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  • Marc Miller: Traveller is in good hands

    From lkh@21:1/5 to All on Wed Aug 28 08:35:26 2024
    Since this is already making the rounds over on Reddit, I'm taking the
    liberty to forward Marc Miller's email here:

    Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2024 16:14:04 +0000
    Subject: Upon The Occasion of the Emperor's Birthday, 2024.
    From: Citizens of the Imperium <noreply@community.forum>

    [This particular announcement comes to you as a member of COTI.]
    [By the way, the Emperor's Birthday is August 29, (or 241-2024 in the
    Imperial notation). ]

    Some years ago, fellow game designer Greg Stafford died, and I was
    impressed that his company announced almost immediately that he had
    a succession plan in place, and that his legacy and his designs would
    live on.

    His example was an inspiration to me, and I resolved to emulate him. It
    would be a terrible loss if Traveller were encumbered, or somehow
    restricted in its outreach to present and future fans.

    With that in mind, I have worked to make Traveller an asset to
    science-fiction role-players... with our user-friendly Fair Use policies,
    with the Travellers’ Aid Society programs, with the Cepheus editions
    of Traveller, and with Mongoose as a primary publisher of their edition
    of Traveller.

    Over the past several years, I have turned over more and more
    responsibilities to Mongoose, and I have collaborated actively with them
    as they work to realize the Traveller dream. Earlier this year I passed
    full ownership of Traveller to Mongoose in order to secure its future.

    With that in mind, I point out that, following the example of Greg
    Stafford, I have a succession plan in place: day-to-day decisions about
    the Traveller game system are already being made by Mongoose Publishing
    (with my co-operation and approval), and if anything should happen to me,
    they would carry on with my full knowledge and blessing.

    That doesn’t stop me from speaking my mind: expressing opinions about Traveller, writing stories and lore, and even revealing secrets about
    the universe.

    But Traveller is in good hands, now, and far into the far future.

    And I thank you for your (continuing) support for Traveller.

    Marc

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Alex Schroeder@21:1/5 to lkh on Wed Aug 28 17:16:41 2024
    lkh <lkh@dwalin.uucp> wrote:
    Since this is already making the rounds over on Reddit, I'm taking the liberty to forward Marc Miller's email here:

    And, what are your thoughts on it? I am of two minds. Mongoose has been
    good for Traveller, I think. I liked Mongoose Traveller 1st ed., which I
    ran for a bit, and I have no reason to doubt that the current Mongoose Traveller 2nd ed. is as good a system the many other Traveller editions
    out there.

    I also have my doubts regarding Mongoose's quality in terms of editing
    -- but who am I kidding, these days people are cutting corners all over
    the place and sometimes they're cutting corners in editing. It happens.
    It's the Zeitgeist. I guess in the world of quality assurance Mongoose
    wouldn't actually be all that bad because I'm assuming they fix all the
    typos in later printings. :)

    Also they based a lot of follow-up products on the Traveller system and
    what's not to like about more 2d6 systems! :D

    This at least ensures that they remain comitted to the basic idea. And
    maybe that means that the PDFs will remain around for much longer.
    That's certainly better than ending up being managed by kids or being
    sold off to the highest bidder after Miller's passing. It's not the
    greatest plan (wouldn't a real TAS be great, that had a board elected by
    the community... an association based on Swiss law, like FIFA, or the
    ICRC... anyway, that's a dream and it wouldn't be clear whether it would
    work in the long run so perhaps passing it on to Mongoose was the best
    idea) but it's a plan.

    I wonder if Mongoose has a better succession plan, though. Looking at
    State of Mongoose 2023, it seems that the whole company is owned by
    Matthew Sprange. Is he so much younger than Marc Miller? What's the long
    term plan, here? https://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/threads/state-of-the-mongoose-2023. 124344/

    Anyway. Thinking about what happens to our games when we die is a
    good idea.

    Perhaps Miller should have slapped a CC-BY-SA 4.0 or a CC0 onto the
    products he owns and said: On the day he dies, these licenses go into
    effect immediately.

    But that's not how these things go. I suspect some money changed hands
    and that's probably for Miller's best.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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