Hans,
Thanks for taking the time to reply -- I do appreciate it -- but as the old movie says, "I think what we have here is a failure to communicate".
The intended points of my post were so far removed from how you interpreted them, that it makes me glad I don't write international peace treaties for a living.
I know that such "grand misses" in communication happen from time to time on message forums and that it's no big deal. Since you took the time to write such a lengthy response, however, I'll make an effort to clarify, what I was trying to say.
I wasn't upset about canon, or about divergence from canon. All I (thought I) was doing was saying this:
Given that there will be some new fans of Traveller, through d20 Traveller, who will want to work as canonically as possible within the OTU setting QLI will be publishing -- does QLI plan to offer any "referee's preserve" space within that campaign setting to allow such players some creative flexibility within the canon?
I was not saying that the desire for such canon conformity was either good or bad -- only that certain d20 players (familiar with such game settings as Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms) who come onboard Traveller with T20 may desire this.
I was curious as to how much creative leeway they might be afforded officially by QLI. That's all.
I responded to the first comment about Foreven only because I thought the Foreven Sector might not work for new Traveller players coming into the T20 campaign setting.
The Foreven Sector is on the other side of the Imperium from where the official T20 campaign will be situated. Additionally, the article in "Imperiallines #1" where Marc Miller declared Foreven a ref's preserve (while at the same time fixing all the stellar positions of the undetailed worlds, naming the subsectors, and even providing UWPs for 4 or so canonical systems) is very hard to come by in its original form.
My only point here was that Foreven is perhaps not the best candidate for those who want a canonical ref's preserve near QLI's section of Charted Space.
For their specific needs, Foreven's in the wrong place, and it's not a completely blank slate -- if we continue to assume, for the question's sake, that a blank slate within the canonical OTU is what such players will be wanting.
My example of Sword Worlds adventure placement was merely a digression. I was simply trying to illustrate how hard it is for someone who truly wants to stay within published canon to have a free hand creating adventures unless they are given the gift of a referee's preserve.
Myself, I broke with published OTU canon in my first or second adventure as referee. I imagine most referees do, and will continue to do so.
Once again, I was only curious whether any provisions were going to be made for those T20 players new to Traveller who might want to keep very true to the OTU and the QLI published setting, but who might still want somewhere to put their own personal stamp on the game universe.
Yes, it's a very hypothetical question, about a very specific type of T20 player (basically, a "D&D emigre" type, new to Traveller), but I've seen the type of setting-canonicity-loyalty that the Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms settings create in certain D&D gamers. I was only idly curious about what kinds of provisions QLI might be making (if any) for that particular breed of setting-focused gamer in T20.
That's all from me on this topic,
LL, not a treaty-writer
