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Post by creativehum on Mar 16, 2018 8:58:35 GMT -5
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Post by ffilz on Mar 16, 2018 13:35:34 GMT -5
I should add that my comparison document is always open to additional commentary or additional textual differences to be called out as relevant.
Frank
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Post by makofan on Mar 16, 2018 14:03:57 GMT -5
Frank is awesome
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Post by ffilz on Mar 16, 2018 14:54:31 GMT -5
It WAS a lot of work, but I would never have done it without Christopher's ( creativehum) blog inspiring me to look into all the differences, not just those called out in SS4 The Lost Rules. And every time this comes up, I am reminded I still owe the OSR community a similar comparison of RuneQuest 1st and 2nd editions...
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Post by True Black Raven on Mar 16, 2018 20:13:32 GMT -5
Link to creativehum's blog or is it already on here somewhere?
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Post by creativehum on Mar 16, 2018 20:41:03 GMT -5
I posted several links in the first post of this thread. But here's a link to all the Traveller: Out of the Box posts. The premise of TRAVELLER: Out of the Box was simple. A few years ago I went to a Traveller website and wanted to take a fresh look at the Classic Traveller rules. Specifically, Traveller Books 1, 2, and 3. I hadn't looked at them for a while, but after digging into the OSR I reasoned it might be worth a fresh look at them. I wanted to ask about the rule as they were written, with the default assumption that they worked, and find out how people used them. Unfortunately, almost anyone wanted to talk about was the Third Imperium. Trying to get anyone to talk about how they used the rules, how they played the game, was almost impossible. My questions were ignored, threads were sidetracked, and people would get into arguments about trade imbalances in Duke Norris' reign or whatever... when I wanted to talk about having cool adventures with PCs. So I started a blog to examine the rules of Traveller Books 1-3 as found in the original boxed set (both the 1977 edition and the 1981 edition) and see what sort of game and play they contained. This means excluding the later books. It also means no concern for the Third Imperium (which is not mentioned in any way in the first three Books). Ultimately this meant comparing Traveller Books 1, 2, and 3 to the text and rules found in The Traveller Book or Starter Traveller, because both those rules sets contain different text than Books 1-3 and change the nature of the implied setting between editions. At the start I simply couldn't get anyone to believe me that there were no references to The Third Imperium in Traveller Books 1, 2, and 3. And no one could conceive you could play without The Third Imperium. This strange urban legend had grown up that The Third Imperium had always been planned and that Traveller Books 1, 2, and 3 were somehow incomplete and waiting to be "fixed" with the rest of the Classic Traveller line. My take was, of course, that the game worked great "right out of the box" -- and I wrote a lot of posts about that.
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Post by makofan on Mar 16, 2018 21:40:55 GMT -5
I reread your entire series of posts this week. Useful and inspirational
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Post by creativehum on Mar 17, 2018 0:10:42 GMT -5
Awesome! And thanks so much!
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Post by ffilz on Mar 17, 2018 0:26:27 GMT -5
Can I use this thread to poke you again about turning your blog into a book?
Frank
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dragondaddy
Traveler
Currently Running/Playing 0D&D, 5e D&D, Classic Traveller
Posts: 120
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Post by dragondaddy on Mar 18, 2018 11:02:52 GMT -5
I posted several links in the first post of this thread. But here's a link to all the Traveller: Out of the Box posts. The premise of TRAVELLER: Out of the Box was simple. A few years ago I went to a Traveller website and wanted to take a fresh look at the Classic Traveller rules. Specifically, Traveller Books 1, 2, and 3. I hadn't looked at them for a while, but after digging into the OSR I reasoned it might be worth a fresh look at them. I wanted to ask about the rule as they were written, with the default assumption that they worked, and find out how people used them. Those were some great articles, and I enjoyed them very much. This series very greatly described that first "pre-Imperium" era of Traveller and the style of play that we originally used. I started playing Traveller simultaneously when Star Wars was released in 1977, but we really didn't use the original Star Wars as a basis for our Traveller Campaigns at all as we were much more informed and influenced by science fiction authors of the time, and many of those had significant backgrounds in hard sciences such as physics, astronautics, aeronautics, xenobiology, and such, and we wanted to make our science fiction campaigns which included all of the latest hard science knowledge. Everyone understood implicitly that Star Wars was "Space Opera" and we ended up using some of the more inspirational elements of Star Wars for our campaigns, but science fiction and the space sciences offered a vast array of additional possibilities for our games that Star Wars never touched. Four movies that did heavily influenced my Traveller games was Planet of the Apes (1968), Silent Running (1972), Alien (1980), and Outland (1981), as well as the later Aliens (1986).
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Post by Mighty Darci on May 14, 2018 21:52:54 GMT -5
Thank you, this is very helpful!
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Post by makofan on May 15, 2018 15:00:53 GMT -5
BTW, 1977 Book 1 had 1 line of errata 1981 Book 1 had 3 pages of errata !!!
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Post by ffilz on May 15, 2018 15:47:08 GMT -5
BTW, 1977 Book 1 had 1 line of errata 1981 Book 1 had 3 pages of errata !!! In the Consolidated Errata or somewhere else?
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Post by makofan on May 15, 2018 16:31:09 GMT -5
Yes, the Consolidated Errata that game with my CD-ROM
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Post by ffilz on May 15, 2018 17:52:59 GMT -5
Yes, the Consolidated Errata that game with my CD-ROM Ah, the latest version of the Consolidated Errata has 8 entries. It all has the look however of Don McKinney not bothering to add errata to 1977 because there are 1981 errata that seem like they should apply to 1977 also. More, it looks like much of the 1981 errata is actually back porting stuff that was changed in The Traveller Book, and other is re-introducing stuff that was dropped between 1977 and 1981. So I wouldn't make much of the differences in errata, though it does make for a snappy statement :-) Frank
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