The Deep and the Dark

So the big project I started last year and turned in earlier this year is finally out: The Deep and the Dark, a sourcebook for Mongoose Publishing’s Traveller RPG. The Deep and the Dark covers Reaver’s Deep and Dark Nebula sectors, a vibrant, messy, and strange area at the intersection of the Third Imperium, Aslan Hierate, and the Solomani Confederation.

I’m very happy with how this book turned out, but it has been a long, strange trip. Almost fifteen years ago an idle search for low tech worlds on the edge of the Imperium gradually morphed into a fascination with this region of Charted Space—and eventually, my very first RPG lead credit. I am an incredibly slow writer so this book was a labor of love, but I feel like I learned a lot and can finally check off a long-standing life goal.

My manuscript was so overstuffed that I had no room for any sort of dedication, but I am indebted to many, many others, starting with the incredibly prolific Keith brothers from Traveller’s Golden Age: J. Andrew Keith and William H. Keith. Along with Loren Wiseman they introduced the Aslan in Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society 7 (1981). This information was greatly expanded in Traveller Alien Module 1: Aslan (1984), which is credited to J. Andrew Keith, John Harshman, and Marc Miller. I am continually astonished that these authors were able to convey so much complexity and offer up so many gaming possibilities in just 40 short pages. All the fundamentals of the Aslan and their Hierate are right there in this little Alien Module.

The Keith Brothers also developed Reaver’s Deep sector through a series of supplements, adventures, and magazine articles published by GDW, Gamelords, FASA, and Marischal Adventures, among others. Their work on the Deep demonstrates their innate understanding of what makes for a great sandbox setting: the Deep is a wild, backward area caught between three great powers, full of mysteries, danger, and interesting places to explore. 

It’s also structured to give maximum agency to the players. The vast Third Imperium with its sector-spanning government, megacorporations, giant capital ships and megafreighters, black globes and TL15 goods can make player characters seem puny and insignificant. The Deep, in contrast, takes everything good about the Imperium and strips it down, shrinks it, and makes it more approachable for a PC. It’s a lower-tech, small ship environment that still has wild, lawless areas. The Principality of Caledon is very much a small Imperium with its own version of the familiar Army, Navy, and Scouts services.

One of the toughest tasks in working on this book was tracking down all of the various references on this sector, which are scattered over dozens of sources ranging from GDW’s Double Adventure 6: Night of Conquest (1982) to small press chapbooks and fanzines. But for the Keith brothers, it was almost always worth it: they were adventure-generating machines.

Another Classic Traveller alien module, AM 6 - Solomani (1986) by Marc Miller and John Harshman has also been a vital resource. Just as the Aslan module, Solomani does an incredible amount of worldbuilding in just 48 pages. It also manages to effectively invert the hoary sci-fi chestnut of the heroic Terran battling against a universe of hostile aliens.

One of my favorite books from the MegaTraveller era was DGP’s Solomani and Aslan: The Rimward Races (1991) by Peter G. Celella and James Holden, which was highly influential on my own Magyar campaign. They did a great job of building on top of the foundations laid by the CT Aslan and Solomani alien modules. Working with the limited data from Atlas of the Imperium (1984), Celella and Holden carefully considered how the unusual astrography of Dark Nebula would have shaped the development of the sector, and used these insights to fill in many details of the setting timeline. S&A also has many evocative line drawings of Aslan worlds by Michael Vilardi, which continue to inform my personal imagining of Aslan art and architecture.

Although I have never been a huge fan of GURPS the game system, I have always loved GURPS supplements for the superb standards of writing and editing, as well as the dedication to extensive playtesting. The extra effort usually pays off: most GURPS books are tightly written and full of gamable material even for referees using completely different systems. But my favorite part is how GURPS books thoughtfully consider the social and structural implications of various game settings.

These insights are particularly useful when it comes to the alien species of Charted Space. The GURPS Alien Races books detail how these alien cultures would actually work, and thus are a great help for players and referees trying to understand what it might be like to live in the Aslan Hierate. GURPS Traveller: Alien Races 2 (1999) includes a characteristically excellent section on the Aslan written by Andy Slack.

Slack has been enormously influential on me personally: his old White Dwarf articles on Traveller were probably my first contact with the game, and I still pull out “Backdrop of Stars” from WD 24 (Apr/May 1981) from time to time. Slack recognized the highly gamable potential of the Dark Nebula boardgame, which has some of the most evocative world names of any GDW setting. I tried to incorporate as much of this into my own history of the Dark Nebula. His GURPS work is enormously helpful for anyone trying to understand what life on an Aslan world would really be like. In a similar vein, Jon F. Zeigler’s GT Rim of Fire: The Solomani Rim Sourcebook (2000) is an outstanding resource for anyone trying to understand life inside the Solomani Confederation.

I am also indebted to Joshua Bell, who created and runs the magisterial Traveller Map website, which I’ve often described as one of fandom’s greatest contributions to any RPG. Not only is his site incredibly fun to play with, it is an invaluable reference for anyone doing research on Charted Space. If Traveller Map had existed in 2009, my search for low tech human worlds on the edge of Imperial space would have taken a couple of hours instead of weeks and months of poring over old, buggy sector data files. At Joshua’s encouragement, I fleshed out the rimward sectors of Canopus, Aldebaran, Neworld, and Langere—which became important prep for working with Reaver’s Deep and Dark Nebula.

I need to thank the ever-patient Matt Sprange of Mongoose Publishing, who was willing to take a chance and assign a big book to an unknown and untested writer. The entire experience was extremely rewarding.

Finally I am thankful for my large group of players, whose characters crew the IMV Starjammer—a Type U armed packet ship working Magyar and Dark Nebula sectors. I know they would often rather play Dungeons and Dragons and so I greatly appreciate their indulgence when I’d rather run Traveller. There definitely would not be a Deep and the Dark without these crazy guys.

Speaking of which, since I tried to cram so much stuff into that book, a lot of material ended up on the cutting room floor. I’m developing a proposal to incorporate some of that work into a new book. Working title: Clans of the Aslan. Fingers crossed!