The RPGnet Interview

This interview was conducted by Shannon Appelcline.

Traveller and The New Era

SA: How did you get involved with the Traveller RPG?

MD: Back in 1983 my sister got given a Basic D&D set for Christmas, which was handed over to me to figure out. She was more into horse riding and spent her time doing that. Being much cooler, I became a gamer (though I learned to ride somewhere along the way). I met up with a few guys looking to put a game together in January '84 or so.

One of these guys was a lad called Steven Field who introduced us all to Traveller. It was my second RPG. I've not played D&D since about 1985 (other than exactly two games I was invited to) but Traveller kept my attention. That and RuneQuest.

I went through a long "if I want to play it I'll write it" phase from the late 1980s to mid 1990s and didn't collect much gaming stuff. I mainly played homegrown games with my own D100 system based on RQ. Gamers came and went and I was looking for a new group. I found some RQ fans through one of the RuneQuest magazines and contacted some guy called Neil Frier. Played my first proper Traveller adventure in years, The Traveller Adventure, as it happened.

About the same time TNE came out and I liked the look of it. Caught myself writing a game that looked like TNE and decided to just go out and buy the damn thing. That somehow led me to wanting to write a Traveller novel (I'd been writing for fanzines and later on actual magazines since 1984 or so). So I sent off a sample and a pitch to GDW, along with a short story called Absent Friends that I cheekily added in.

Dave Nilsen, then line editor for Traveller, loved what I'd done and I was offered a contract for the novel along with a promise to publish the story "somewhere." It never happened though. GDW closed down a little later, which more or less scuppered the project.

Neil and I wrote some other stuff, initially for Imperium Games. That led to working with BITS for a while and with Steve Jackson Games around the same time. Neil and I were thinking of trying to set up our own Traveller label, the Ilelish Free Press, but that went by the wayside.

Anyhow, I was talking to Marc Miller about various stuff (Traveller novels and movies and such; we had a real shot at a movie at one point) and when Hunter Gordon set up to do T20 he was looking for writers. Marc recommended me as a writer for a short piece (The Olympia Incident, in the GRIP Traveller books) and I ended up doing a lot of work for QLI over the next few years.

I was also able to set up my own minor publishing venture, Avenger Enterprises, during that time. I later took Avenger out solo. And here we are....

SA: I think you may be a rare old-school Traveller fan that was immediately won over by TNE. What did you like about it?

MD: I was always a big fan of The Morrow Project, and TNE offered something similar--above all else, a chance to make a difference. Staving off the fall of civilization, or helping people rebuild from the wreckage is A Big Story, so to speak. It's an environment with lots of shades of grey, yet a mission that's in the final analysis truly heroic.

I never really got to grips with the rules (I used my homegrown D100 based system again) but I really liked the setting. here was a chance for a handful of guys to really make a difference. Not a huge one maybe, but a difference all the same. The potential for tragedy was important too. The emptiness of a boneyard world, or the futility of arriving just weeks too late to save the last survivors could be a powerful motivating factor next time the characters had something to do.

I liked the 'frontier' feeling of TNE. Classic Traveller could be restrictive in some ways--the Imperium was just so plain huge and possessed such inertia. The Rebellion was equally huge and you could get lost in its currents. But in the New Era there was a chance for characters to be captains of their own fate. Of course, the sea was stormy and there were no charts. Nor a compass for that matter. The boat was leaking and the crew had scurvy, too. In fact being captain of your own fate in TNE was an exercise in misery a lot of the time. At least, it was when I was the Referee...

No, seriously, the best thing about TNE was freedom and the chance to make a difference. That's what adventuring is all about, to me at least.

SA: And freedom is indeed one of the reasons that GDW staff have cited for both the Rebellion that kicked off MegaTraveller and for the new frontiers of TNE.

Imperium Games & T4

SA: Getting back to your career in writing Traveller ... you said you did some work for Imperim Games, a company which probably ended up being as controversial as TNE itself between its management, its old-style game system, and its very quick dissolution. Do you have any thoughts on Imperium from your work there?

MD: The phrase "Grrrr" comes to mind. I liked the T4 rules a lot. Indeed, I actually used them for a long time, albeit with some tweaks. They felt like Classic Traveller but they were very flexible and intiuitive. I know a lot of people would debate that, but they worked for me.

There were some good folks writing for Imperium and working for them, but overall my impression is of a shambles. A lot of what they produced was obviously not written by anyone who knew about Traveller and there was no real overall vision I can discern. Some products were really, really good, but I blame the writers more than the line editors for that. Some of what came out had concepts that blatantly violated Traveller's basic precepts (eg sending off FTL messages and ships arriving in repsonse a 4-5 days later) or just plain daft (a world with an evil twin hidden in a nearby nebula? Oh dear). I don't understand how that sort of thing went to press unless nobody knew or cared that Traveller has its own internal consistencies.

The editing was ... intriguing. One of our pieces went to press with errors in it that weren't in the submitted manuscript. It seems that someone ran a spellchecker and just hit replace all the time without engaging their brain at any point. Words the spellchecker didn't know ended up being changed in a way that mangled the end product - and in some cases obviously didn't make sense. Apparently nobody proofread the final documents.

Oh, and then there was money. Or actually, lack of it. I was owed for some work--not a great sum--when Imperium began to fragment. If they'd just flaked it would have been bad enough but we were offered a "renegotiated" contract (as in "this is what you're getting, deal with it") to settle what we were owed. When that one was also never paid it left a sour taste.

Without naming names, the signature on that contract belongs to a man who then spent a lot of money making a movie--which I boycotted, and maybe just as well because I'm told it was less than stellar. Another Imperium Games luminary achieved fame as the only games-industry client to rip me off twice. He actually tried to get me to work for him a third time; that discussion was a bit short.

Imperium Games had a good shot at the market and some great people writing for them, but overall my experience with them wasn't good. On the plus side, it did establish me as a paid (well, supposed-to-be-paid) Traveller author. So maybe it wasn't 100% bad.

QLI & Traveller20

SA: I think a lot of folks in the RPG industry would be surprised to know that in the time between the fall of Imperium Games and the announcement of Mongoose's new Traveller RPG, the Traveller field has been quite lively. As you’ve already mentioned, there have been a variety of companies producing material, including QLI/RPGRealms, ComStar Media, and Avenger Enterprises—all of which you’ve been involved with.

After the fall of Imperium Games, you ended up working with QuikLink Interactive (QLI), who published the d20-based Traveller20 rules in 2002. What did you contribute to that project?

MD: I joined the project just after it started, I think, and ended up as Line Editor. I managed most of the submissions and edited the projects I didn't write. As to what I did write... the short answer is: "I was involved with pretty much the whole QLI Traveller line, and I was the main or sole writer on the majority of it, I think."

Specifically, I did some parts of the T20 rulebook and rewrote the whole thing from the raw draft. After that I did most of the early Travellers Aide and EPIC adventure series and was the editor for most of the rest. I wrote the big adventure in the Referee's Screen and the one set in the Sydymic Outworlds... . and I wrote the vast majority of the text of Gateway to Destiny. I shortened the rules down to create T20 Lite, too. Oh yes... and the T20 players' book, which was published rather later than intended, just a few weeks ago in fact.

There was some other stuff too, I'm sure. Some of what was originally intended for QLI publication came with me when I went solo. Anyhow, I think I was involved in some way with every T20 product up until I left in late 2005. I could be wrong about that but I can't think of any I didn't manage, edit, write (or all three) some part of.

Gateway to Destiny was the best, I think.

Avenger Enterprises & Comstar

SA: How did Avenger Enterprises and your relationship with Comstar Media come about?

MD: Avenger Enterprises started out as my own sub-license publishing through QLI. Later on we went solo, mainly because of the hiatus at QLI. By the time QLI was in a position to publish again we'd hooked up with ComStar and that deal really suited us. In fact ComStar is the best thing that could have happened to us. They're very reliable and professional and they handle all the boring stuff like marketing (and they do it well!), freeing us to write game products. We get all the benefits of a full-service games company without having to do the dull parts. Yay ComStar!

For our part, Avenger Enterprises is a design house producing Traveller materials and publishing them via our alliance with ComStar, though that's not all we or they do. We're jointly working on some other projects including a new SF RPG, Traveller fiction and some other projects that may or may not turn out to be worth pursuing.

SA: In the last month it’s being announced that Comstar and Avenger are growing even closer, with Comstar acquiring 50% of your company. How is that going to change things?

MD: It doesn't, not really. The new partnership deal is more like a formalisation of the relationship we've evolved over the past couple of years. Basically the setup is unchanged - the 'Avenger' end produces text and the 'Comstar' end does book production, layout, art and such - only now William (Andersen) is in overall control there's no dislocation between the two processes. It just makes everything smoother and tidier. Oh, and William gave me money. That's good. I like money.

PDF v. Print

SA: Since the fall of Imperium Games, there have only been a handful of non-GURPS Traveller products that have been produced for print. We’ve already mentioned Gateway of Destiny and the T20 rules, but for the most part you’ve produced PDFs for QLI and Comstar.

Why such a heavy emphasis on electronic media rather than print?

MD: One of the underlying principles of the Traveller background is that "everything is driven by economics." In this case it applies to publishing too.

It costs a lot less to put out a product in PDF, which means we can produce more material. We have printed a couple of supplements (those first two 1248 books for example) and we intend to do more, but we're building Avenger from the ground up, so everything has to pay for itself and print runs have to be paid for out of revenue from other projects. Without capital to inject, the cost of that has to come from the PDFs.

So far it's going okay but building something like this up takes time...

SA: When you do print more, will they be new products, or are you planning to get your current backstock into print?

MD: They'll be new products, though the back catalogue will get into print as well, sooner or later.

We have a deal in place to publish materials in close conjunction with the Mongoose line, and those are going to be in print (and distributed by Mongoose). We’re going to finish the 1248 series that’s in process (the Spinward States and Freedom League books will be out or in late preparation by the time this is printed) and then concentrate for a while on OTU books set in the Mongoose 1105 background. We’ll maybe get into that later on.

TNE1248

SA: First, let’s talk more about those 1248 books you’ve mentioned. Personally, I think they’re the most exciting thing to happen to Traveller since GDW went down in 1996.

You've put out two sourcebooks thus far, a massive sourcebook and an in-depth look at the Fourth Imperium, and you’ve already said that you’ve got two more in process. Through these books you’ve advanced the timeline to 1248, which is the first time any post-GDW publisher has revealed more of Traveller's future. How in the world did you get the OK to do so, and is the material all official?

MD: Yes, it's official. As I said earlier I was involved with TNE a little bit and I'd been talking to Marc (Miller) about various things for years. Somewhere down the line I became some sort of TNE guru--Marc started forwarding queries to me instead of answering them.

We talked about the forward timeline on and off for a long time. My initial idea wasn't what Marc wanted but this version met with approval. So by the time I got around to wanting to publish it, we'd pretty much accepted that this was the future timeline. At that point it was a foregone conclusion really.

SA: So how much about TNE1248 ended up being yours, how much Mark's, and how much Dave Nilsen's, who was the TNE guy at GDW before it went down?

MD: 1248 is my extrapolation from Dave Nilsen's work. Other than suggesting that my original idea wasn't right, Marc’s input was fairly slight – though he did okay what I was doing which is kind of an important contribution! I talked to Dave a bit back, but after 1248 was done. I had Dave's loose threads and background stuff from TNE to work with, and in some cases I was guided, in others pretty much railroaded, by what already existed.

But the interpretation of it all, the final direction? Pretty much all my fault!

SA: And why did you decide to jump all the way to 1248, instead of continuing on immediately where GDW left off, in 1202 or so?

MD: Several reasons. For one thing it'd been a decade and I felt the need for a clean break. Besides, I wanted to leave TNE 1202 open for those who wanted to play in it--and maybe had advanced their own game timeline a few years. It wasn't my intention to try to invalidate what those folks were doing, and by jumping ahead and just filling in the broad brush strokes I figured I could leave enough room for people to play in that era without being contradicted. We've actually published some stuff set in 1202-ish, and it's an era I'd like to support.

On top of that I wanted to present some answers to the 'big questions' left hanging by GDW. That required a more distant perspective.

Most of all, though, I want 1248 to offer the best of all Traveller eras--stable Imperium, frontier, New Era in the Wilds, great fleet clashes and all that. By moving the timeline past the initial recovery period to a point where some stability has returned, I felt we could offer something to the more "classical" fans who might feel that TNE 1202 was too different from their favourite setting.

1248 offers a stable Imperium with somewhat grubby internal politics for fans of that sort of game. Just over the border is a universe of exploration, salvage and rebuilding in the Wilds. And for those who liked the war in the rebellion, there's the Dominate and several more or less equally powerful states who don't always get alone. Or you could just head off into the Wilds and try to carve out an empire. Or whatever.

In short, I wanted 1248 to offer something to every kind of Traveller fan. That required some time for the dust to settle.

SA: Can you tell us more about those two new books and what’s coming up afterward for the TNE1248 setting?

MD: Some guys who are big fans of the Star Vikings are doing the Freedom League sourcebook, set in the old Reformation Coalition. There's also the Spinward States sourcebook on its way and the Terran Commonwealth book. The plan is to cover all the major regions but leave enough vagueness between them to allow Referees to run their own games without being restricted.

Longer-term we’d like to deal with wider issues like the Great Rescue and the exploration Rimward from Terra. There's still the question of what the Solomani expeditions to the Perseus Arm might have found; I want to take a look at that at some point. We’ll get to that sooner or later, I’m sure, but at the moment it’s in the discussion/ideas stage.

Mongoose Traveller

SA: Though I’ll stay with my contention that TNE1248 is the most exciting thing to happen to Traveller in a decade, over the last few months there’s been another huge news item: next month’s release of a new Traveller from Mongoose.

Could you expand on your involvement with Mongoose?

MD: I've freelanced for Mongoose on and off for some years and I'm doing a book on their main product line (the Spinward Marches Sourcebook), so it made sense for Avenger to work in parallel. We're going to be putting out a series of adventures and supplements set in and around the Marches region which will be compatible with the main Traveller line from Mongoose. That should not be hard since in some cases the same people are writing them.

This is something of a special relationship; I don't think Mongoose will be licensing other companies to publish OTU materials and the existing licenses will 'sunset' at the end of their terms. There are exceptions - as I understand it BITS will continue as before, SJG have their own variant-universe Traveller line, and licenses to use the new Traveller rules for other settings will be available of course. In short, nobody new will be able to get a license to publish in the OTU. I may be wrong about this, but it's what I think is going to happen.

For us, this is a good thing. It means that we won't have to worry about conflicting versions of the same information. We're working closely with Mongoose (which is why we're trusted to do this) so we can ensure 100% compatibility between OTU supplements and adventures. I expect we'll develop some concepts in our Avenger materials that are hinted at in Mongoose ones. That requires pretty close cooperation but you can't get closer than having the same author I suppose.

SA: Is there anything surprising or new that we should be looking for in Mongoose's version of the Spinward Marches?

MD: It's not a straight rehash so there are certainly some new angles and such like, but some of the things we'd planned to ask Marc about putting in got scuppered. The short version is that somebody started a rumour that we were going to do something or other, various people got into a flap about it but nobody asked what was actually going on. At that point it was just a bunch of ill-informed people on a mailing list arguing about something that wasn't happening anyway, but then somebody decided to tell Marc that we were pulling a fast one.

Next thing we knew there was a very large fuss about it and the list of things we were working up - we were planning to ask about them when we had a final version to put in front of Marc - got sideswiped before we sorted it out. Basically we lost our chance to do anything really 'special' before we were even able to make our case.

That said, there are a few surprises, I hope. The Marches is/are a big place and there's room to develop some new things. I've also tried to use data from old classic adventures that are set a couple of years ahead in the time line but still leave things open. Oh, and I'm exploring a couple of long-standing canon questions like Jump 'course tapes' and the like.

Onward to the Future …

SA: So what's the future look like? When does Avenger's current license sunset and will your relationship with Mongoose allow you to publish either 1105 or 1248 material afterward?

MD: Our initial license ends in November 2008. After that our relationship with Mongoose (it's not quite the same as a license) lets up publish whatever they are inclined to let us, providing Marc doesn't object of course. We have some ideas in the pipeline but we're not in the habit of announcing projects before they're concrete and, indeed, nearly finished. Too many times I've seen games companies make grandiose announcements then fail to produce anything, only to go right back to shouting 'Vaporware! Get Your Vaporware Here!' about the next big thing. so I'll keep quiet about plans until we know we can deliver.

What I can say is that we'll be doing a series of 1105 supplements and adventures, and we do intend to support the 1248 line once we're properly established. 1105 is the main priority because the Mongoose tie-in makes the most commercial sense, simple as that. 'Everything is driven by economics' as the Traveller book says. One of them does, anyhow.

SA: It’s great to hear that you'll be continuing on with Traveller into the future. Is there anything else you'd like to say before we finish up?

MD: Hmm, I find myself struggling for anything meaningful. One thing comes to mind... I do have high hopes for Mongoose Traveller. The existing Traveller community can be very inward-looking at times, and there are more divisions than things that unite the existing fans. I'm hopeful that Mongoose Traveller will reach out beyond this pool of long-time players (though it may appeal to them too!) and find a new audience. If so, it will be a big and lasting success. I'm putting in some work to become part of that because I really do think it will be worth it