Hello and welcome to this Track of Words, where today I’m pleased to welcome back the always-excellent David Guymer with a fantastic guest post talking about something of a new venture for him! Chances are you’re familiar with David’s writing from his many Black Library stories, or his great work with Aconyte Books, but now he’s venturing into new SF territory with a series of short stories set in the world of Mongoose Publishing’s Traveller. Whether you’re a long-time Traveller fan or this is the first you’ve heard of it, David’s got you covered with this guest post – so read on to find out how this new venture came to be, and what you can expect from this new short story series, Sindal Sunrise.
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David Guymer: This may come as a shock to regular readers at Track of Words, but (whisper it now) I am a little bit of a geek. Star Trek: the Next Generation was my formative TV show. The original Baldur’s Gate was the first game to demand repeat playthroughs of every conceivable class/race/party interaction combination. I cut my hobby teeth on Space Crusade and Warhammer Fantasy Battles, but soon made the natural sideways move into Warhammer Quest, the venerable 1st edition of WFRP and World of Darkness. I was the proud owner of a suite of hardback source books on the Forgotten even though I never (and have still never) actually played Dungeons and Dragons.
I am, you might also say, a roleplayer.
In spite of all this, I’d actually never heard of Traveller when the opportunity to write for it came my way (an unlikely sequence of events beginning with my learned fellow scribe Alec Worley persuading me to give LinkedIn another whirl). I was surprised to learn that it was a contemporary of Dungeons and Dragons, its first edition being published by Games Designers Workshop (no relation) in 1977, and that it was the inspiration behind Bethesda’s Starfield game.
It even has a fan wiki to organise the enormous amount of in-universe lore – a sure sign of a healthy game system.
So tell me about Traveller already!
I’m glad you asked…
“Traveller is a science fiction roleplaying game of the far future… If you have a favourite science fiction film or TV show, Traveller will be able to replicate it for you, bringing you best-loved futuristic moments to life.”
-Traveller Core Rulebook
In much the same way that Dungeons and Dragons can represent any fantasy environment, but 90% of players set their adventures in Faerûn, the major narrative setting in Traveller is Charted Space
“Humanity has gone to the stars and found them crowded with other forms of life and sentient species, and science and technology have advanced vastly on the present day – but the essential nature of humanity is unchanged.”
-Traveller Core Rulebook
The predominant power in Charted Space is the Third Imperium (and yes, coming from a Games Workshop background, I do sometimes get confused), a powerful but less multi-species coalition based on mercantile interests and mutual self-defence. It exists in a state of perpetual cold (and sometimes hot) war with two lesser but not-insignificant human polities: the psychic Zhodani Consulate and the authoritarian, Starship Troopers-esque, Solomani Confederation. In terms of alien powers, we have the expansionist Aslan Hierate, the militantly herbivorous (and gigantic) K’Kree, the piratical Vargr, and the altruistic but manipulative Hivers. All have source books and rules. All are roleplayable if the player’s up to the challenge. And that’s just the co-called Major Races.
But Charted Space is vast. There is no faster-than-light communication and travel, compared to something like Star Trek, is slow. The Imperium leaves its worlds to chart their own courses, provided they don’t rock the free trade boat too much. Each one has a unique culture, form of government, and level of technology, which makes for an endlessly refreshing setting in which to explore themes and tell stories.
As a system, Traveller is granular and proud of it, trusting you to calculate your journey times, adjust the Credit cost of your spacecraft’s life support when you take on a passenger, or notice that there’s a box on your character sheet to track radiation exposure. Hey, space is dangerous. It’s a setting where you can famously die during character creation. You’ll either love that depth of detail or you won’t, and you’ll probably know exactly which camp you belong to even as you read this.
I love it.
Deal with it, nerds! There’s a cheat’s option further down the page, but I love that this is a thing.
One of my earliest projects for Traveller’s current publisher, Mongoose, involved designing an android bounty hunter NPC. There’s a flow chart for doing exactly this in the Robot Handbook, but it still made my brain hurt. And yet I’ve never felt such satisfaction at a job well done!
How the game managed to so completely pass me by I don’t know, because teenage roleplayer me (much like forty-one-year-old lapsed wargamer me) is absolutely its target audience.
Write what you (don’t) know
Learning a huge, fifty-year-old setting from scratch is, let me tell you up front, no mean feat. There are lots of people who can write, but there aren’t nearly as many who can write Warhammer. When people read tie-in fiction, they of course want to be entertained by a good story, but more than that (in my opinion at least), they want to be told something new and exciting about the universe they love. How can you, as a writer, do that if you don’t know that universe? How do you even start thinking about ideas to pitch?
Spoiler: you don’t.
I had a similar experience with Dark Avengers: The Patriot List in that I’d never read a Marvel comic before, but in that case I did at least have a genuine familiarity with the setting from computer games, 90s cartoons, and the MCU. Imagine trying to research the Marvel Multiverse if you didn’t know who the Hulk was and had never heard of the X-Men.
I’m sorry to say there’s no shortcut.
It involves reading. Lots and lots of reading.
Just to get me started…
As a PhD student, the trick I was taught to reading quickly whilst holding onto that information was to take notes. It doesn’t even matter if you never intend to look at those notes again. The simple act of doing it keeps your intention from wandering off. I was also taught to track the text with the bottom of the pen as I read – so having physical copies really does help.
I absorbed a lot of what you might call facts from those source books, and even produced a fair bit of background material and playable adventures as I went, but I didn’t really get the setting until I started reading some of Charted Space’s already-published fiction.
If you’re reading this and are interested in delving deeper into Charted Space, then here’s an excellent taster menu to get you started:
From my Goodreads library
Shadow of the Storm is a shortish novel that I can’t recommend highly enough. Set on an experimental Solomani warship, it’s a cracking bit of military sci-fi, especially if you’re big on naval action.
Wet Work and Widowed (both, coincidentally, by Chris A Jackson) are S-tier short stories which do what the very best sci-fi stories always do – ask big questions and make you think about the answers. Wet Work features a mega-corporate operative sent to commit genocide on a planet where the human population is benevolently ruled by a race of telepathic alien whales, asking difficult questions along the way about the nature of happiness and who really has free will. The central character of Widowed is a biomechanical peacekeeper of some kind (it’s never totally explained) who finds herself abruptly cut off from her internet of ‘sisters’ and forced to survive on her own wits. Again, it’s superb stuff.
The King is Dead is an example of world-building done right. It takes you on a whistlestop tour of several worlds while the protagonist scours the nearby stars for the heir to his now-vacant throne, delving deep into the culture of Drinax, which is one of the more important worlds in the Traveller game. If you’re looking for the abridged guide to Charted Space, then this is the story for you.
Speaking of fiction
Did I mention that I’ve just written some fiction for Traveller?
I didn’t?
Well, I have!
There have been a few stories set in Charted Space, over and above those I alluded to earlier. We’re not talking Black Library volumes but, you know, some. A few have had connective tissue in the shape of a particular region of space or a moment in time, but most have been standalone stories fleshing out their given corner of Charted Space. There hasn’t, at least to my knowledge, been a series of stories attempting to represent the typical Traveller experience; i.e., a foursome of freshly rolled Travellers hitting the universe with inferior wargear and a bargain bin starship.
This was the premise for Sindal Sunrise, a series of short stories following the adventures of disinherited former playwright Ethin Aldan, down-on-her-luck Aslan trader Suyosa, med-school dropout Anjali Pranand, and their enigmatic Marzian mechanic, Zblzk.
Now, regular readers will know that out-of-their-depth, less than reliable narrators, who are just ever so slightly less capable than they think they are, is sort of my milieu. There’s a bit of my Felix Jaeger in Ethin, a bit of my Norman Osborn and Hamilcar Bear-Eater. He’s wealthy, entitled, expensively educated, he’s got an outfit that costs more than his ship, but it’s also his first time off-world and he’s kind of just keeping up appearances and trying to not die while Suyosa strong-arms him into increasingly dangerous money-making schemes.
While Traveller, the game, absolutely allows for combat-heavy encounters, it doesn’t have to, and having written more than my share of mighty battles, it’s what most attracted me to the setting. The first written adventure that I read, High and Dry, doesn’t even feature an enemy at all – unless you’re counting the volcano whose geological survey you have to complete before your borrowed scout ship gets swallowed by lava, that is. As a science nerd and a Trekkie first, it’s the themes of exploration and discovery and ‘seeking out new life and new civilisations’ that really speak to me.
It’s even moved me to dust off my roleplaying gloves and persuade my gaming group to peel themselves off Starfield and give Traveller a go with me. I haven’t roleplayed, much less GMd, since high school (a promotional session of KeyForge: Secrets of the Crucible notwithstanding) so I’m sure nothing could go wrong.
And if all this sounds as exciting to you as it has to me, then why not check out The Art of a Warrior, the first in what I hope to be many, many Sindal Sunrise stories. The second instalment, Night of the Dragon, has already been written and might well be out by the time this article goes live and I’m already plotting the third.*
I still haven’t read through that entire pile of course (to say nothing of my digital Traveller folder), but as my Travellers venture into new areas of Charted Space, I get to pick up the relevant book and go in with them.
Lots of reading, as I said.
Lots and lots of reading.
*If you’re worried about your next Age of Sigmar fix then don’t worry – I can’t talk about anything specifically yet, but I’ve still got you covered
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David Guymer is a freelance author, PhD in molecular microbiology (which still comes in more handy than you might think), and tabletop warlord based in the Yorkshire East Riding. He has written for Black Library, Marvel, Aconyte Books, Asmodee, Mantic Games, Cubicle 7, Creative Assembly, and Mongoose Publishing.
For more information, follow David on Twitter @WarlordGuymer.
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I’m sure you’ll join me in saying a massive thank you to David for taking the time to write this great guest post! Having read this I’m very interested indeed to check out David’s Sindal Sunrise stories – I’m hoping to read The Art of a Warrior very soon, so keep an eye out for more on that in due course!
See also: all of the David Guymer reviews and interviews on Track of Words
The Art of a Warrior is available now from Mongoose Publishing – order your copy via DriveThruRPG!
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