RPGaDay 2023, Day 31

This is the end ...

Today is the last day of RPGaDay 2023. It’s been an interesting month, but this blog will be going back to a weekly format from tomorrow, with the next blog coming out 2023-09-07.

The thing about naming one game as your “favourite of all time” is, it’s kind of childish. Why only one, when there are so many great games (not D&D) out there? Over the course of this month, I’ve listed pretty much all of my favourites, and the ones I don’t get to either play or run much any more, if at all these days, but which I hold close to my flinty, obsidian heart.

So why did I single out Traveller?

Because it was my first roleplaying game.

I bought my first LBBs (Little Black Books) on a bright day in late August. I had no idea that August 29 is also Marc W Miller’s birthday.

Traveller became part of my life. I had no idea that I would be playing, running, or even writing, material relating to Traveller in 2023.

Frankly, I had no idea what I would be doing in 2023. Writing to a computer was probably not one of them. Writing a weekly blog, even more unlikely. I did not even know if I would be around in 2023.

Before I wrap up this post, I could not help but wonder what tabletop would have been like, had it been invented by somebody else. Someone other than Gygax. If Traveller had come to us in, oh, 1969, during the Summer of Love, for instance, just after Neil Armstrong had spoken the first words uttered by a human on the Moon, and we’d just had three seasons of Star Trek, and Patrick Troughton was Who’ing it here in the UK, and Woodstock was a thing, and before Altamont destroyed that rosy glow.

Imagine a Traveller core rulebook predicated, not on combat, weapons, and the military life, but on conflict resolution through dialogue, and investigation a la Columbo, and the discovery of mysteries.

Traveller came to the world in the late 1970s. We weren’t generally au fait with Einstein’s General and Special Theories of Relativity. We did not know a lot about pulsars, quasars, supernovas. We knew nothing about quarks, quantum mechanics, black holes, and supernovas. Remember - at the time of Traveller, astronomical terminology was not mainstream. The occasional TV show would talk about “black suns” and “black stars,” but “black hole” was a null word to most.

People can nowadays Google about novas and supernovas, pulsars, neutron stars, white dwarfs, degenerate matter, Cepheid variables, the composition of asteroids and comets, the Oort Cloud, the Kuiper Belt, and they can learn from the internet almost as much as out astronomers and cosmologists were beginning to learn back then.

Plus also, you can dig up knowledge about modern cosmological mysteries which the scientists of the day could not even have dreamed about - The Bootes Void; The Great Attractor; dark matter; dark energy; the Higgs boson.

Imagine a science fiction tabletop like Traveller, which focuses on people who seek out these cosmological mysteries, rather than military science fiction. Or a science fiction tabletop which actually inserts real world diplomatic procedural knowledge, tradecraft knowledge, and investigative procedures into a core rulebook, allowing the players to experience a world of wonders, subtlety, and secrets.

Since Cosmos came out, I have had dreams of waking up on strange, abandoned or deserted worlds, some of which are possibly dying slowly, and looking up past ancient ruins at the night sky and seeing a vast, swirling galaxy - and thinking “Somewhere in there is my home.”

That’s why Traveller is my favourite tabletop. It’s my first tabletop, and so far it is the only tabletop which allows my characters to live out my strangest Galactic-seeking-home-where-I-belong dreams.

Bye Bye RPGaDay 2023

This is my last RPGaDay 2023 post. It’s been a long journey, and the first time I have ever been able to complete a full cycle.

I’m not going to compare this to the first RPGaDay. I first tried doing this thing back in 2017. I never finished it. And most years between 2017 and this year, I either forgot that it existed, or I realised it was happening until mid August.

I don’t know if I’ll be doing RPGaDay 2024. I might be involved in doing something else. I think someone said something about a convention taking place next year up in Glasgow - a Worldcon - and next year, assuming I am still here and still with my loved ones, I might be focusing my attention on prepping for that event.

But who knows?

In any case, this was fun. See you next week for my regular scheduled posts.

I might be writing them up on Thursday and scheduling them for the weekend. I’ve got blogs which I update on Saturdays and Sundays: I might look at rescheduling these regular weekly posts to come out at the same time: 10pm on Sunday, on all platforms - BRP Central (monthly), Books of Robert Greene (tumblr), The Spiral Room (Wordpress), and here.