The Terran Trade Authority, Traveller, and Setting Greebles

When I was a kid, one of the big retail stores near my house (maybe Kmart?) had a bargain bin for books. I was particularly drawn to the disorganized piles of large, glossy, science fiction books. I killed a lot of time there gawking at color illustrations of starships, space battles, and weird aliens. Eventually I was able to acquire a few of these titles, which were mostly from Steven Caldwell’s Galactic Encounters series.

Caldwell would use repurposed sci-fi paintings to illustrate a classic space opera setting of his own creation. I spent an enormous amount of time reading and re-reading these books, and my two favorites were probably Aliens in Space (1979) and Worlds at War (1980).

I particularly loved that the books were all written from an in-setting perspective—for example, Aliens in Space is presented as a “real” product of the Federal Data Bureau “to provide a comprehensive service for space travelers.” Even “Steven Caldwell,” as described by the dust jackets, “joined the Federation Security Force in 2393, and quickly rose to the rank of Group 1 Battleforce Commander. During his 15 years of active service he travelled to all parts of the Federation, and was awarded the Andromeda Star for his part in the settlement of the perimeter words.”

This commitment to the in-setting perspective helped foster an immersive experience—the Federation setting felt real and deep—while also leaving open a great deal to the imagination. Because the books were written for in-setting readers, they don’t spend a lot of time providing definitions or explanations of terms or concepts. You are just dropped into this unfamiliar milieu and have to puzzle out what these things mean.

The Galactic Encounters books helped foster my interest in science fiction at a time when the genre was still a bit niche and underrepresented in popular culture. Although science fiction has now thoroughly permeated television and the movies, once upon a time a fan had to look hard for decent science fiction material. So I was a bit surprised to realize, many years later, that the Galactic Encounters series was actually a knock-off of an earlier, much more influential series written by the very same author. Steven Caldwell, it turns out, was a pseudonym for Stewart Cowley, who was the author of the Terran Trade Authority books. 

In an interesting interview, Cowley explains how the TTA series came to be:

I was working as a graphic designer when I had the idea. I was doing work with an illustration agency [that] happened to represent a new generation of brilliant artists working in the SF arena, and I was really excited about their work. The only outlet for their illustrations at the time were paperback covers, but I felt convinced more could be done with the amazing images they were producing.

I persuaded them to loan me file transparencies of art samples and had them stuck on my lightbox for a couple of weeks. I'd look at them every day, trying to think how they could be utilised. Then one day I remembered a book I'd had seen as a child. It was Jane's Fighting Ships—a survey of the world's navies—and it hit me. Spacecraft 2000-2100 AD was born. Being a designer rather than a writer, I tried to find someone to author the project but couldn't find anyone with the same vision as I had. I wanted someone who could not only create specifications for the spacecraft shown, but set them in a believeable historic context.

I was surprised to read that Cowley and many fans consider my beloved Galactic Encounters books to be inferior to the TTA books. Both series have been out-of-print for many years and tend to be fairly expensive, but recently I was able to get my mitts on a good copy of Spacecraft 2000–2100 AD (1978), which was the first and generally considered the best of the TTA line. It’s quite good, and clearly shares plenty of genetic material with the setting described in Galactic Encounters. 

But it also seems to share a lot with the Traveller RPG.

I’ve been unable to find an interview or essay that discusses any relationship between Traveller and the TTA. Certainly both TTA and Traveller draw heavily on a common space opera framework: the TTA war with Proxima, for example, has many echoes with the Traveller Interstellar Wars. Both fictional histories are pretty standard space opera fare: Earth unites to fight off a technologically superior alien invader with determination and innovation

Similarly, if Jane’s Fighting Ships influenced Cowley it obviously influenced Traveller’s supplement 9, Fighting Ships. But I have to wonder if, given the timeframe, perhaps the TTA books had a more direct influence on Traveller designers. The T4 line, for instance, certainly used a lot of Chris Foss art for its covers.

Many Traveller books are at least partially written from an in-setting perspective. Several Traveller game constructs such as the Universal Personality Profile neatly double as in-setting artifacts as well. 

One technique used effectively by both Traveller and the TTA books is what I’ll call Setting Greebles. In modeling, a greeble “is a prominent detailing added to the surface of a larger object that makes it appear more complex, and therefore more visually interesting. It usually gives the audience an impression of increased scale.” 

Think of all the little widgets and doohickies that pepper the hull of the Nostromo or an Imperial Star Destroyer. These things don’t necessarily have a function but look cool and create an illusion of complexity.

Both Traveller and the TTA books are filled with these little setting greebles—small bits of specificity salted into the text to create a sense of verisimilitude. An effective greeble might drop a particular date, or model number, or manufacturer, or world name without any explanation. And I think the more casually and confidently these greebles are presented, the better. Of course the DeVrass Generator opened the road to the stars. Of course the Sylea-class is an Imperial 100,000 ton battleship.

The beauty of a good greeble is it forces a reader to stop in the face of an unfamiliar term and imagine what it might actually denote. The old DGP book Solomani and Aslan (1991) for example, contains an illustration of human variant races that include a “Cassilldan,” an extremely tall figure in loose garb with a sword. No other details are provided and many Traveller fans have speculated about this race over the years. Where are they from? How tall are they really? Why does he have a sword?

An awful lot of Traveller canon has sprung up from writers extrapolating or interpolating details from just a handful of greebles. Sometimes these exercises produce really interesting or innovative material, but sometimes these additional details actually give us too much of a good thing. Part of the magic of a good greeble is its ambiguity: it creates the illusion of a deep and textured setting while simultaneously remaining open and undefined. We can murder this with too much explanation, like a butterfly pinned to a board.

Any published RPG setting has to navigate an inherent tension between giving too much or too little detail. A great setting book should establish what is unique and interesting about the setting and provide tools for a referee to run their own adventures. Too little detail, and the referee may have difficulty understanding the setting well enough to use it in a game: why buy a setting if you are making up everything yourself? But too much detail may overwhelm the referee and be overly constraining.

As demonstrated by TTA, setting greebles can be a highly effective technique for Traveller and other RPG settings. Good setting greebles help readers understand the milieu and instill a sense of verisimilitude—but do not restrict the referee with data dumps of canon.