A bizarre movie. I enjoyed it, and the weirdly calming end credits sequence. But I don’t understand what I saw in the movie.

You even directly quoted the complaint that this is built on the backs of thousands of people’s work. Without their consent, without the possibility of attribution and recognition for their work.

And then blithely ignored it, failed to address it at all.

You have demonstrated you just don’t care about the creative work of countless people over countless hours, that has been shredded and fed into the machine which extruded this thing you want to promote. Why should anyone care about giving you “constructive” feedback? De-construct this thing and think a lot harder about the people you’re trying to market to.

I recall discussion of Traveller in ‘rec.games.frp.misc’. Can’t dredge up more detail than that, though.

Thank you for the disclosure that you used Generative AI.

The original GURPS Illuminati was rough, but a fun book of inspiration for wild conspiratorial world-girdling secret society weirdness.

When Kenneth Hite started working for SJ Games, he produced a great collection of well-researched and well-written alternate-history weirdness:

• I find GURPS Cabal to be a masterpiece. If you want World of Darkness but less emo goth and more crossed with Kabalah and Illuminati and multi-planar divine power.
• There’s great value in each of GURPS Alternate Earths and GURPS Alternate Earths 2. A few pages fleshes out each entire rich alternate world history, each one well enough to build an entire campaign.
• He ran a regular column, Suppressed Transmission, in the SJ Games magazine. There is a Suppressed Transmission anthology that is well worth dipping into.

Thank you. What rebellion are you referring to? Is that connected with the Assassination of Strephon?

Thank you, I was wondering whether the Empress Wave was included in the detested canon.

And thanks for characterising why: the “catastrophic change” makes for impressive reading, and feels like the kind of big deal that an epic saga will deal with; but, as you say, it robs the individual characters (who, in Traveller, tend not to be ultra-powerful but more quotidian) of agency, with a transformation of the setting they can’t do anything about.

Do I gather correctly that the Interstellar Wars canon (ignoring the RPG system) is better accepted by the community?

The development of the Third Imperium, or more recently Charted Space, literally began the concept of a setting arc in RPGs. When Traveller was first written in the 70s, the idea of a cohesive setting for an RPG hadn’t been invented. The Third Imperium Was cobbled together after the release of Star Wars because everyone thought there should be a big “capital E” empire. Even the idea of different alien species was something that came up later on in the setting as it developed.

The article there does not go much into this, but I’m reminded that many people really disliked the later timeline development of the Traveller setting; and the Interstellar Wars timeline was welcome because it was set earlier, and the Mongoose reboot takes the timeline in a different direction. So I’ve gathered, anyway.

Can anyone point me to contemporary discussions of why the Traveller canonical timeline was so unpopular?

Today’s crop of heavily-promoted image-generation models and text-generation models are both trained on huge swaths of the public internet as well as private sources; this has been done without the consent of the vast majority of authors and artists of those works. Once fed into the model during training, there is no way to retract a work from the resulting model.

Both the training of models, and the routine usage of them, consume unethically large amounts of electricity (and water consumed for cooling).

People who use those models to generate text or images, and then post the results, are either unaware of the ethical abuses, or don’t care enough to stop. Yes, I support a blanket ban on posting such content here.