Recent Media Consumption

[davidgillon]

Books:

A Picture of Murder, T E Kinsey

The fourth Lady Hardcastle Investigates story, as usual narrated by her lady's maid Flo, who does all the heavy lifting, while Lady H swans around being intermittently batty and incisive. It's November 1909 and a travelling film show* is coming to the village at the invitation of Lady Farley-Stroud up at the Grange. Only her plans to put them up have fallen through as the kitchen at the Grange just went up in flames. So Lady Hardcastle steps in to host the visitors: director 'Colonel' Nolan Cheetham, and his three actors, Euphemia the young starlet,  Zelda the mature female actress and Basil, the ageing character actor (apparently having the actors on hand to take a bow was a thing). It turns out the village pub also has a visitor, Aaron Orum, 'Colonel' Cheetham's estranged writing partner, who insists his plot has been stolen, and the society columnist of the Bristol Post is intent on being a snobbish pain to pretty much everyone she encounters. As we're right at the start of film as media, the film is very short and simplistic - young beau loves young girl, evil witch intervenes, witchfinder intervenes, everyone dies horribly. Which is fine, everyone is impressed, except the rentamob Christians convinced film is evil and films about witches are the express train to hell. But then the cast start to die, in identical ways to their characters, and Lady H and Flo really can't stand by when people are being done-in on their own kitchen floor.

I was less impressed by this than by the previous three. The writing for the main arc is fine and Flo and Lady H continue to be delightful, but the plot really isn't so much convoluted as contorted, and shouldn't have worked even if it was carried out perfectly.  There's also a clumsily inserted bit of combined backstory and foreshadowing that really doesn't make sense. I mean, if you have a couple of passing London-based acquaintances pop in and announce that they ran into your brother a few weeks ago, and he mentioned that next time they see you they should probably mention your life is in danger from a foreign intelligence service, then wouldn't the first thing you would do be ring your idiot brother and ask what he's playing at and couldn't he pick up the phone himself?

* It's admitted in the end notes this is a little late for this kind of thing.

Christmas at the Grange, T E Kinsey

This is listed as book 8 of 8 by Amazon, but it's really not in the main sequence of the Lady Hardcastle tales. Instead it's a novella set a few weeks after A Picture of Murder, with Lady Hardcastle and Flo invited (both of them, not as Lady plus maid) to spend Christmas at the Grange with the Farley-Strouds and their crowd of relatives. So there's a Christmas Eve party, a Christmas Day meal, and a Boxing Day dinner for the entire village to be navigated, and in the process a priceless pearl pendant goes missing, and of course it's absolutely impossible to call in the police, so it's up to Lady H and Flo again. It's so slight a plot that even Lady H and Flo remark on it, but it's not so much a plot as a device to justify spending Chrismas with our protagonists.

Gaming:

Traveller, the Little Black Books

Back in the 80s the first edition of Traveller, the first ever SF RPG, was published by Game Designer's Workshop as A5 sized books, usually 40-64 pages, each black overall with title in a varying colour - quite stylish, but marketing-wise not really something to leap off the shelf and grab you by the throat. These were universally known as the Little Black Books (or LBBs). The core rules were books 1 to 3, supported by a range of more detailed character generation rules, background supplements, adventures and double adventures - two short adventures printed back to back.  I originally started buying them at university and I ended up with about half of them in physical copies before Traveller moved on to new editions and they disappeared from the shelves. So when Bundle of Holding ran two bundles to cover all of them, I took the chance to complete my set by picking them all up in e-book format.

It works out at about 60 books total and 3 maps. About 5 of them were either free or included in other things, and there were a few more I had no intention of paying money for - only GDW could think a bunch of forms was a good idea for a supplement for a role-playing game, and they did it for every edition of every game they produced. At least one suggested role-playing filling the forms. So call it 50 books I'd have paid money for, and checking back in an old magazine they were retailing at £4 at the time, so $40 for the complete set of ebooks isn't bad.

I'm not disappointed in the purchase, but what reading the first few has done is remind me how far roleplaying has come in 40 years (1st edition of the Traveller rules was 1979). My memory of the contents of the ones I had is pretty good, but what I'd forgotten is how slight they were. Many of them don't so much guide you through an adventure as sketch in a very minimalist skeleton for a campaign, drop in a few ideas for incidents and leave the GM to get in with it. So rather than remembering the highlights it turns out I'm remembering pretty much the complete thing. For instance the introductory adventure 'The Imperial Fringe' ('free' with the boxed set of rules), handed your characters a scoutship and said in effect "there are 488 star systems in the sector, I want an independent audit of each of their statistics, I'll pay you so much per system, see you in 20 years". A very similar adventure, 'Leviathan', ups the level of detail a bit, cuts the area of interest down to a subsector of about 30 stars and leaves you to get on with developing trade links for your employer. There are a handful of mysteries hinted at, missing ships, pirates etc, but absolutely no details. Nowadays they'd be the precis before you got to the meat of the campaign, in 1980-85 they were the main event.

I can see how this would have developed based on Traveller's origin as a house-rules add-on to Imperium, a strategic space warfare game GDW had had a lot of success with, where your character would swan around the galaxy, leaning on a die-roll here, giving a favourable shift on the Combat Results Table there (they spun off a later RPG, 2300AD, in a similar process). And I'm not sure some of the GDW principals ever really got role-playing other than at that very abstract level (afaics Marc Miller - the current GDW-successor edition is 'Marc Miller's Traveller' - is still trying to reduce Traveller to numbers and forms).

So, very much one to buy if you know what you're buying (and the offer closed on Monday so it's too late anyway).

OTOH Bundle of Holding - https://bundleofholding.com/ - usually has about three to five bundles ongoing at any one time, many for quite modern RPGs (occasionally for books too, they have a Glen Cook offer at the moment), and pretty much all structured with a sub-$10 basic offering that'll get you 3-6 core books and a main offer in the $15-25 range that'll get you three times that, so if you're into gaming they're well worth watching/subscribing to their mailing list. Downloads are generally via DriveThruRPG, though you also have your own 'Wizard's Cabinet' with BoH that'll get you direct to anything you've ever purchased.

Comments

[yhlee]

I loved the idea of Traveller but when we actually obtained reprints of the core? set of little black books, I spent a very long summer week rolling up characters, over half of whom were unplayable, and concluded that character generation, anyway, was completely fucked. :p I think I wanted a little more meat on the bones of the setting, but possibly that was in the stuff we didn't have access to.

[davidgillon]

Character generation has gradually gotten better. Books 4-6 are advanced character generation for individual classes - scouts, navy, mercs, where you have yearly rolls for promotion and skill acquisition, giving much more developed characters with 2-3 times the skills of basic ones. Special Supplement 1(?), published in GDW's magazine later added it for Merchants. But the later editions have completely different character systems roughly equivalent to the advanced ones. Lots of additional options, and in many cases lots of additional professions. And no dying during character generation, they quickly figured out that was a bad thing. Essentially GDW lost out by having the second or third RPG on the market, and taking character generation in a direction that turned out not to work, but no one knew that in advance.

The core current edition is Mongoose Traveller, which is the current licensed version - when GDW died the staff picked up the rights to the stuff they designed, so Marc Miller set up Far Future Enterprises to sell Traveller stuff, and licensed Mongoose to produce a version of Traveller that was an updated original, while also, eventually, releasing Marc Miller's Traveller, which I've never been tempted to buy (and doesn't seem to have a huge player base as far as I can tell). There was also a licensing scheme for other people to use, given the explosion in mini games companies as ebooks became feasible but after a bit of a kerfuffle there (I can't remember the details) a bunch of the bigger companies who had been using it spun off the Cepheus Engine, which is a rights-free clone of original Traveller's rules with Mongoose-like character and ship design.

[davidgillon]

As for the meat on the bones of the setting, that was something GDW were very slow to appreciate people wanted. Okay, here we go with a breakdown of all the Traveller editions I can recall and how they did background-wise:

Pretty much the entire first edition - the 60 LBBs - didn't really dig into setting, it was all hints and suggestions. What detail there was was either limited to those adventures that stuck to a single planet, and still skimpy, or turned up in their house magazine.

They started to get better with the next edition - 'The Traveller Book', which had a few supplements looking at a single setting, or developing a single campaign to a more modern level of detail. This was also when they did some really good supplements on individual alien races.

Then if anything they went backwards with Megatraveller, which was based on an Imperium-wide civil war, and never even managed to detail the factions, never mind an individual world. Some of the very late Megatraveller stuff was much better, concentrating on a handful of systems in a backwater area of the Rebellion, but that was basically down to a new team prepping for the transition to Traveller: The New Era.

IMO TNE was the best GDW version of Traveller, but lots of people hated it for blowing up the Imperium, which probably killed it at launch (plus it shifted to a completely new rules set). OTOH it actually started out with a functional background that both explained what government was trying to do and spun adventures out of it, over initially a small-ish number of worlds that all got a reasonable level of development.

There was also a post-GDW licensed reboot of TNE 50 years on that basically tried to rebuild the Imperium out of the ashes and had one big 3-400 paged book per successor state. That never really got any traction that I could see, but there's a lot of background compared to other editions, I just didn't like the way a lot of it went.

Traveller 4 was a post-GDW licenced reboot that drew on TNE but shifted the timeframe back to the start of the 3rd Imperium and had some pretty good background stuff, but was killed by catastrophic typesetting errors. Unfortunately that's not an exaggeration, the ship/technology building supplement, which is utterly equation driven, went to print with every multiplication sign rendered as "<->", and on top of that deliberately put every equation (over 200) at the back of the book, not in-line with the text explaining how to use them. It would have been near-unusable even without the multiplication cock-up, but it went into the shops in that state and people took one look at it and concluded the licensees didn't care. (Which is a pity, I've dug into it a bit and if you're into the nuts and bolts of designing ships it fixed some of the weaknesses in the TNE version).

T2O was a D20 rules post-GDW licensed system that shifted the timeframe back and to one of the little developed areas of the Imperium, and my impression is was rather better than the GDW average, but still trying to spread the background it did provide over too large an area.

GURPS: Traveller had some fantastically detailed supplements on how the Imperium worked, but did it by assuming the Megatraveller Rebellion never happened. They really showed how to do Traveller background, and as they were being produced by an ex-GDW Traveller staffer you had to conclude the lack of background problem in the GDW stuff may have been down to deliberate management/editorial decisions at GDW.

I've never really bought much Mongoose Traveller stuff beyond the rulebooks, but it seems to have a better grip on providing background than GDW did - it focused on the GDW developed bits of the Imperium, but rolled the timeline back a century. What I did like was the originally Mongoose based Clement Sector from one of the independent publishers Independence Games (originally Gypsy Knight Games), which really showed how GDW should have done it with a completely new background concentrating on a much smaller area - 4 subsectors and a few bits on the fringes - and developing every planet in at least some detail. And when there was the licensing kerfuffle that resulted in Cepheus Engine they produced their own Cepheus-based rulebook, so it now rates as a complete independent RPG that happens to be Mongoose Traveller compatible. I think some of the individual planets are a bit woo-woo, but overall it's an impressive background. Having developed that in as much detail as they wanted they've recently launched Earth Sector, which has the same background as Clement Sector. If someone wanted to start in Traveller from scratch, this is where I'd point them.