Indeed do many things come to pass

Posted by Arthur

https://refereeingandreflection.wordpress.com/2026/05/05/the-fifty-year-mayday-this-is-free-trader-beowulf/

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Shannon Appelcline has cultivated a bit of a career as an RPG historian, producing material which is less academic than Jon Peterson’s Playing At the World, The Elusive Shift, or Game Wizards whilst casting a wider net than Ben Riggs’ Slaying the Dragon. His magnum opus is the Designers & Dragons series, whose core release constitutes a bunch of potted histories of different game companies, arranged by the year they entered the RPG industry; I reviewed the four-volume edition here a while back.

As well as looking to push the series forwards with a volume on companies of the 2010s and a collection of “lost histories” of companies that didn’t make the cut on the first go-around, Appelcline has branched out into a number of side projects under the wider banner. One of these is This Is Free Trader Beowulf from 2024. Taking its name from the iconic mayday message that graced the original Traveller boxed set nearly fifty years ago in 1977 (sorry, gang, I think the Beowulf is toast), this is a “system history” of the Traveller RPG – a journey through the game’s publication history from that iconic collection of three little black books through to Mongoose’s latest efforts.

In fact, the book was put out from Mongoose – meaning that Appelcline is in something of a “court historian” role here where he might not necessarily be able to be as critical of Mongoose as he is of some parties. Ken Whitman’s bungling of both his responsibilities at Imperium Games during the T4 era and later his botched Kickstarter for a Traveller television pilot does feature here, and whilst Appelcline keeps things as civil as you can, it’s pretty hard to lay out the bare facts of what happened in those situations and not have it turn into a character assassination on Whitman.

Then again, I’m not sure Mongoose needs a heavy roasting from a game historian at this point in time. Despite my initial objections to how Mongoose trimmed down their second edition (later mollified when their revision to the core rules put the starship creation rules back in and demonstrated impressive improvements in presentation and editing), it’s hard to argue that Mongoose isn’t one of the most successful custodians the game has ever had.

It’s now around 18 years since they took it on – which means we’re rapidly approaching the point when Traveller has been with Mongoose for longer than it was ever with GDW, and the expansive second edition product line is proof positive that they actually pulled off the trick of doing a major edition turnover for Traveller without the new edition disintegrating in a morass of fan backlash and runaway errata – a trick GDW never managed to pull off. If Mongoose want to put out an officially-sanctioned history which paints them as the heroes who saved the game line, eh, I’m willing to say they’ve earned it.

Presented in a coffee table-friendly format, this manages to include lots of helpful diagrams, illustrations, citations, and product checklists without skimping on the text. The story told here is expansive, taking in not just the core publishers (GDW, Imperium Games, Far Future Enterprises and Mongoose) but also the extended family of third party licensees that have produced material for the game over the years. (Recall that Mongoose was such a licensee, albeit one of particularly great importance, until recently – now Marc Miller has bequeathed the rights of the game to them, whilst retaining a lifelong right to produce his own material, specifically to make sure the rights to Traveller don’t fall into a legal black hole in the event of his death.)

This coverage is not total; there’s a brief mention of early foreign-language licensees, but otherwise the book restricts itself to English-language Traveller material, the Anglosphere-centric approach being a recurring shortcoming of Designers & Dragons (though any such project helmed by one individual is going to face constraints of this sort unless they are so polyglot as to be equally conversant with every language a particular game has been translated into).

Within that limitation, however, the range is truly impressive. There’s some licensees that you absolutely couldn’t do a history like this without featuring extensively; I knew that DGP was closely involved in the development of MegaTraveller, for instance, but until I read this I hadn’t realised just how intimately intertwined they were with the history of Traveller at a time when GDW were keen to outsource as much work on the game as possible because their main decision-makers were more interested in their wargame output and newer RPG products like Twilight: 2000.

Other licensees I’d regard as being truly essential to the story here include Steve Jackson Games – there were a ton of attempts to adapt the Traveller setting to other systems during the “long dark” between the collapse of Imperium Games and T4 and the rise of Mongoose’s back-to-basics take on the game, but GURPS Traveller was far and away the most important and successful, and Appelcline is correct to regard it as critical to maintaining interest in Charted Space during that period. I’d been tangentially aware of BITS (British Isles Traveller Support) and their cheap, cheerful, and high-value “little white book” supplements, but I hadn’t realised how important they’d become to trying to keep T4 alive when the game line was badly behind schedule and hurting for designers to write material.

Although FASA never quite became as central to Traveller as any of those licensees, I suspect anyone attempting a history of this sort would bother to profile them anyway, because of all the companies which were specifically founded off the back of doing third-party Traveller support, theirs ended up being the biggest success story – initially when they put out the first really successful Star Trek RPG, then when they came up with influential properties of their own like Battletech, Shadowrun, and Earthdawn.

Appelcline covers all of these and way more besides, getting deep into the weeds to shine a light on even the most obscure corners of the Anglophone Traveller landscape – some of which I had heard of (like the prolific output of the Keith brothers, whose material burst the confines of GDW and ended up being the basis of a morass of third-party releases) to true obscurities. Beyond that, Appelcline delves into the fandom itself, with a particular emphasis on endeavours like the History of the Imperium Working Group that ended up making their own impact on the game line itself, along with wholly independent forks from Traveller.

In particular – and here’s where it’s a classy move on the part of both Appelcline himself and Mongoose as the publishers – there’s a nice section on the Cepheus system designed as an open Traveller clone and its Clement Sector setting, offering a genuinely sympathetic profile of a fan-driven endeavour which, by any reasonable measure, is directly competing with Mongoose’s official rules. (Of course, this also gives Appelcline a chance to say nice things about how Mongoose responded to Wizards of the Coast’s bungled attempt to tweak the OGL – an utter PR disaster which for a while caused consternation among OGL-using projects which didn’t use Wizards-derived game systems in the slightest, as was the case with Cepheus and other projects relying on the SRD Mongoose put out for their first edition of Traveller.)

If I had one criticism of the book, it’s that Appelcline is a bit too quick to ascribe the early 1980s downturn in the RPG industry in general and Traveller in particular to the Satanic Panic. Jon Peterson’s Game Wizards has outlined how there were compelling factors affecting Dungeons & Dragons over the same time – both a broader economic recession and internal issues within TSR – which had nothing to do with the Satanic Panic, and which offer a much more compelling explanation for the sales downturn of the era than BADD and its ilk; generally speaking in the English-language industry, bad times for Dungeons & Dragons coincides with bad times for the industry as a whole, especially if those bad times are due to broader factors which will also affect the game’s competitors (like, say, a recession).

Moreover, Appelcline is unable to identify even one major incident of a Satanic Panic moral panic outbreak targeting Traveller specifically, or even significantly including it as collateral damage. This, I think, shows a misunderstanding of how this sort of moral panic work. I admit that my evidence here is only anecdotal, but I am aware of multiple people who have attested that when their parents got swept up in moral panics around RPGs, it was specifically Dungeons & Dragons which was the target of it – other RPGs were largely untouched, but Dungeons & Dragons had got a reputation as the Devil Game and consequently had to carry the can.

Many’s the gamer who managed to continue their association with the hobby simply by choosing a different game; one of my oldest and dearest friends even got around parental objections by simply playing Advanced Fighting Fantasy, a game with similar themes, an often even grimmer aesthetic than the one TSR was pushing at the time, and which also had evangelical objections to it – but those were more obscure, didn’t cut through, and according to Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone generally increased sales.

If Advanced Fighting Fantasy could evade a censorious eye through the simple, brilliant strategy of, er, not being called Dungeons & Dragons despite being about essentially the same sort of stuff, surely Traveller would have an easier ride than it? It’s not called Dungeons & Dragons, it isn’t presented like Dungeons & Dragons, it isn’t about the same subject matter. Sure, some hyper-conservative parents might object to the idea that space is real and science is not a lie, but we’re now dealing with people so extreme that they’d object to any book their child bought that wasn’t a Bible or a trite restatement of their sect’s favourite bits of the Bible.

Sorry, Shannon, I’m not buying that bit – Peterson has more than adequately shown that the industry leader’s problems were the making of far bigger forces than a transient moral panic which probably inspired as many sales as it drove away if not more, and if you’re going to accuse the Satanic Panic of slamming the brakes on Traveller‘s growth, you’re going to need more than anecdotes about fundamentalists going after… (checks notes)… an entirely different game, put out by an entirely different publisher.

Beyond this shortcoming, however, Appelcline’s grasp of the wider industry is strong, and regular “View From the Industry” sidebars offer tasters of what was going on in the wider field as Traveller faced significant turning points in its history – a useful way to consider the context these changes took place in.

Appelcline also makes a compelling case that the infamous Traveller: The New Era might have actually ended up being a success despite the extent to which it split the fanbase (a controversy he documents extensively), had it not been facing further headwinds as a result of GDW being distracted and bogged down by other matters like the Dangerous Journeys lawsuit from TSR, their brief foray into current affairs factbooks which initially seemed like a goldmine before turning into a bit of a business disaster, and a disastrous repeat of the sort of widespread errata problems which had previously poleaxed the debut of MegaTraveller.

Although Appelcline acknowledges that RPG editions which make sweeping changes to both the setting and system of an existing game have a bad track record, he argues that changing the Traveller: The New Era system to the GDW house system and the major setting adjustments were both done with genuinely useful motivations in mind. By this point, Appelcline has demonstrated that how the outsourcing during the MegaTraveller era left GDW in a spot where they were short on in-house familiarity with the system – the use of a house system is a tempting solution to such a problem. As for the setting changes, Appelcline outlines how these were intended to make the setting a bit more approachable to newcomers by brushing aside a lot of the accumulated detritus and advancing the timeline to a point which could be taken as a fresh start.

There’s something to this idea: a major problem with RPGs as a commercial prospect is that once you sell a core rulebook to someone, unless the game is shockingly incomplete they can essentially walk away and play forever with the old books as soon as they decide they no longer want to keep up with what you are doing, and if you are toying with the idea of a new edition it’s probably because your core book sales are in enough of a downturn that you don’t expect to reach many new audience members with the existing offering.

Unless you are satisfied with constantly catering to a dwindling audience of old hands, at some point you’re going to need to bring in new blood, and a new core book is about as fresh a jumping-on point as exists; if you want to significantly improve sales from where they currently are, there’s an impetus there to take risks and make changes in the hope of attracting a new audience and accepting that some of your old audience isn’t going to come along for the ride, hoping that the new recruits will outweigh the dropouts.

That’s all very well – but there’s two significant issues with this approach, both of which Traveller: The New Era seems to have fallen into (both on the evidence here and my own experience in the 1990s). Firstly, it undervalues the old guard, who under the right circumstances can be the absolute best sales force your game can want. Ultimately, unless someone becomes an avid collector for the sake of collecting, people will tend to want to make use of the games they buy, and the more active the play community around an RPG is, the easier it is to do that – Ryan Dancey leveraged these network effects expertly to reassert D&D‘s position as top dog back when 3rd Edition launched. Sure, someone who is introduced to Traveller via an existing group may not have paid you a penny – but if they get hooked, they’ll probably become a customer sooner or later, and even if they don’t they still build that network of play and might make a loyal customer of the next person they recruit.

On the other hand, if a significant chunk of a fanbase feels that a game has abruptly decided to abandon them as customers, it’s naive in the extreme to expect them to slink away quietly – especially a fanbase as actively communicative as the Traveller one, which embraced e-mail lists and newsgroups and whatnot rapidly. If people see a fanbase which is in the middle of an edition war, then no matter how good the edition being fought over is that still looks like an unappealing scene people don’t necessarily want to get involved in.

The “radical shifts to win a whole new audience” approach is also predicated on the assumption that somewhere out there that new audience exists in sufficient numbers to justify the gamble. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t – but we can do a little thought exercise to consider where such new audiences may be found, and it doesn’t bode well for the “let’s totally change the system and radically transform the setting” approach. Who are the people who actually make up this potential new audience, and how would the Traveller: The New Era strategy actually land with them?

• People who have never heard of your game. That sounds like a reason for a new marketing strategy, not a new edition. Especially if you are an industry leader like Traveller, putting out a radically reconfigured game that is advertised in essentially the same channels as your existing game seems unlikely to reach anyone who wasn’t already aware of the previous edition. Sure, a shiny new core rulebook can be appealing if you’re about to launch a new strategy through new avenues of promotion – but you can do that just as easily with a gentler, “evolutionary not revolutionary” update to the core book without alienating the old fans. If it’s new to these potential customers, they won’t know how different it is to what came before in the first place. (They could just have easily have been reached with an all-new game, come to think of it.)
  
• People who have heard of your game, liked the idea of the setting, but were put off by the system. You ruined it for a lot of these people by changing the setting – they wanted to play in the cool setting they heard about before, not a different setting. Maybe they will find the new system meets their complaints and they find the transformed setting intriguing enough to have a go with anyway, but you could have snagged them just as easily with a brand new game which happened to match their system tastes in that case. Some of these people could be reached just as easily with a new game, others might have been happy with a new edition which made evolutionary changes to the system which alleviated the problems they previously had with it.
  
• People who have heard of your game, find the system interesting, but were put off by the setting. You ruined for more or less all of these people by abandoning the system they cared about in the first place. Maybe – maybe – they’ll like your new system too, and the changes you made to the setting will address their objections, but if they already decided the setting was a big pile of arse, why would they look into the revised version of it deep enough to change their mind now? Some of these people could be reached just as easily with a new game, others might have been happy with a new edition which made evolutionary changes to the setting which alleviated the problems they previously had with it.
  
• People who have heard of your game, dislike the system, and dislike the setting. Maybe a few of these people will give this game named after a game they have outright rejected a chance, but it seems more likely that they’ll hear the name and switch off instantly. These could have been reached just as easily with a new game – more so, because they’ll associate the title of your game with all the stuff they disliked about old versions.
  
• People who have heard of your game, are interested in the system, like the idea of the setting, but find the current core offering too intimidating or impenetrable. These people want an easier onramp to your game as it currently exists, not a totally different game that’s been Ship of Theseus’d to the point where it only shares a name with the previous edition. This is a compelling case for an evolutionary update of the core rules to make them more accessible, increase their clarity, and make them overall more attractively presented, not a total rethink.
  
• People who have heard of your game, are interested in the system, like the idea of a setting, but would greatly prefer to be introduced to it by existing players rather than trying to figure it out all by themselves. Changing editions, regardless of the strategy you use, will do nothing for these people – these folk need outreach from the existing fanbase or a proactive demonstration game or organised play network.

Taken as a whole, the above analysis suggests that what RPG companies really ought to be doing to expand their customer base is a) producing evolutionary-not-revolutionary updates to existing games which address significant sticking points and/or ensure the game keeps looking fresh and vibrant, b) making entirely new games to capture audiences disinterested in their old games, c) promoting organised play to leverage the power of the existing fanbase rather than seeing it as a burden to be jettisoned, and d) exploring new promotional routes to raise awareness of their games through hitherto-unexplored avenues. Putting out a game under the old title whilst totally changing the system and radically reshaping the setting doesn’t seem to appeal to anyone who wouldn’t be just as happy with a basically new game, and the blowback from such an approach can be offputting both to the old guard and previously interested potential new customers.

Of course, none of that is cheap or easy – but I would argue that any publisher who can’t afford to explore at least one of those options (preferably several, ideally all) almost certainly can’t afford the massive roll of the dice that’s involved in a Traveller: The New Era approach.

But hey, what do I know? Thanks to This is Free Trader Beowulf, the answer to that is a firm “more than I did before”. This comes highly recommended to all Traveller fans, as well as those interested in RPG industry history more generally. Traveller really is one of the few games outside of D&D which could sustain a history like this – too many other candidates have either not existed for long enough to generate the wealth of material to cover, have had too uneventful and straightforward a publishing history in comparison, or have undergone long periods of inactivity where, in contrast to the “long night” era of Traveller, there really wasn’t much of anything happening other than some stray fan activity here and there. Perhaps a book taking in the Basic Roleplaying family as a whole – or a Call of Cthulhu system history which took in all of the foreign-language markets to a similar level of depth – might qualify, but I can think of precious few others. As it stands, This is Free Trader Beowulf is a rather unique effort, and doubly worth it because of that.

https://refereeingandreflection.wordpress.com/2026/05/05/the-fifty-year-mayday-this-is-free-trader-beowulf/

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