It’s coming up on a month since I first hinted at the Uthe Subsector Tour, and I feel like twice a week I’ve had to explain why this awesome post I really want to write isn’t here yet. In today’s article, I’d like to explain what I intended to deliver, why it’s so much more difficult than I thought, and how I’m changing my workflow to make this difficult dream a reality.
I intend for my subsector tour series to introduce the worlds of a subsector in enough detail for the reader to understand the character and identity of the places being described. The setting overview is meant to be an introduction to the major forces at play, but the subsector guide is where the bulk of information for players on individual worlds will go. Presenting worlds totally individually would be disingenuous since one of Traveller’s core themes is politics between world states, so while I may try my hand at a few modules set on individual worlds, I want to put a lot of what an experienced TTRPG player needs to run a game in this setting in subsector-level guides. That means that each world needs to have, at the bare minimum, an IPA representation of its name, a description of where it lies both in the subsector and relevant to the boundaries of any nearby polities, an explanation of its UWP (Universal World Profile, a code Traveller assigns every planet to describe its physical and societal situation), any errata made to that information for Milieu XX16, a recap of that world’s official lore if it has any, and an overview of what the society on that planet is like and how it fits into the greater astropolitics of the area. This final part is the most challenging, since often it has to be derived almost from scratch. Depending on the world, this can be easy, or take several revisions or require me to go back and make errata. I’d also like to clean up some maps of the area to display at-a-glance information like tech level and trade routes.
Uthe subsector, after the changes I’ve made to the layout of the Coreward Setting, comprises thirty worlds. That’s quite a lot–with world profiles often taking a thousand words or more, just this one subsector tour could easily be novel length. While that excites and inspires me in terms of the project I’ve set out for myself, it’s also a little more than I can tackle in a week. By my count, I’ve already written about eight thousand words on the topic in the past month, on a total of eight worlds in coretrailing Uthe subsector. That’s not bad, but it could be a lot better, so I’d like to highlight some aspects slowing down the process.
Contradictory and Absent Data
With Traveller having existed for nearly fifty years, it’s only natural for its setting information to be scattered widely over many sourcebooks. When I do my research on a world, if it has a wiki entry, I have to find all of the sources used to put it together, some of which are out of print and difficult to obtain legitimately. For example, I recently purchased what appears to be the only digital copy of a sourcebook which was out of print with the few remaining physical copies retailing for over $50. Often there is no more than three paragraphs of information on a world, all in different works which copy each other gratuitously while making minimal changes between editions. These tend to be more cursory nods at the idea of a guide to the area than complete explanations, as well. Many worlds in Uthe simply don’t have any canon information on them at all beyond the UWP either. I predict that the Spinward Marches half of the Coreward Setting will be somewhat less frustrating in this regard, but not by any chance free of this trouble.
A Need for Errata
Since much of this setting was established in the 70s by writers with a backwards view of social justice throwing clattering handfuls of dice and shrugging at the results, there’s always the question of what can be worked with and what should be changed. For example, several worlds in Uthe have names that can be mispronounced as various slurs. While I’d love to expect my audience to consist entirely of mature adults whose understanding of the IPA is matched only by their conscientious refusal to find humor in the suffering of marginalized peoples, realistically, I’ve seen enough people butcher word-initial /ŋ/ in conwords and laugh at the fact that they’ve just said the n word that I am no longer taking chances. But renaming a world from scratch is not necessarily a light undertaking, and often I struggle with whether I should keep any aspect of the original name and how.
And while a name is a piece of set dressing, a confusing aspect of the UWP is even harder to update. (Seriously, how are so many worlds which can’t construct orbital spaceships maintaining all these fancy orbital highports?) The tech level update I devised helps, but it isn’t a complete fix. More TL 15 worlds need to be seeded into the setting for it to work, which means deciding which worlds should be bumped up and, in some cases, overhauling worlds to redesign them to suit their surroundings. It’s always a tough decision, because I do care about staying true to canon where it’s reasonable to do so, so I try to pick the smallest change that can accomplish what I want it to. It’s a process that takes a lot of thought for what ends up looking like a tiny tweak–it’s a truism that game designers are like stage hands in that, if we do our work right, we’ll be invisible.
The Work is Never Done
Part of creating a vibrant and interconnected setting is that you can never truly put away a world profile once it’s finished. Usually when I explain a world for the first time, I put in some guesses as to how it interacts with other nearby worlds, but I still have to come back after I flesh those worlds out to bring the information up-to-date. Even if I make a big change several worlds away, as long as there’s a trade route connecting the two worlds, I still have to make sure there isn’t an issue that crops up because of the change in the setting. When I go back to make a change this way, I also have to always check that it doesn’t need to have a ripple effect on nearby worlds. On top of that, I’m often receiving feedback from my amazing beta readers, so I might make changes based on that and end up with ripple effects that way. I like this method because it creates a world that feels alive and complex, but it certainly isn’t trivial to work this way.
Working Without a Map
Since I originally thought this project would take only a week, I never made a plan for what parts of the work I would do in which order. Since I’m working through executive dysfunction, this can often lead to wasted time when I don’t know what to do next. Totally pivoting into designing a new world can throw me badly off-course and lead to me getting stuck. I also lost some important map work to a computer crash and haven’t known quite when to work on redoing it.
Personal Issues
I really don’t want to belabor this point; I know how considering personal factors can come off as making excuses and I have no interest in becoming just another game designer who never has anything but a sob story for their patrons. Still, I’d be remiss to pretend that I’m a machine who can devote sixteen hours a day to this project. Since I started this blog, I’ve found work training large language models, which means I can’t pour all of my waking hours into game design until I find work in the industry. I’ve cut back my posting schedule to my two favorite series in order to hopefully turn the hours I do have for this work into regular posting, but it’s still not always easy, especially since I’ve been ill lately. I also face the dilemma here that this is not a political blog (not that it is an apolitical blog, but it is not a blog about politics) and I feel uncomfortable pulling attention away from vital unfolding political topics to talk about fifty year old racist science fiction, even if I am working towards social justice of my own as I do so.
What Needs to Change
I’m making a few changes to my workflow here to hopefully get more awesome work into your hands over the next few weeks. First, and most importantly, I plan to split the Uthe subsector tour into several posts to make the posts more digestible and get them to my readers faster. My initial plan is to split this based on trade route, with worlds in a particular trading network in the same post, but I’m open to feedback about the idea, and could very much see splitting them by polity or astrographic location. There will still be, for posterity and ease of searching, a post which has all of the information, but this will come out after all of the smaller posts are finished. Second, I will be making a schedule to direct my work on this project and on posts on other topics that can be posted if a tour segment isn’t ready on a given Tuesday. Connected to this, I also want to move some of the information on UWP and other general Traveller topics out of the world profiles and into posts of their own. Last, I want to take a step away from deciding ahead of time what I’ll post each week. I feel like it’s creating a cycle where I guess incorrectly what will be ready a week ahead of time, make a promise, and then have to apologize to my readers for not living up to my expectations. I don’t think it’s a healthy or fun dynamic for me or for you guys, so I want to work to change that.
So on that note, I’ll see you next week, dear Reader, for more Traveller Tuesday–wherever it takes us!