As I explained last week, the Ares Section of Dragon was an absolute favorite of mine during the period when I subscribed to the magazine. Consequently, many of the articles I remember most vividly from those years appeared within it. That should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, since science fiction is my true love and, until the advent of the Ares Section, sci-fi articles in Dragon were comparatively rare. Now, I had several of them every month and I couldn't have been happier.
Issue #85 (May 1984) contained a good example of the kind of article that stuck with me for years afterward. Entitled "Preventing Complacency in Traveller Gaming," it was written by Roger E. Moore. Though only two full pages long, it packs a lot of great ideas and advice into it. Moore's premise is that it's easy, after years of playing Traveller, to start seeing the universe it depicts solely through the lens of its world generation tables. For seasoned players, the shorthand of the Universal World Profile (UWP) is both strangely comforting and something of a straitjacket.That's why Moore issued a friendly but firm warning in this article to veteran referees and players alike: don’t let those numbers lull you into a false sense of understanding. The UWP might provide a useful framework, but the real work of building compelling science fiction locales lies in what you do with that framework. In fact, he argues, the surface-level rigidity of Traveller’s world generation system presents a terrific springboard for the imagination, if you’re willing to embrace ambiguity, interpretation, and the joys of contradiction.
The article is thus something of a manifesto for imaginative refereeing. Moore gleefully dismantles the idea that a world with a size code of 0 must be "just an asteroid colony," instead proposing alternate interpretations. Perhaps, he suggests, it’s a massive orbital station or a rogue moon or even a city-sized relic orbiting a dead star. A tainted atmosphere might not just mean smog; it could signal hallucinogenic pollen, post-volcanic ash clouds, or trace gases that cause skin to fluoresce. Hydrographics might imply steaming oceans or acidic lakes or frozen continents skated across by iceships. His point is not to throw away the UWP, but to complicate it and to turn it into a prompt rather than a constraint.
What Moore suggests here is, of course, accepted wisdom among longtime Traveller referees nowadays, but, at the time, I don't recall its being so. Consequently, I found the article almost revelatory in the clever way it reminded the reader that the numbers of the UWP are just the beginning. The real act of world building comes from asking, “What else could this mean?” A participatory democracy on a low-tech world? Maybe it’s a direct voting system controlled by a sentient AI with its own motives. A law level of 9? That could mean total disarmament – or an arms-free society hiding behind widespread telepathic enforcement or ritualized violence. The possibilities are endless.
Perhaps Moore’s greatest gift in the article is his encouragement to take nothing for granted. He delights in the idea that official UWP data could be wrong, misleading, or faked. He points out that tech level is a poor predictor of what’s available, let alone what’s culturally important. He reminds us that a government can call itself one thing and behave like another. He also notes that rapid change, chaos, and revolution are just as true to a science fiction setting as any neat planetary entry in a subsector catalog.
What I found especially useful when I read the article forty(!) years ago is that Moore doesn’t reject the UWP system or advocate abandoning this distinctive aspect of Traveller. Rather, he shows how to deepen and expand it. His is not a call for gonzo chaos or narrative fiat, but for interpretive richness and contextual layering. This is particularly useful in slower-paced campaigns, where the referee has time to imbue each world with history, nuance, and surprise. A jump-2 merchant route then becomes a journey through half a dozen genuinely unique cultures, each shaped as much by what's not revealed by the UWP as by what is.
You keep saying how much you loved scifi and yet you apparently rarely if ever read the actual Ares mag while SPI was still afloat, much less Space Gamer which was around throughout this period. I just don't get it, did you just never hear of them back then? Or was it mostly Traveller (and therefore the Journal/Challenge) that you were interested in and the other stuff was just a curiosity? Dragon's Ares was mostly good for Gamma World, Star Frontiers and Marvel, and I didn't think you played the last of those, and maybe not much SF?
ReplyDeleteI never heard of Ares until after its run was over, while The Space Gamer was one of those things I was aware of but never encountered in the wild. (I remember seeing ads for its in Dragon occasionally.)
DeleteRemember, too, that I was a big TSR guy, so, alongside Traveller, I played a lot of Gamma World and Star Frontiers. They both got lots of coverage in Dragon, which was my main gaming periodical until the mid-80s, when Challenge first appeared.
Interesting. SPI Ares was an odd duck and not wholly scifi either, although there was more of it than fantasy and no historicals at all despite that still being what SPI was known best for - they had another mag for that. The big selling point was the game in each issue, some of which were fairly humble (Barbarian Kings, for ex) but many were big, meaty games that would have merited a full-sized "bookcase" box if they'd been sold separately. Much more the centerpiece of each issue than with Dragon, where the games were more of an afterthought that showed up once in a while.
DeleteDragon Ares did add a lot to Star Frontiers, no denying it. I found their GW content less useful and more erratic overall, and (despite being generally into supers RPGs and a moderate Marvel comics fan) the Marvel RPG stuff just a consistent waste of page space to me.
Challenge quickly became my second favorite (after Space Gamer) once it appeared, and marked a big step up over the Journal to me. I know some Traveller players that really hated the wider scope though, which I guess I can understand. Sometime you just want a real specialized mag like Autoduel Quarterly of Advneturers' Club where all the content aimed at the same target audience. But man, Challenge was terrific for years. Only thing it didn't do was insert games, which even Space Gamer dabbled in - several of them getting independent releases through SJG later on (Kung Fu 2100, Battlesuit, Globbo, and I think Orbit War).
I got the Ares issue with Delta Vee. Maybe another issue or two...
DeleteThis is actually kind of timely, since I was having a discussion about hex crawl games the other day and my stance that many Traveller campaigns are hex-crawls kept getting dismissed on the grounds that the UWPs meant there was no sense of surprise or discovery. I can only conclude the people involved didn't actually play Traveller (at least not in a form I'd recognize) if they thought a UWP gave you anything but the very broadest of details about a system - and even then they were often invalidated by recent events.
ReplyDeleteAlso, as Christopher Kubasik points out repeatedly in his excellent "Traveller: Out of the Box" blog entries, Traveller did not originally make the UWPs an in-world thing. That came more with the Charted Space setting.
DeleteThough, yeah, knowing the very basics you could get from a distance doesn't tell you specifics or current events.
That's a great point, Deadstop (and Christopher)!
DeleteIt does still leave the question, which I think any setting needs to answer whether intentionally or accidentally, of what kind of information about nearby systems, planets, and people are available. (In the Charted Space/3I setting, it kind of beggars belief for me that "travellers" (as a class) couldn't easily look up an enormous amount of information about their interstellar neighborhood, for example.)
What a nice summary of the Dragon article, and one to have a look out for.
ReplyDeleteWe've had a lot of fun in Traveller lately just surveying the systems and worlds in the Urnian subsector. There has been some combat, but it has been a mostly peaceful survey mission focused on exploration. Great stuff!
ReplyDeleteI must have read, but don’t recall, this article. Does it mention Book 6, Scouts, at all? That has a copyright of 1983, but I don’t know whether it had been published by the time this article was written.
ReplyDeleteThere's no mention of Book 6. I suspect that the article had been in the slush pile for a while before being published. In any event, most Traveller articles in my experience didn't make reference to anything beyond the original three books.
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