Greetings and salutations to you all. Oh what the heck, HI EVERYONE!!!
Well, I've been unable to read my mail for a couple of weeks, and BOY have
you guys been BUSY!! I had a brief scan of my accumulated mail (all 460K of
it!), and I have a few comments to make and a question.
First, the question -
One thing that's always bugged me about traveller is the fact that lots of
people (and I'm referring to people living in the traveller universe) seem
to like living in VERY inhospitable curcumstances, such as on planets with
Exotic, Corrosive and even Insidious atmospheres. I find this rather odd.
Ok, I can hear everyone saying that there's lots of valuable ores
and minerals on these worlds, which are exploited by industry. That's all
very well, and I have no problems with this. For example Heavy Metals
Amalgamated finds platinum and lathanum on a particularly nasty Insidious
planet. There's just enough to make a small mine cost-effective. So, they
send down a few tens or hundreds of people to build a small underground
mining village and live happily ever after. I can live with this - although
I dare say the employees would rather not....
What gets me is that there are several worlds in CT, MT, and TNE
which have very high populations, but type B or C atmospheres. One example
is in Path of Tears (I think its in the same subsector as the planet Lucifer)
which have a population digit of 7 and a type C atm. Lets see, that's a few
tens of millions of people living on (or in!) an absolute hell-hole of a
world (just think, Venus is bad enough and that's only a type B atm!). The
big question is.....WHY?!
Seriously, I would appreciate some kind of reasoning behind
condemning millions of people to live in a 750 atm pressure, radioactive
Hydrofluoric Acid atmosphere with oceans that corrode you if you even THINK
about them.....
And no sneaky saying that the population actually live on the
planet's moon! If they did that, then the more habitable moon should be listed
in the UPP, and not the hellhole it orbits!
Answers on an email please to ....... [email removed]
Now, a few comments before I leave you.
First, MESON HANDGUNS: scary.......
There seems to be a lot of this going about. 'I know, lets see if we
can design a realistic tactical nuclear grenade' |-). I hope people are
joking here, otherwise, I think they've missed the point with the iron-
mongery in FF&S. Of course, there are good points to this, just picture a
mob running around a building lobbing tac nuke grenades through the windows...
Maybe I'm just being too serious.....
Second, is there any plans to release any solid info on the K'kree?! I mean,
lots of people have said that the starport rules were a long time coming, but
the poor K'Kree are practically unknown!! I was really looking forward to DGP
publishing an Alien Module on K'Kree and HIvers (also largely unknown but this
at least seems about to be rectified by GDW, bless their little cottonsocks!)
as well as modules on the Zhodani and Droyne (there's ANOTHER mysterious race
for you), but they (IMHO, flame on, etc) appear to have conveniently copped
out (and let a _lot_ of people down in the process - thanks a lot, DGP...).
I'm sorry, but I would imagine that the DGP Alien Modules were fairly
universal (even non-Traveller GMs could find them very useful) - they were
very well laid out and also were good reads to boot. For DGP to say that
they're dropping an excellent Traveller line just because the New Era was
coming seems a bit daft to me....(***flame off (was that a flame?!)***).
I'm sorry, but I _had_ to get that out of my system. Anyway, back to
reality. What little info on the K'Kree that I have read (in DGP MT Journal 4)
was quite interesting, but they seem to have been largely ignored by GDW (The
K'Kree? Oh, they're just a bunch who live to Trailwards who generally have
nothing to do with the Imperium - forget about them....:-)). I do hope that
now DGP have dropped their line, GDW will start doing more books on Aliens
(I know there's an Aliens of the Rim one coming up, but that still leaves the
K'Kree, Droyne and Zhos largely uncovered.). If anyone's got any more ideas
or info on any of these races, then do drop me a line, and sorry about the
rant.....
Right that's all from me. TTFN until neaxt time and remember-
Be Pure, Be Vigilant, BEHAVE!!! (-Torquemada, Nemesis the Warlock, 2000 AD)
TTFN, Constantine