And so began one of the greatest and most detailed adventures in SF history. It was a fictional universe, but it was not a novel. It was a game called Traveller, the brain-child of game-design legend Marc Miller. Although its original publishers—GDW–ceased to exist as a corporate entity in 1996, the game lives on, with licensed publishers creating a relatively steady stream of new products, and fans contributing daily to the growth and definition of the universe in which the tales were set.

I was fortunate enough to work on the second iteration of Traveller—Megatraveller—starting with a publication in GDW’s house magazine, Challenge, in 1987. By 1990, I was the Traveller editor for Challenge, where I ultimately published over 50 items for Traveller alone, as well as others for other GDW RPGs, including Twilight 2000 (sometimes under the pen name Karl Johnson), Dark Conspiracy, and the wonderful ultra-hard-sf RPG, 2300 AD. I also wrote Traveller products for other publishers. The complete (I think?) bibliography includes:

Assignment: Vigilante

1992

(a lot of my original material was removed from this, er . . . “dramatically” rewritten and truncated product.)

Astrogator’s Guide to the Diaspora Sector

1992

The Diaspora Sector had originally been intended as the primary site of action as the inheritors of the Imperium struggled to salvage what remained of it, in one form or another. However, the full length product that was supposed to show those first stages of hope was made moot by GDW’s “post-Marc Miller” decision to go with the Imperium-destroying Virus and New Era, instead. This slim gazetteer was all that remained of what would have been a rich, full-length successor to Hard Times.