveller player like me who never gets to play it anymore! (Nice, uncluttered system; but it's the richly detailed backdrop which is compelling ...)

The website is at Far Future Enterprises.

There was a short-lived attempt by a company called Imperium Games to release a 4th edition, back to basics Traveller, but it folded after a couple of books and supplements.
--