Marc Miller (1)

I've enjoyed the game Traveller since the very early 80's, and have played the original, the sequel Megatraveller, and Mongoose versions of the game. Marc Miller has been the creative force behind the game from the beginning. I recently met him and he's intelligent, creative and a really nice guy.
This is the 5th edition of Traveller, and when it came out on Kickstarter I was enthused to back the most ambitious version of the game, and to give something back after all these years.
Unfortunately... this book is a wonderful design "bible" that could be used to produce the best Traveller yet but it is not, however, a very playable game by itself.

Character creation used to be one of the most fun aspects of Traveller. In fact, it is a mini-game all its own with characters learning, having life experiences, developing contacts, acquiring heirlooms and sometimes being killed, all in a matter of minutes. Yes, while you are in the process of creating a character for the game, your character can be killed. Some professions have high risk/rewards, and if you push your nascent character into it for too long, they may get taken away before you get to play them. My daughter and I have spent hours creating characters, seeing how far we could push their experiences without losing them in the process.
In contrast, I have spent hours on two different occasions trying to create a single character with T5, flipping madly between widely spaced sections with no index to assist (note: MM has since released an index in PDF form, but it was not included in this version of the book), only to eventually get hung up on some aspect that I couldn't resolve.
In general, instead of listing out recipes for different types of human, alien, planets, spacecraft, equipment, etc., this book provides detailed formulae for creating any form of them. There's no "grab a template for a psychic human", you need to follow a process and generate each aspect and it's easy to lose your way.
Marc has promised to release a "Player's Guide" that will be more of an actual game manual and hopefully then I'll be able to play T5. I just can't do it with the current book as-is. In the years until a player's manual is available, we'll continue our adventures with Mongoose Traveller and T5 will sit on the shelf.

It's a shame and somewhat ironic that T5 was dead before we got a chance to play it, like so many of my over-ambitious characters.… (mais)

The Traveller RPG was first published in 1977, and has been through several incarnations in the decades since. And during those years, there have been a handful of tie-in novels published – two by the game’s original publishers, GDW; one by a major imprint; but most by fans. Miller was the inventor of the game, and has been seen as its authority ever since – much as Gary Gygax was for Dungeons & Dragons – but until Agent of the Imperium, Miller had never published fiction (unlike Gygax). Agent of the Imperium was published by Miller’s company, Far Future Enterprises, but was financed via Kickstarter. Despite not think highly of other Traveller novels I’ve read, I decided it might be worth reading Miller’s go at one. And… there’s some interesting ideas in the novel, and the way it covers so much of the Third Imperium’s history is cleverly done… But it reads like a series of unconnected episodes, which eventually lead up to the seizing of the Iriridum Throne by Arbellatra, the founder of the Alkhalikoi dynasty (which was still in power five hundred or so years later, at the time the setting of Traveller “began”). The narrator of the novel is the agent of the title, and he works for the Imperial Quarantine Agency, which is charged with preventing epidemics on individual worlds from spreading across the Imperium. Of course, it takes something especially virulent to put the Imperium in danger, and the opening incident describes a world where a species of parasite has taken mental control of the population. The Agent, however, is not a real person. He was a high-level bureaucrat during the early years of the Imperium, but his personality was encoded on a wafer (a fatal process), and now, in certain circumstances, the commanders of Imperial Navy vessels or fleets are instructed to insert a copy of the wafer into a suitable officer equipped with a jack, and so invoke the Agent, who can then advise on the situation. These situations usually result in the Agent advising the fleet to destroy the world. After several such incidents, the Agent (there is a system in place to keep his memories updated and in synch) assists Arbellatra onto the Iridium Throne. I’m a big fan of Traveller and the universe its designers have created and yes, it’s a good playground for fiction… But most of the fiction set in the universe has never quite managed to grasp the flavour of it. Unsurprisingly, Miller manages that really well – despite throwing in virtual personalities and wafers and jacks, none of which, as far as I remember, appeared in any of the incarnations of the RPG. However… Miller is no prose stylist; in fact, he makes Asimov look like a prose stylist. This is commercial sf prose stripped down to its most basic, and the best that can be said of it is that it’s serviceable (although an editor should have spotted that “flang” is not the past tense of “fling”). The story is also far too episodic, and the links between the episodes too minor, to give the whole a feeling of a plot. Fans of the RPG will enjoy it – because it’s by Miller, because it’s set in the RPG’s universe – but if it had been a non-Traveller work it would be a poor one.… (mais)