Monday, December 23, 2024

Roleplaying Adventure in a Techno-Fantastic Age

Though DGP's The Travellers' Digest was very well regarded among Traveller fans in the late '80s and early '90s, it wasn't especially lucrative for the company. That's why, when GDW announced it would end the MegaTraveller line and proceed with Traveller: The New Era, DGP saw it as an opportunity to forge its own path by publishing an original roleplaying game called A.I. Here's an advertisement for it from issue #59 of Challenge (April 1992). 

A.I. is set on "an alien, future Earth" some 1500 years in the future, after rampant artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology have made it nearly unrecognizable. I adore settings like this, where technology has become indistinguishable from magic – "secret science fiction," I call them. Needless to say, I was very excited to see A.I. and ads like this one only increased my excitement.

Alas, a series of unfortunate events, including a catastrophic hard drive crash, resulted in A.I. becoming RPG vaproware. Soon thereafter, DGP itself was no more. It's a pity, because DGP did great work on Traveller and I would have loved to have seen what they'd imagined for a wholly original science fiction setting. But, even in 1992, there were already more roleplaying games in existence than I could ever play, so I didn't waste too much energy mourning this one. Seeing this again, though, briefly took me back to a time, more than three decades ago now, when I not only looked forward to this game but first began to ponder the possibility of trying to make a living as a RPG writer. Simpler times! 

5 comments:

  1. Oh, I remember this one. I also remember a more extensive presentation in one of the later issue of the Traveller Digest.
    I confess I would have loved to see how it would have turned out.
    At the time I was disappointed by how Megatraveller had been developed - and terminated - and even more by Traveller New Era.

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    1. I know the Rebellion marked the start of my own drift away from Traveller. For a while it was interesting to read the "war news" in Challenge every issue, but got old fast when it became clear it was going to turn into a grinding stalemate that would last until some deus ex machina resolved things - and the Virus was an even worse ending that we'd been dreading.

      I don't recall a single MT game I played that used GDW's metaplot, and TNE only got to the table once for me and that only lasted a few weeks. Haven't played a steady game of Traveller since then, just the odd nostalgic game using the LBB rules. I have a serious hate for Mongoose (or more accurately, Matt) based on past behavior so the current edition does nothing to encourage me to change that.

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  2. Haven't thought of that one in a long while. From a 2024 POV it sounds like it would have been a setting not unlike Numenera, perhaps with overtones of a more serious/plausible Gamma World blended in.

    But yeah, not much point anymore in pining for might-have-been RPGs or even the ones that died early and might have deserved more success. There's more out there than anyone could ever hope to even read, much less get to the table. Best to just remember DGP for the good work they did do and move on.

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  3. Never having the taste for this particular genre flavor, I _wasn't_ enthused to read about DGP's change of focus to "A.I." but was still sorry to see them fold up so quickly.

    I got the impression that some/many of the DGP crew were also just tired of RPGs and were content to leave the scene -- which hasn't been really contradicted by anything I've been able to read or hear in the years since then. The residual fanboy in me still finds that upsetting and regrettable, but at the same time, I really, really do get that.

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    1. Trying to make money publishing RPG materiel is often a great way to stop wanting to publish RPG materiel forever.

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