Just got the news via Tenkar’s Tavern that Loren Wiseman has passed away.
Wiseman is mostly significant to gamers as part of the old GDW team, where he co-designed games like Twilight: 2000 (which has rather fallen out of fashion but was the top post-apocalyptic RPG back in its prime) and En Garde! (a very, very early post-D&D RPG – in fact, it’s sufficiently early that it barely resembles a recognisable RPG, though its rather mechanistic and limited rules do make it nicely suited for play-by-email purposes).
He’s mostly famed, though, as a major contributor over the years to Traveller, both during its original run at GDW and as the mastermind behind the GURPS Traveller line at Steve Jackson Games.
I’ve gone on the record before as saying that there’s probably too many official system conversions for Traveller out there, but out of all of them, GURPS Traveller was easily the best. (Indeed, I suspect its success was the main motivation behind many of the other Traveller conversions over the years – and part of me wonders whether Mongoose would have even taken a punt on Traveller had the GURPS line not kept it fresh and asserted the Third Imperium as a still-viable setting.) A large part of this came down to the excellent setting material for it – useful stuff whether you were using GURPS or one of the existing Traveller systems or some conversion of your own design.
One useful decision made was to set the GURPS line in an alternate timeline where the Rebellion that kicked off the MegaTraveller setting never happened. This did allow the GURPS line to distance itself from controversial setting changes that had divided the fanbase in the past, but it also posed the challenge of making the setting seem like a place you could have dynamic, exciting adventures in despite the rather static nature of the Imperium. At its best, the GURPS line solved that problem by providing strong emphasis on traditional flashpoints like the Solomani Rim and the Spinward Marches, along with really strong planetary writeups which remembered that each planet should in its own right provide a jumping-off point for adventure; underpinning this seems to have been an understanding that the adventure in Traveller isn’t so much in the galactic-scale macropolitics (which by its very nature is too vast and glacial for any individual adventuring party to really expect to make much of a dent on) and more on local-scale tensions.
Regardless of whether this represented Wiseman’s position all along and he’d just been overruled back in the GDW days, or a lesson painfully learned during the decline and fall of GDW, this approach to Traveller offered a refreshing clean break from the galaxy-wide revolutions and disasters that GDW had become fond of during the later phase of the line, and the GURPS line – and Wiseman – deserve a toast from all Traveller fans for that.
With a career as long as Wiseman’s, of course, GURPS Traveller only represents the tip of the iceberg. He also coauthored The Traveller Adventure – a campaign so well-regarded that Mongoose more or less reprinted it with minimal changes to update it for their version of the system rather than making extensive changes to it. And I especially want to pick out Book 0: An Introduction to Traveller as an important contribution of his (excerpts were later incorporated into Starter Traveller, a beginner’s version of Classic Traveller, and The Traveller Book, a complete-in-one-book version of the core Classic Traveller rules).
This was a Classic Traveller supplement that was originally one of the booklets you got in the Deluxe Traveller core set, and represents perhaps the most extensive “What are RPGs, and what’s the deal with this specific RPG?” piece ever written for a major game line up to that point (and for a good while afterwards at that). I particularly like the fact that it goes into fine detail about the tasks of the referee – a vitally important concept for newcomers to get their heads around – as well as providing an example of play which reads like a real session with real personalities to the players, as opposed to the rather sterile style some examples of play can be presented in. The booklet as a whole is especially worth revisiting in terms of the level it pitches the material at; it’s an excellent example of how you can present this stuff patiently and carefully to an interested audience without talking down to them or making them feel like you’re treating them like a confused child, and I would recommend a quick reread of it to anyone who’s about to undertake the task of writing a “What is roleplaying?” essay.
(In a classic example of Far Future Enterprises making business decisions that make me go “bwuh?”, they’re selling PDFs of Book 0 for $4.99. Come on, Miller – there’s no substantive system stuff in there, it’s an introductory text, give the PDF out for free to tantalise the audience.)
So, if you saw the news that Loren had died on the grapevine and weren’t aware of what he’d produced, that’s just a little cross-section there of the stuff that stood out to me. Please send kind thoughts in the direction of his friends and family.
Refereeing and Reflection 