Archive for 2025 week 46
- Close-up on 0107 - 10 Nov 2025
- The psionics of star travel - 11 Nov 2025
- St. Christopher - 12 Nov 2025
- Religion in charted space - 13 Nov 2025
- Mercenary - 14 Nov 2025
- High Guard - 15 Nov 2025
- Scouts - 16 Nov 2025
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
St. Christopher was historically sometimes depicted with a dog's head (probably either intentionally or unintentionally due to "Canaanite"/"canine" similarity) and I think I'm going to need a weird Wolf obsession with either the saint just because (little statues on Wolf ship dashboards!) or perhaps Catholicism in general. Maybe a splinter sect who's absolutely convinced it's evidence of Wolf presence on Terra pre-starflight.
A lot of sf fiction or games leave religion out altogether, except for the occasional Weird Cult Planet. But that kiiiiind of disregards all of human history. Even in modern America, where "nones" are like one in three people, there's an upsurge of less-organized religious belief: astrology and so forth. Sure, most people will say they don't take it seriously, but it still represents some kind of shared belief system, even if the "believing" is wholly ironic (or IS it?)
My approach to Traveller was always, as I have mentioned, "player characters are the crew of a tramp freighter." It probably says something different about Marc Miller (and Frank Chadwick) that the fourth Little Black Book (after the base three that defined the game) was Mercenary, not Merchant Prince.
Trav Book 5 was the Navy book. While it has starship combat in it, and improved starship construction rules, it's still not tramp freighters. (To be clear though: although I discovered Trav much earlier, I didn't actually get my hands on it until '83, so it wasn't like I was waiting for the rules I was really interested in.)
I've been going through the last couple days thinking Merchant Prince was Trav Book 6 which of COURSE it isn't, that's Scouts. There was no LBB for merchants when I took up Trav, though there was a JTAS article I'm not sure I was aware of (my collection of JTAS is spotty).