Traveller and Star Wars - What tech tells you about a setting

Let's talk about Traveller.

Part of the reason I've not been updating the blog is that I've refocused my energies on a new campaign. I've always wanted to run a Traveller game - something about the setup of the rulebooks just inspires me, especially with regards to the little black books of Classic Traveller. Traveller seems, in some respects to be exactly set up for the on-and-off, open table sandboxes I've come to love (and in some ways not, but that's probably another post).

But I've clearly drunk too much of the OSR DIY Kool-Aid - the idea of setting my campaign within an already established setting with lots of details doesn't spark my imagination like the idea of coming up with something of my own, tailored to my tastes (and stealing liberally from my favourite sci fi authors). Building a sci fi setting for adventuring in, though, is a different job of work from building a fantasy milieu. And that's what I want to discuss today.

Specifically, I want to talk about the role technology plays in fleshing out a sci fi setting. Obviously, you have your iconic sci fi technologies - Warp Drive, Lightsabres and so on. But the contribution these make to the feel of a setting, especially as a place to play an rpg, is often just as much down to the social factors implicit in their design, and the social consequences of their existence.

Traveller is a really good example. Classic Traveller, when it first released, didn't have any official setting. This wasn't an oversight, but was intentional on the part of Marc Miller, the author; referees were intended to be given free reign to create their own universe, using the tools provided by the game (indeed, Traveller is in lots of ways the original 'toolbox game'). Nevertheless, certain features built into these tools greatly influence the character and feel of the settings created. Most notably, in Traveller, the only thing capable of travelling faster than the speed of light is the Jump Drive. Importantly, this includes things like communication signals; you can't have a real-time phone conversation with someone in the next star system (or even on the next planet), because of the time taken for the signal to traverse the distance. The speed of communication is thus the same as the speed of travel - in the far future envisioned by Traveller, your best bet for getting a message to someone in another system is to write them a letter and hand it to a spacer going in the right direction. In a society with faster-than light travel, mail ships exist that ferry messages between the stars.

I absolutely adore this. As has been commented often, it creates an 'Age of Sail' feel, where people can, for example, outrun the law by escaping out to the colonies before word can be sent ahead of their arrival. Worlds can be cut off and isolated from the galactic community (such as it is) for years if they're not on a major jump-route, or if they're too distant from their neighbours for trade to be profitable. The prospects for adventure are tantalising. In my mind, this is one of Traveller's essential, core features. Even though there's no setting detailed in the little black books, you already have a feel, reading them, for the sort of setting they're likely to produce, largely from this one fact alone.

Technology can also point beyond itself to details of the setting, effectively working as a sort of 'Noodle Incident' pointing to its development. The Noodle Incident, for those who don't know, is from Calvin and Hobbes: At some point in the past, Calvin did something he would like everyone to forget about involving noodles. The point is that we never learn what, exactly, because it's more fun to allude to it mysteriously and play up the gravity of the incident - whatever actually happened, if we ever learned about it, would inevitably be a disappointment. It's better kept offscreen, so to speak. I believe the people behind some of the most interesting lore for Warhammer 40k call these 'closed doors': The fiction gestures, sometimes obliquely, to a place, faction, event or similar, but intentionally refrains from codifying it so that individual fans can explore it themselves in their own games (it's worth noting that this ethos seems to have diminished somewhat in the 40k space).

The foremost example of a Noodle Incident/closed door in popular culture, in my mind, happens when Obi Wan briefly alludes to his past to Luke in Star Wars: A New Hope. Obi Wan tells us several things of note: He fought in something called the 'Clone Wars', he was/is a Jedi Knight, an ancient group of "guardians of peace and justice", and the weapon of a Jedi is a lightsabre, an "elegant weapon from a more civilised age" that is not "as clumsy or random as a blaster" (i.e.: a laser gun).

For as much as this tells us, it hints at so much more. Forget, for a moment, what we know from all the Star Wars that came after, and imagine, as in 1977, that this film is the only Star Wars media in the world. What do we know about the world presented? Well, there was a previous age - a "more civilised" one - where a group of knights protected the peace. These guys fought with swords, not guns, in a world where guns were presumably available. Forget for a moment the whole thing of blocking volleys of blaster bolts with a lightsabre that we see in later Star Wars iterations (I know Luke practices with the drone in A New Hope, but nowhere does anyone attempt to block actual blaster fire with a sabre as if that would be a reliable strategy). To me, this strongly implies that previously, conflicts would often be resolved in a more ritualistic way, through duels, as in Dune (a stronger influence on Star Wars than George Lucas often admits), rather than necessarily through overwhelming force. And, to be sure, we see this where Obi Wan fights Darth Vader, with the ceremonial drawing and crossing of swords, Vader telling his Stormtroopers not to interfere, and Obi Wan's eventual surrender and execution (spoilers for Star Wars, I guess).

So a previous society with stronger norms surrounding conflict, where ceremonial duels rather than sheer force (pardon the pun) can be the deciding factor. What changed? Well, there was a thing called the 'Clone Wars'. Now, to be clear, we know very little about what this entailed. Wars have all sorts of names, for all sorts of reasons - the War of the Roses wasn't fought by armies of roses, for example. But it seems fairly reasonable to guess that these wars (note 'wars' plural) might have involved armies of clones clashing - the phrase is evocative, and that's definitely one of the images it evokes. And a world in which you print out clone soldiers en masse is not one in which a personalistic, ceremonial method of resolving conflict through duels, as opposed to overwhelming force, is really viable.

So we have a world in which the social norms are crumbling, which is becoming more barbarous, with less room for ceremony and chivalry. But notice how this is articulated through technology: You used to have individual knights wielding sabres, now you have armies of clones and everyone uses blasters. Likewise, we learn that the emperor has just dissolved the senate (performing a galactic scale coup entirely offscreen), and plans to rule through his "technological terror", the Death Star, with imperial officers even telling Darth Vader that he's outdated to his face (or mask, I suppose). It's often stated that Star Wars is more space fantasy than sci fi, and this is often cashed out in terms of a lack of focus on technology. And sure, shows like Star Trek may take every opportunity to explain to you the technobabble behind this or that new gizmo, which Star Wars definitely doesn't, usually. But a surprising amount of the worldbuilding in A New Hope is done entirely through focusing on technology - the society and history it hints at, and the events and social changes it produces.

At the risk of going on a tangent, just the visual design of early Star Wars, and A New Hope specifically, tells us a lot about the in-world implications of different technologies. For instance - and this is a tendentious claim, I'll admit - I believe there is a narrative embedded in the visual design that tells us why no-one in Star Wars uses guns that fire conventional bullets. Very nearly all the laser weapons we see appear to fire semi-automatically - that is, they don't require you to manually reload each shot, but neither can you just hold down the trigger and keep spraying, as with a machinegun. This strongly implies that the rate of fire of a blaster is limited by something like the amount of heat it generates or similar. Indeed, several of the bigger weapons platforms seem to use multiple linked guns to achieve a higher rate of fire - one gun fires, then cools down while the other three fire and cool down in turn, as with the Millennium Falcon's quad turrets, or the X-wing's four cannons. The exception that comes to mind is the static machinegun-blaster used briefly by Snowtroopers in The Empire Strikes Back, which appears to fire short bursts, but requires setting up like a World War 1 static machinegun. The limited firing rate of other blasters would explain why the Empire bothers lugging around such a cumbersome weapon.

The question is, if blasters fire so slowly, and are more high-tech and thus presumably more difficult to manufacture than normal guns, why don't people go back to machineguns that fire ordinary bullets? And the intended answer, as I see it, is armour - specifically, Stormtrooper armour. People joke all the time about how stormtrooper armour is useless - the only person we see survive a blaster hit in the original trilogy is Leia, and she isn't wearing any. But consider if the point of Stormtrooper armour (and the helmets etc. that other troops wear) wasn't to deflect lasers, but bullets, something it did really well. The Rebel Alliance, a cash-strapped guerrilla movement, would love to fall back on cheap, easy-to-produce bullet weapons that saturate an area with fire. But if they did, they wouldn't be able to affect their main targets. Thus Stormtrooper armour makes sense because, even though it's ineffective against the blasters used by the rebels, the point of it is to force the rebels to upgrade to those blasters rather than cheaper, more low-tech weapons with a higher rate of fire.

The idea of everyone running around with high-tech, low-rate-of-fire, weapons designed to be armour-piercing, even though no-one is wearing armour that could stand up to them, is actually quite historical. Muskets evolved to be able to pierce through plate armour, but continued to be the standard even after people stopped commonly wearing plate armour (because it can be penetrated by muskets!). Likewise in tank development, there's actually a benefit to making your tanks heavily armoured, even if your enemy's best guns can penetrate that armour, precisely because it forces the enemy to mount that bigger, more expensive gun.

Do I think George Lucas had all his in mind when making the early Star Wars films? Frankly, no, I do not. Lucas has often been allocated most or all of the credit for Star Wars' success, but this obscures the greater portion of the work done by the various creative teams and individuals who also worked on the films. I can fully believe that this loose narrative was cooked up in the various prop and VFX design departments as justification for design choices, much as one would cook up a chain of reasoning for why the escape hatch on the Millennium Falcon should go just here. The fact that Lucas later okayed decisions that invalidated this narrative under a different design team (witness the Super Battle Droid's tiny wrist-mounted laser machinegun) speaks to the idea that he either wasn't aware of or wasn’t interested in it.

And of course, returning to the previous discussion, we must note here that Star Wars violated the terms of the Noodle Incident by going and showing the clone wars on screen - and, as per those terms, it was largely a disappointment to a large number of people (to put it mildly), at least if we limit ourselves to the movies. When a franchise becomes financially successful, the people in charge tend to lose the sense of how the setting can be richer when things are left to the audience's imagination. This is partly why I limited my scope above to the first Star Wars movies, as they were received at the time; there's simply too much Star Wars now for it all to fit in one box, and for all these speculative background narratives to be teased out without contradicting other things we see on screen. The clone wars Obi Wan alluded to in 1977, that we have to wonder hazily about, aren't the clone wars we saw onscreen in 2002-present.

For the GM, I believe this points to an important lesson: You don't want to make everything explicit. Games offer a way to get people to see things about a setting for themselves without having to be told - for instance, that social norms are eroding from a more chivalrous age to a more barbarous one, or that certain technologies are employed by great powers to try and out-price their competitors. What ttrpgs can do is make players feel this by affecting their actions - when they try to defuse a conflict by invoking social norms, or when they try to buy a suit of battle armour. And this is why ttrpgs have a unique value, distinct from other ways of presenting speculative fiction, that is not derivative from those others.

This is not unique to sci fi ttrpgs, but it is more keenly felt there. In prepping for D&D, I felt that it was enough to have a map with some notes and a strong feel for the setting - anything else I could work out in the moment. With Traveller, so much about the feel of the setting depends on the specific technologies within it that it feels like there's much more detail to master before getting started playing. But part of the lesson here is that these things can remain in the background - they can inhabit the level of world-feel, as opposed to taking centre stage. (One might almost say: "Draw maps; leave blanks.") As players start to get a feel, piece by piece, for what they can do in this world, they will start to inhabit it - that's been my experience form other games, at least.