I got into Traveller with Starter Traveller...(in around 1984) and anyone who knows that book, it is lovely art but no milieu, save for the smattering of comments (eg. the Emperor is the ultimate Enigma). So I started designing my Traveller universe around an Earth centred Empire. Well, it was not long before I came across JTAS and purchased a copy and lovely scanned others that I learnt that the Empire could be called the Imperium. That presented some problems for my milieu but the players were more interested in adventures than the overall background, at first...
Then coming across the Sky Raiders trilogy, I decided that my Earth was not Terra but the centre of what would later be called a Pocket Empire one sector removed from the Far Frontiers Sector... (Having bought at auction AM Zhodani & Solomani, no amount of grafting could really account for the change in the timeline save a full-fledged immersion into the Imperial Campaign...luckly, this was 1987 - the year that MT started.
We loved MT and went full throttle into the milieu. And, we played hard for 3 years but found it difficult because of the lack of support offered by GDW...in Canada, at that time it was a challenge to even get Challenge and the irregularities of DGP made subscription the only route. So in between we experimented going back to AD&D, CofC, Champions, etc. like many others. Increasingly, we wanted a change but did not know for what...
Then in 1995, I had the opportunity to go to Prague to study - where I stayed for many years and still go back regularly. At that time, TNE came out, just before leaving I bought the main rulebook and the Players Forms. Shocked at how GDW destroyed the Imperial Campaign in silly way (compared to the logic of Hard Times) and how the Players Forms seemed a complete rip-off for my hard earned money. I decided that I would not buy any more Traveller, even if I had the means...which I would not in Prague.
However, in Prague, (I brought the TNE book with me) I started with a group of Czech players and we started a modified TNE game with heavy emphasis on a Pocket Empire centred around Corridor - where a Vargr dictatorship was trying suppress a human client state...
At the same, I had access to the Internet, for the first time in my life and started hearing all the backward/forward sagas of TNE. And, could begin to like TNE, even if the RCES was not really Traveller, it was evolving toward something.
When I came back to Canada, briefly, I managed to pick up all TNE supplements and found them to be an acquired taste, not really suited for my campaigns in Prague but it did offer some more meat for what we were playing with.
When I did finally return to Canada T4 was all the rage or at least that was the only Traveller. My old group of players were not interested in T4 and we sort of fell apart. Only getting together occasionally to try our hand at a TNE or M:0 scenario.
GT we treat with caution because it essentially repeats the CT milieu and our group is looking for something wicked. This is why I call for a different conceptualization of Traveller. We have a lovely set of mechanics for our game but our milieus seem nomadic.
The best time that fleshed out the Imperial Campaign was when it was actually being built upon, not when it was designed. That period was the MT phase. Therefore, if Traveller can capture some of that creative energy, it will surely once again dominate the market. And as much as we older foggies we argue about cannon, we have see it as an evolving storyline something that if we simply repeat the CT, we will not be able to do...
), but how many people here first got into Traveller with MT or TNE?
