For your enjoyment: An alternate Traveller

[robertsconley]

Over here, http://www.therpgsite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8346, people talking about how RPGs could have developed earlier. Having written some alt-history stuff, I came up with something I thought would have been plausible.

For your enjoyment

Originally Posted by John Morrow

I don't disagree that fandom played a role, but go back a step further and ask why fandom developed. That, too, involved leisure time and disposable income.

Here is what I feel is a plausible version written in a alt-history format.

-----------------------------------
Forward to Adventure
A retrospective of 30 years of Adventure Games.
Imagination #224, September 5th 1970
Hello fans, welcome to the 30th anniversary of the Adventure Game. It was at ChiCon I where Paul Miller and V. Wiseman introduced "Travelling, Your adventures in the future". Surprisingly the first edition of Travelling wasn’t a game. Sure many of today’s rules were present. World & creature creation, starship construction were present. The remaining rules were either non-existent or only present in the sketchiest of outlines.

To understand why Travelling was written. We need to go back to the New York World Fair and the first Worldcon. Miller was one of those attending the first con. Like other fans he was intensely interested in the new style of science fiction being written in Astounding and other magazines. He wanted to learn how to write those stories. Rumors have it that he spent much of the convention trying to corner Campbell and other editors with questions about how to write good science fiction.

Miller left the first WorldCon very frustrated as he felt that nobody could give him clear answers. He returned to his hometown of Chicago where two months later he was talking to his friend Victor Wiseman. Wiseman was studying physics at the University of Chicago at the time. Inspired by his friend’s troubles, he sat down and wrote up a set of tables for his friend to use to create his stories. For the next four months Wiseman researched the available literature on planets, stars, rockets, and even a little biology. By the spring of 1940 he had over two dozen pages of tables, charts, and notes for Miller.

Miller loved what Wiseman had done and immediately used them to create his own worlds and settings. Miller pulled material from E.E. Smith and other writers of the time. When Miller found something that wasn’t clear or was difficult to use, he made notes and worked with Wiseman to make the charts easier to use. One innovation that introduced at this time was the use of dice to randomize various results.

Miller wrote in Imagination #64, “I was making the first sector of the Spinward Republic and was starting to get repetitive in how my worlds were turning out. To give my head a break I started rolling dice to randomly pick items off of the tables, modifying the more outlandish results. When I showed Wiseman what I was doing, he picked up on it right away. He knew quite a bit about statistics and probability from his work at the University. For the third revision he reorganized the tables so you could use 1 or more dice to roll for random results.

At the end of the spring term, Miller and Wiseman had what would be the first edition of Travelling finished. With the second World Con coming in September, the pair decided to spend $100 and print their charts and notes as a small book with the intention to sell it at the Con. They figured that there were other writers that have the same problems as Miller.

That summer, Miller took all of Wiseman’s notes and charts and typed them up. He took Wiseman’s star, world, creature, and starship charts and added chapters on characters, equipment, and setting. At the end he included a small subsector of his Spinward Republic setting, the classic Victoria Subsector.

When September rolled around, Miller went to the WorldCon and set up a table with 100 copies of Travelling for sale for $2. Travelling was a hit! All 100 copies sold out by the end of the second day. Years later Robert Heinlein wrote “I walked by and saw Miller there with a crowd of people. I picked up a copy of Travelling. Now I knew a lot of what Wiseman and Miller wrote and had the reference books; but it was nice to have it all in one place. Plus being able to use dice helped when you are stuck trying to figure out exactly what a place looked like. “

Miller left the convention with orders for two dozen more books. In addition he used some of the cash to pay for ads in next month’s issue of Astounding and other magazines. When he got back he split the profits with Wiseman and the two ordered 100 more books. Throughout that first year Travelling was reprinted two more times. The third print run was 200 copies and the fourth was 500 copies.

The next major step in Travelling evolution were Chadwick’s famous “Bottle Caps” rules. Named for the use of bottle caps to represent starships and people. This first appeared in the March 1941 issue of Astounding, John Chadwick came up with a set of rules, using dice, to resolve combat using the starships and personal weapons listed in Travelling. Miller, immediately like the “bottle caps” rules and contacted Chadwick to incorporate them into a 2nd edition of Travelling.

The 2nd edition was released the fall of 1941 at the third WorldCon in Denver with a modified version of Chadwick’s rules incorporated. 2nd edition included chapters on characters, combat, worlds, stars, creatures, equipment, and starships. Over a 1000 copies were made and all were sold within months.

The 2nd edition was first edition that could be played as a game. Although the character and equipment lists were much cruder than subsequent edition. 2nd edition was spearheaded Travelling initial popularity throughout World War 2 .

After the 2nd Edition was released, Campbell at Astounding Magazine was inundated with submissions based on Travelling. Some were little more than list randomly generated from the charts in Travelling. Campbell founded a new bi-monthly magazine called Imagination, Gateway to the Future and filled it with Travelling submissions. The first issue featured Miller’s Spinward Republic and outlined a complete sector done in Travelling format.

Next… Travelling and World War 2.

[Qoltar]

Damn,.....you beat me to it.

I was going to ask your permission to post that on here so LKW would see it.

Reminds of an Alt history shost story about Swentor Proxmire going back in time and making Heinlein or Campbell would be healthier and Science Fiction ;literature would not happen the way that it did.

The plan backfired on Proxmire....of course.

So, in this alternate timeline did Gene Rodenberry play the "Travelling" game in his spare time?


- Ed Charlton

[combatmedic]

That's pretty cool.

[robertsconley]

Originally Posted by Qoltar

So, in this alternate timeline did Gene Rodenberry play the "Travelling" game in his spare time?

- Ed Charlton

With further thought, I think that in this timeline travelling didn't spawn one industry but two. First Adventure Games, and basically books that helped you write by generating plot ideas for various genres.

Here was I am thinking how it went down in this timeline

Travelling and World War 2.

Travelling 2nd edition became a minor hit during World War as entertainment for soldiers. Especially in 1943 when Saul Banner submitted the idea to Imagination of using a single referee to judge the scenario for a group of player working together. This article came with the classic scenario Output Alpha, which featured the famed Nostradamus Bugs.

Saul Banner went on to write several more classic scenarios, notably the Memory of Beta, about a sentient ship, and Gamma Twilight which took placed on the tidelocked world of Gamma in the Victoria Subsector. Gamma Twilight was written in conjunction with Miller's article on the Aryan Consulate. The Aryanites were the main villains of the scenario.

Towards the end of the war, several companies came out with their own adventure games, but most were so poorly put together in rules and binding that Travelling kept its dominance.

Also V. Wiseman never really contributed much to Travelling after 2nd Edition because after he graduated from the University of Chicago, he went to work for Fermi and the Manhattan Project.

During the war, Imagination introduced the Aryan Consulate the sworn enemy of the Spinward Republic. Also the Dogmen of Antares made their first appearance, along with the master intriguers the Ceti Octopiods.

Travelling 3rd Edition

After the end of the War, the WorldCon were resumed starting in the fall of 1946. Miller, with backing from Campbell, hired Saul Banner and formed AGW, Adventure Games Workshop. In 1947 the two released Travelling 3rd Edition which finally completed Travelling's transformation from a writer's aide to a full fledged Adventure Game.

How Pirate & Plunder almost sank Adventures Games in the 50s

During the war, rivals of Astounding, and even comic book companies put out knocks off of Travelling. Most of them were poorly written, poorly designed, and poorly binded. This doesn't mean Travelling wasn't that much better but it was obvious that Miller put a lot more care and effort into Travelling than what his competition did.

The half of the dozen or so World War 2 Era Adventure Games were space related. Amazing Planetary Adventures, TriPlanetary (later sued by E.E. Smith), Astonishing Space Adventures were some of them. The remaining half dozen expanded Adventure Games into new genres, superheroes mostly, but there was a western (Tombstone Tales), a Three Musketeers game (Legends of the Rapier), several Pirate games, a game based on the Greek Myths, and one Time Travel game from Educational Comics (Time Travel Tales or TTT)

When EC Comics founder, Max Gaines died in 1947, his son William took over. William Gaines decided to jettison the comics and focus on taking the Adventure Game market away from AGW. He hired many of the best sci-fi and genre writers from Astounding rivals and turned them loose.

The result was an explosion of titles, and magazines for the Adventure Games market. Time Travel Tales was cleaned up and the Time Patrol was created along with their arch enemy the evil Denebians. Galaxy Trek was created to go head to head with Travelling. And finally their most popular game was Pirates & Plunder, a game dealing with the pirate genre. Along with the Adventure Games expansion the company changed it name to Entertaining Games.

By 1950, Entertaining Games was still second place to AGW. In the fall of 1950, The 2nd edition of Pirates & Plunder was released. It added a chapter on the dead, pirate curses, and black magic. This caused an explosion of interest in Pirates & Plunder and for a brief time in 1951 it outsold Travelling.

During the early 1950's Entertaining Games introduced the standalone scenario. Previously scenarios were only published in one of the Adventure Game magazines. It also introduced the idea of expansions with the release of Tales from Davy Jones' Locker. Davy Jones' expanded the chapter on the dead, curses, and black magic. This was followed up in 1953 with Legends of the Ancient Mariner.

However 1953 was the highpoint of Entertaining Games. In 1954 Seduction of Youth was published which criticizes Adventure Games and Entertaining Games in particular. Sales plummeted and with the bankruptcy of Entertaining Games distributor in 1956, William Gaines ceased publishing everything except for a humor magazine known as Crazy.

During this Miller and Banner kept toiling away at AGW. Despite the competition from Entertaining Games, the general Adventure Game market boomed during the early 50s and AGW expanded to a dozen employees. Miller and Banner released a 4th edition of Travelling. The 4th edition was noted for a introduction by Physicist V. Wiseman, who also contributed charts and notes on on Nuclear technology. Miller also began publishing standalone scenarios and supplements. Mostly repackage of earlier contributions to Imagination, updated for 4th edition.

With Seduction of Youth and subsequent downturn, AGW was forced to let most of employees go by 1956. Miller writes. "The summer of 1957 was pretty bleak. We were down to myself, Banner, and our secretary/office manager Lauren Smith. That fall We had a small uptick in sales from some tie ins with the International Geophysical Year. Grand Survey was the best of that year's releases. We knew that there was work being done to launch something into space. "

Miller continues "By October I was working on some stuff about the early days of the Spinward Republic and thinking about how to incorporate what was going on. When Saul runs in and tells me to turn on the radio. That when I heard beeping of Sputnik and the report that Russian launched the first satellite. I was mad and afraid along with the rest of the country. As beloved as the Spinward Republic was. This was real and the Russians were first. But I also know that beep was also the sound that AGW was saved."

Spy versus Spy and revival of Adventure Games in the 60s.

With the launch of Sputnik, interest in Travelling and Adventure Games exploded. Even with rivals putting out their own space related Adventure Games, AGW remained the largest publisher of Adventure Games.

The closest rival to AGW was Jackson Games of Tulsa Oklahoma. John Jackson gained noticed by writing for several of AGW's rivals. His work pushed the conventions of the space adventure games in new directions. Following the strange disappearance of Arc Johnson of Small Box Games. Jackson returned to his home in Tulsa Oklahoma and founded Jackson Games. He developed Spy versus Spy in 1963. Capitalizing on cold war tensions and the popularity of spy films and shows. Spy versus Spy and its line of scenarios and supplements became the #2 game of the 60's.

The triumph of the Hobbit, Adventure Games return to the past and fantasy.

By the fall of 1955, the third volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic Lord of the Rings was released. With the decline of Adventure Games due to Seduction of the Innocent both AGW and Entertaining Games did not notice the release. With the launch of sputnik, Adventure Games focused on space.

In 1963, Gary Ganon and David Arendt founded Fantasy Adventures, Inc in Great Britain. They loved Travelling, Adventure Games, and Tolkien. With a desire to enter Tolkein's world. Arendt created a thinly disguised version of Middle Earth called the Wilderlands and Ganon created rules for the game. The two released Fellowship, Adventures of Fantasy, at the 1964 World Con.

The game was a hit. Lord of the Rings was beginning it's rise in popularity and people wanted to use Adventure Games to play in his world. In 1965 Tolkien wrote to Ganon and Ardent praising their work and noting that they seemed to have lost his check in the mail. Fantasy Adventures paid Tolkein a royalty and secured an official license to continue Fellowship. Arendt then created a line of "official" Middle Earth expansions along with continuing the Wilderlands. By 1967, Fellowship and Fantasy Adventures, Inc were the #2 company behind Travelling and AGW, Jackson Games and Spy Versus Spy remains a solids #3.

During the late 60's Travelling and adventure games gained some amount of maintain notice with the sucess of Star Travels. Gene Roddenberry, the producer and creator of Star Travels, was introduced to Adventure Games when he was writing westerns for TV in the 50's. He learned about Travelling and was inspired to combine his work on western with the ideas found in Travelling. Today Star Travel is in its 5th season with Jeffery Hunter playing the role of the starship Enterprise's captain James Pike. The Klingon Leonoids are a homage to Travelling's Dogmen of Antares.

The Future of Adventure Games.

Today, in 1970, Adventure Games still is a strong vital market. It appears that the recent unpopularity of the Vietnam War is having an effect on sales of Travelling and Spy vs Spy. Fellowship keeps growing in popularity every year. Fantasy Adventures newly establishing line of Mines and Caverns scenarios is especially popular. It is rumored that the 3rd Edition of Fellowship is going to make a Mine crawl the centerpiece scenario rather than the Citadel of Dun Arthanc. There are rumors that Jackson Games is expanding the rules used in Spy vs Spy to the Fantasy Genre. The new system is supposably going to be called GUAG or Generic Universal Adventure Game and involve the use of the different polyhedral dice being used in the wargame industry.

[Qoltar]

Klingon Wolfmen ??.......oh..kaay...


I always identified more with the Aslan..but hey its an alternate timeline.

- Ed Charlton

[robertsconley]

Originally Posted by Qoltar

Klingon Wolfmen ??.......oh..kaay...


I always identified more with the Aslan..but hey its an alternate timeline.

- Ed Charlton

I changed it to Leonoids.

[Apache]

This is brilliant..:)

[Qoltar]

Shifting gears to INFINITE WORLDS a litlle... Which Quanta should we put this timeline in ?

Geek tourism there would be pretty high in numbers....


- Ed Charlton

[Cypher]

Originally Posted by Qoltar

Shifting gears to INFINITE WORLDS a litlle... Which Quanta should we put this timeline in ?

Geek tourism there would be pretty high in numbers....


- Ed Charlton

Don't forget the prospect of the various Adventurers from this world touring the worlds that match their favorite games!