Marc Miller's email was reposted in a few places, like Usenet (oh yes, it was posted on rec.games.frp.misc!), Rob Conley's blog, and elsewhere. What are your thoughts on it?
it was posted on rec.games.frp.misc
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! 😸
This at least ensures that they remain committed 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 but it's a plan. Wouldn't a real TAS be great? An association that had a board elected by its members, 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 after all.
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?
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 I die, 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.
#Traveller #RPG