Peace Finally Comes

I've mentioned a couple of times previously that I'm currently playing in a Traveller campaign refereed by an old friend of mine. I first met this particular friend around 1990 through a Traveller fan organization known as the History of the Imperium Working Group (HIWG – pronounced Hi-Wig). HIWG's original purpose was to assist GDW in developing the Third Imperium setting during the MegaTraveller era, when the Imperium was in the throes of a succession crisis/civil war inexplicably known as the Rebellion. 

HIWG had a fanzine called Tiffany Star that was released more or less bimonthly, starting in January 1988. Its first issue included a map of the warring factions of the fragmented Third Imperium as they were five years after the start of the Rebellion, which I've reproduced below.

The map originated with Marc Miller at GDW and bears the title "Peace Finally Comes." The original idea behind it was that this map would represent the end state of the Rebellion, after its factions had become exhausted by years of open warfare between one another. What was interesting about it is that there were a couple of missing factions, which is to say, factions from the early phases of the Rebellion that had seemingly disappeared, leading to much speculation about the circumstances under which they were defeated or subsumed into other factions Likewise, many of the remaining factions had grown or contracted in their astrographic extent. 

Figuring out how this had all happened was part of HIWG's original remit. Certain members of the organization were "sector analysts," whose job it was to create and collate material pertaining to one of the sectors of the Imperium or surrounding space. In theory, this material would then be used by GDW in creating future MegaTraveller products. I was the sector analyst for Antares sector, while my friend was the sector analyst for Lishun sector to spinward. We became friends because we started exchanging letters – remember, this was in that benighted time just before the advent of the consumer Internet – and sharing information of mutual interest. Later, when I went to graduate school, it just so happened that I moved to the same city as my HIWG pen pal and we've been friends ever since. 

When I again saw the Peace Map, as we called it, for the first time in many years, I felt a huge rush of nostalgia, not just for MegaTraveller, warts and all, but for one of my earliest and most serious brushes with organized RPG fandom. Remember, as I said, that this was before the Internet was in widespread use. Almost none of us had email addresses, let alone a regular means of real time chat. Instead, we exchanged photocopied (or dot matrix printed) materials by post, occasionally meeting at conventions if they were geographically convenient. It was slow, inefficient, and occasionally frustrating, but also a great deal of fun. I made a lot of friends through HIWG, several of whom are still in contact with me.

Beyond that, the Peace Map represents a path not taken for Traveller. The whole point of the Rebellion was to shake up the staid status quo of the Third Imperium by creating multiple successor states suspicious of one another. This created many more opportunities for adventure, intrigue, and outright warfare. This greatly appealed to me and my preference for smaller settings. I was quite excited by the possibilities, especially for my beloved League of Antares faction. Alas, it was not to be. Instead, GDW opted to descend the Imperium – and, later, most of charted space – into a new dark age with almost no interstellar states and most worlds regressing both technologically and socially. What a waste!

I still have dreams of one day revisiting my own vision of a post-Rebellion Third Imperium setting, one where the fragments of the shattered Imperium survived and pursued their own destinies. I don't know that I'll ever get around to refereeing such a campaign, but a man can dream ...