Traveller General: Tinker-Edition

Your welcome, traveller.

Okay, since this seems to have vanished I'll repost.

I'm thinking about doing a thing in one or two campaigns, and need some input on whether there is a coherent ruling on it or a widespread attitude. MGT1e Dilettante has rules on creating and managing a portfolio. You add assets instead of benefits.

So say as a non-noble, just a regular guy who has a lot of money to invest, what would stop me from buying and managing some real estate, a business or generally stocks. Is investing into a portfolio allowed when you're not a noble? Or is this exclusively for nobles for some Imperium-legal reasons?

They made it really weird, with restricting it to characters built using the careers from that book, who get portfolios instead of cash.
A possible interpretation is that it's anybody with SOC 10+ who qualifies for portfolios, or something.
Since Mongoose is just full of shitty editing, I would say you can roll on the portfolio table instead of taking a cash benefit.

Also a good note for GMs i forgot.
Your players will start as competent adults and a skill level of 1 is "properly educatet" and you can be hired for the purpose of using that skill.

compare:
0 is having your drivers license
1 is being a professional trucker/Taxi driver
2 Advanced driving and motor control, professional racing/stunt driving starts here.
3 Good chances that you drive a racing car at national championships, triple A movies.
4 Your driving style is literally used to show people what "true" driving looks like and there are techniques named after you.

Traveller PCs are competent (i can't stress this enough) and therefore your players should shut their trap when they ask for "experience points".
What i do is handing out one skill per player at rank 1 after major story arks, which usually are followed by some downtime.

Character advancement in Traveller is more about getting resources and equipment as much as it is about learning what your character is already capable of.

I absolutely agree. Doing it well tho like D&D means players and GMs need to calibrate expectations and mechanics accordingly. As another user wrote up:

Anything that is usual for a professional in a field to carry out should be a Routine (+2) task. A person with +1 from an attribute and +1 from skill has a total bonus of +4, so the odds of success are 91,67%. Even if you fail, the degree of failure will be small meaning the outcome is likely to be annoying rather than catastrophic.

Compare this to an Average (+0) task: total bonus is +2 so the odds of success are 72,22%. Success is again likely, but by no means guaranteed. You might get a significant degree of failure, which again implies that whatever you are doing could go wrong pretty bad. In other words even professionals sometimes fail at Average tasks; they are no picnic.

The same basic professional would have a 41,67% chance of succeeding at a Hard (-2) task, and a 16,67% chance of succeeding at a Very Hard (-4) task. With the Very Hard task it most of the time it is a case of how badly it goes wrong, not if it succeeds. In other words, these difficulty levels should be used for tasks that even professionals are more likely to fail than to succeed at.

In conclusion: most common tasks performed in the universe are not Average, they are Routine (as the name implies). Now obviously you should not roll for such boring tasks unless the outcome actually matters. The difficulty level with +0 modifier does not represent the difficulty of the tasks people carry out most often, it represents the difficulty of tasks that are most often just difficult enough to warrant a roll.

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No, I mean expressly not as a chargen benefit, but in-campaign.
> I'm just a low-status meathead/broker/engineer/security guy and made a lot of cash on this [campaign] gig.
> Let me just invest that cash into stocks
What I'm asking is whether that is allowed.

Who cares if the book says it's allowed or not?
Gather your cash, choose an investment type, then make a broker roll or two depending on the level of financial risk you want.
Or pay a few thousand for a good broker, then start managing your portfolio.
Simple.

To put it a bit different.

It's true for many rpg systems and especially for Traveller that the rules are more basic ideas how to handle the game and less super solid rules, at least i think that's one point which seperate the good systems from the bad.
You know those that that encourage rule lawyering like pathfinder and shadowrun with their rulesbloat.

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>shadowrun with their rulesbloat
And not even clearly written rulesbloat, either. SR4 was a mess. SR4/20 was a mess after a spritz of grammar. SR5 is a whole new mess.

Its like they don't realize they are bad writers because their fanbase actually loves to figure out their page scrabble.

>And not even clearly written rulesbloat
Are you implying Pathfinder is clearly written ?

Jokes aside, the problem with those systems is, taht there are sooo many miniscule rules and power ups, that changing some of them has a real risk of toppeling over what's levt of the balance... again.

That's a penis.

Which Trav campaigns do you follow on Youtube? Any Trav podcasts worth listening to? Why are there no new episodes of Felbrigg's podcast?

Close the Airlock was pretty good.

Yes, saved it while it was online. Glad to see it on archive.org. Sadly the next project was DnD.

So, let's assume that there is a System in the foreven sector and there is a small system which want's to become a part of the larger nations.
Well they've found potential allies in the gundam-space germans from "Die Weltenbund", under the condition that they get their crime problem under control.

Now the players step upon the stage as qualified ship crew who are mysteriously jobless and seem to have a midlife crysis. They get the Job offer to work as in system patorl and can even get a small ship rented to do that work and bring the three large crime oganizations, that haunt the system, down.

What are some interesting space crimes and criminals, that stand in the way of justice and peace, you can come up with ?

What's Close the Airlock?

A Traveller podcast with about 110 episodes.
Each episode is a live recording of one session of a longer campaign.

Is it actually decent, or is it the sort of memey cringeworthy faggotry that you'd see from the D&D games that do this sort of thing?

1970s 2D6 RETRO RULES
www44.zippyshare.com/v/LAufPAs0/file.html

That's not really a question anyone can answer for you, because it's hard to say what you think constitutes "memey cringeworthy faggotry."

Every RPG podcast and show ever made has been accused of that by some user at one time or other, so there's no possible objective metric.
Have a listen and see for yourself. I liked it.

>What I'm asking is whether that is allowed.

There's a current thread on the board asking us oldfags to compare our gaming experiences then to now and that incredibly pathetic question neatly sums up the differences I've experienced.

Allowed? You're the FUCKING REFEREE. You decide what is allowed or not.

Getting back to the question. You've a PC who received a windfall in chargen or game play; lottery win, dead uncle, loot, etc. They want to bank to money, go travelling, and you don't know what to do.

Google/bing "annuity". Think of it as a pension you pay yourself. The PC hands over a chunk of money and/or other assets to an institution which then manages it for him in various ways while cutting him scheduled checks.

The return is higher than a savings account because it's actively managed. The annuity holder doesn't need to be around to constantly sign off on decisions, and, unlike stock dividends, the return is guaranteed.

Read about annuities, fiddle the numbers to work for your campaign, and for fuck's sake OWN your game. You're the referee, the rules don't apply unless you want them to.

Does anyone have a link to the not-shit-gravy Robots book? Mongoose 1e, someone's asking about it and I don't personally have it.

Excellent advice from wise anons. Let me add that the target number need not always be 8+. In MgT, the target number can be as high as 14+ or as low as 2+ depending on the difficulty of the task.

So, why roll for something as automatic as 2+? Because sometimes whether the PC succeeds or not isn't the real purpose of the roll. As MgT2e states on page 56 of the core rules - and as so many seemingly overlook - sometimes the rolls is made because "The Travellers are under the pressure of time."

Replacing the cover to the light switch you just tampered with is dead simple BUT can you do it fast enough before the guard returns?

Or, you've six simple tasks to perform in order before the air runs out. How quickly can you manage them?

The problem with that is that Effect has no influence on Time. Time is something you can shift up/down by 2 categories at most, giving you a modifier, but it's still on a 1d6 of X scale. You have little to no influence over it.

>That's a penis.

That is a penis. It's also not a Traveller ship. let me explain.

The guy who diagrammed it, Star-something or other at COTI, doesn't use any ship building system from any version of Traveller to design his ships. He's got a wild mash up of tech instead with warp drives, deflectors, missiles, etc. He also uses a "module" based diagramming system. He designs modules with his own ship building system for common functions, draws the modules, and then fits them all together like Legos with one-off diagrams providing whatever connections he needs.

His designs are good looking and nicely detailed, but they're next to impossible to "fit" to Traveller designs because they're built with a different system.

Check Mongoose 1e, Third Party, Rules and Careers.

>The problem with that is that Effect has no influence on Time. Time is something you can shift up/down by 2 categories at most, giving you a modifier, but it's still on a 1d6 of X scale. You have little to no influence over it.

I used MgT because most here know nothing except MgT. In the DGP - MT - BITS task system, the amount by which you exceed your target number does effect the amount of time you took.

Anyway, my point still stands. Sometime you don't roll to see whether you succeed. Sometime you roll to see how WELL or how FAST you succeed.

Did you ever stop to think that all the taxes don't go directly into your noble's pockets? That maybe, just maybe, some may be needed for "luxuries" like roads, schools, police, fire, EMT, courts, public health, infrastructure, the social safety net, and silly shit like that?

>Sometime you roll to see how WELL or how FAST you succeed.

You sound like an ORE user and there is nothing wrong with that.
But i think at their heart most traveller games are about "does it work or not" when it comes to rolls and even MgT doen't really care about your positive success as long it's not 6 higher that the usual goal.

Overall it looks to me like a mechanic that was not intendet for most versions of this sytem, like MgT 2e "advantage/disadvantage mechanic"m
, since the basic idea is "Do you have the skill? yes? okay you do it."

Let me dial back your Santa Claus-machine fantasies by introducing the concept of feedstocks.

3D printing or, more accurately, additive machining will be part of any ship's engineering spaces and for all the reasons you note. Additive machining will not be building circuit boards or pistol ammo or anything else out of nothing but "iron dust" however.

Additive machining will need different raw feedstocks and different discrete components for different "builds". What's more, those feedstocks will have to come in specific forms and levels of purity. That requirement will limit the use of additive machining, or "makers" as T5 calls them, on low tech worlds. If you don't have the tech to feed it properly, it ain't going to build shit so, sorry, Ramses II isn't going to march to Kadesh with AK-47s.

TL;DR - You aren't going to be able to empty the Aslan's litter box into your Santa Claus machine and get a jump drive out the other end.

>You aren't going to be able to empty the Aslan's litter box into your Santa Claus machine and get a jump drive out the other end.

What if it's a really shitty jump drive?

>But i think at their heart most traveller games are about "does it work or not"

That's true up to point. There are exceptions and those exception exist to enhance play. MT added a time component and MgT specifically mentions time as one of it's Four Reasons To Roll The Dice.

That doesn't mean time is ALWAYS in play. That doesn't mean time is ALWAYS a concern. It does, however, mean that sometimes, just sometimes, time is the issue at hand and time is the reason you're rolling.

There's far too much binary, sperg-type thinking in RPGs these days with it's always this or always that. Most of the time you roll to see whether you succeed, a few times you roll to see how fast you succeed, and even less often you roll for other reasons.

Now THAT's comedy!

More like dump drive...

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Traveller, user who posted that here.

The iron dust laser printer was my "lowest expectation" example and we use those things already.

And on our thread about dimension creating space drives, where did you jump to the conclusion that I meant the hecking bronze age with "low tech" ?

Just as nearest example, I'm pretty sure that MgT 1e considers WW 2 Tec as low.

But I'm to tired to check that for some random stranger on the internet with autism about how 3D printers work in a game of make believe.

So here is it: (you)

I see your, and understand it and I'm sorry if it sounded like "don't do that because". I just wanted to use the open platform to reason for an alternative approach, which I as GM prefer for reasons I stated.

Have a good day traveler

There was an user in the previous who had a number of "episodes" they wanted help in knitting together into a campaign "arc" or "plot".

If they'd care to post again, I'm sure everyone would enjoy spitballing some ideas they could use.

Oh, that wasn't all of the taxes - that was just the head tax, which I've now cut down to a more reasonable 1d6x10cr/citizen average, instead of the 1d6x100/citizen average. Because you own the planet, and you can charge rent. Go see just how much a pop 9 world adds up with that, especially with a multiple of 7 or higher.
Rest of the taxes go into the Imperium (when designated) and back into the world infrastructure and policies. Smart nobles also designate a portion of their head tax to go back into the world.

>Go see just how much a pop 9 world adds up with that

We did way back in '81 when TCS came out and the question of where does all the money go first arose.

CT's Early Small/Later Big schism just doesn't involve a big Imperium with big fleets full of big ships. It includes BIG tax bases too.

Be very careful with those budget "projections". Your players can quickly use them to drown your campaign.

>I just wanted to use the open platform to reason for an alternative approach, which I as GM prefer for reasons I stated.

I also prefer the approach you stated. I just leave my options open.

One size never fits all.

Oh trust me, I know. I once ran a PF character worth over 14billion gp thanks to accidental time travel.
I don't have to restrict access to the money, I just have to make sure there are situations where money doesn't help.
And also keep the wallet out of their hands. I did get an idea for a campaign, where the players are all members of the same noble family - after 2-3 terms, they get recalled home, given some training, and then given a ship with the understanding of "you will do as we ask, when we ask. Other than that, have fun!"
Built in Patron, and gives some slack for them to catch/hang themselves with.

That sounds like a great idea for a campaign. Free ship and huge expense account come with a Very Big Hook.

You and your group should have a hoot playing it.

I don't have a group.
Partially cause I don't know very many people who like SF games, and my work schedule is shit for keeping a consistent game schedule.
So yeah, I work on Trav stuff because I want to.
And hand it to you, because someone might as well try to use it.

Just make sure they don't take advantage of Right of Escort - Right To Bear Arms is dangerous enough in the hands of a player, but "I can arm my minions, and the Law won't yell at me? I can have minions?!" is very dangerous.
Great for Patrons (you've all been hired by a noble as bodyguards/skilled servants. Bonus points: you can carry just about any non-energy weapon you want, all the time), bad for groups, unless they use them to achieve secondary objectives while the main group goes after the main ones.
And restrict how much of the expenses they don't have to worry about, and make them keep track of the discretionary fund (about 500k to start is probably good)

Funny note: a Type R, paid off, will be able to support itself extremely easily. Make about KCr898/year, and you'll be good - and that's with crew salaries, and full life support for everything, all the time. Put another way, ship about 898 tons of freight over an entire year (At full capacity, 4.5 trips), and you're good. At 25 jumps/year, it requires taking on 36 tons of freight at each stop.
Hows that for a cover ship? Any profit is more money in their discretionary fund - which means they don't have to answer for it.

>Just make sure they don't take advantage of Right of Escort - Right To Bear Arms is dangerous enough in the hands of a player, but "I can arm my minions, and the Law won't yell at me? I can have minions?!" is very dangerous.

Only in the presence of a bad referee. This Traveller and actions have consequences.

That Right of Escort they're going to abuse?

First, the Imperium grants it and will sure as hell rescind it once word spread someone's repeatedly abusing it.

Second, other NPC nobles are figure out every loophole and extenuating circumstance the PC do, if not more. Their retinues are going to be packing just as much heat, if not more.

Third, the planet's Johnny Law might not be able to ban your weapons but he'll sure as hell know you're packing and will take action if your group decides to go "blood simple". If he doesn't have the firepower to tackle your murderhobos, he can whistle up some NPC nobles and their retinues who do while letting the Imperium know about everything.

>Make about KCr898/year, and you'll be good - and that's with crew salaries, and full life support for everything, all the time.

That's with MgT numbers, right? While Classic's numbers are close to that, the point you were making is still the same.

A fully paid off ship can be both a good earner and a great cover.

Yep, 2e. Just ran my same methods on CT, and it turned out great.
But we always knew most of the running cost was the mortgage.
This does offer up a great idea: patron pays off ship for group, but they owe him big time. In between favors, they have to make the expenses. You can do it even for a Broadsword.

>This does offer up a great idea

That's one of the plots of Classic's and MgT's "The Traveller Adventure" (TTA).

Which I never read.

Sure. Check out anyway. There's lots of stuff to borrow from both versions.

Question: adapting the anime Black Lagoon to Traveller.
Has anybody else tried it? Because it is perfect for this game.
If you haven't seen it, go do so (Even subbers agree the dub is amazing), because it fits perfectly.
For a group of criminals anyway.

Well the career system with middle aged people already fits well, i dare to say.

Combat is already pretty lethal, but i would stick with mongoose 1E, still quite deadly but not too deadly.

There are splatbooks with rules to create a ship or you can just make it a little pulpy and play "black system".

I think it's a good fit, better than shadowrun.

>Sure. Check out anyway.

Arrgggh! Late night, stubby fingers, potato phone.

That's supposed to have read:

"Sure. Check them out anyway."

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bump

why use the british spelling of traveller when marc miller was american and in an american company?

>What's more, those feedstocks will have to come in specific forms and levels of purity.
. . . The printers we have TODAY can take pretty junk recycled plastic. If you can melt it, and push it through a hole you can make a tube. It doesn't even have to be that prefectly shaped, just enough so the grabby-wheel can feed it into the head which melts it all down again and pushes it through a smaller hole.

Junk in the feedstock (or sawdust that gets on it) can jam up the head, and the finer the head the more fickle it is. Which is a bitch. So most people put a little dry sponge on a clip before the head to clean it as it goes in. If there's something chunky inside the stock, that sucks. And it'll halt your print. Resetting mid print isn't worth it, so you just start again. (And melt down the half-print back into feedstock.

That's for plastic. Metal is a lot harder.

omg you guys.

>I once ran a PF character worth over 14billion gp thanks to accidental time travel.

It's storytime user

>. . . The printers we have TODAY can take pretty junk recycled plastic.

I work with additive machining. Not some table top device sold to people who want to "print" their own WH40K figs or keychain fobs to sell at the flea market. We use the tech for rapid prototyping, mould figures, and the like.

Printing in plastic results in a plastic part and plastic is rarely what you need.

>Junk in the feedstock (or sawdust that gets on it) can...

Thanks for making my point.

>That's for plastic. Metal is a lot harder.

Do tell. Metal, while being harder to use, allows more items to be produced. The more substances and items a "maker" can handle the more and better parts it can produce.

Branding, set the game apart, the "Dumerest" series, etc.

Definitely.

Okay. I've told it before, but here we go again.
About 4-5 years ago, my older brother ran a PF game at home. Now, he and I got trained by our dad, who started back in the 70's with Monty Haul games that upped the ante every time you got better gear, so we know how to handle this sort of stuff (skill checks everywhere!).
I finish my character first, down to background: rogue, daughter of innkeepers, secretary for the mob, and painter. The last is why she adventures, and also her bane - inspiration strikes and she needs a will save to avoid dropping everything to set up for painting, or making INT checks to memorize the scene. This happened in combat a few times, mostly when I dominated too much and the other players felt left out.
But back to the story.
Since I finish first, and we have players new to gaming, me and bro decide to run a prequel adventure involving a man forging paintings that aren't finished yet, and putting them out there before the original hits a gallery. Much adventure, ends with me and two other artists setting his ass up as an art exhibit, with the evidence on display, in front of his forgeries, which were displayed in the kings favorite gallery. And our newly made masterwork paintings of the entire exhibit in front of him.
This leads to his execution, right after the auction of said paintings. I made over 10K. That was the start of my money making.
Keep on The Borderlands later, I make some investments using Ultimate Campaign. Then plot hits, and we get sent forward in time to a world of sky islands and air that supports ships because the macguffin shattered and fucked things up.
Now, bro is an accountant. He looks at the rules for investments, looks at how I set things up, then goes through and does the math. He does it twice, catching an error the second time, and suddenly my bank account is the budget of several small nations, at a pretty 14 billion GP, with a few hundred million gp in spare change.

I promptly started a school for adventurers, attached to an orphanage. Both of which had self supporting portfolios. But all the money in the world couldn't solve the main plot: that was hands on, and our hands only.

Fascinating. Monty Haul has never been my "cuppa tea", but still fascinating.

Well, for the sake of discussion, what kinda campaigns do you like, user?

Yeah, we fought the Monty Haul by requiring rolls to track down desired magic items. There was one that I had to commission, and another where the only known one was on an island somewhere.

Nothing as high powered or Mary Sue-ish. No continually upping the ante. No "modern banking methods in faux medieval times" anachronisms. None of that.

Our theme has always been ordinary people in extraordinary situations and not extraordinary people in extraordinary situations. No PC would be a masterwork painter, forex, although an NPC could be.

Then again, we rarely play games with levels, XPs, etc.

Hi travelers, how do you like your primitive aliens? Should they be mysterious and bizarre, strange and exotic or familiar with a twist?

I want to implement a primitive to a "one system" game where a colony was established before the long night and didn't recognize an amphibian/mostly aquatic species as sentient.

I've had aliens ranging from "Are they sentient?" to "Are they gods?". What I try not to do is fall into the "Primitive Equals Stupid" trap.

Uhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh

Anybody remember the Terran Trade Authority books?

There were rumours that it would be a Mongoose Traveller setting, but don't know how that turned out.

Found the out of print rpg version.
sendspace
/filegroup/hdcR%2B4EX7fmRynckFKzi4A

Got the first four. There were apparently more, but I'm not 14 anymore.

Foss' paintings and drawing are fantastic, just a little too fantastic for me take even slightly seriously as a young teen.

T4 still catches flak from dullards who thought that, because Foss' work was on the cover and inside, the game's ship building rules could recreate the "diesel powered flying lobster claw & electric donkey bottom wiper" ships Foss drew.

I like some of the Foss ships that were assigned to specific Traveller ship classes, though there are a couple duds there, too.

mediafire.com/download/4zxvucxd81041mj/Terran Trade Authority RPG - Core Rulebook.pdf
mediafire.com/download/z3dgxdd7z55h0kd/TTA Handbook - Spacecraft 2000 to 2100AD.pdf
mediafire.com/download/bnhsyxpi7qq9uz5/TTA Handbook - Spacecraft 2100 to 2200AD.pdf
mediafire.com/download/yhygvuk3963ujcg/TTA Handbook - Great Space Battles.pdf
mediafire.com/download/1xel3tu2td64zc6/TTA Handbook - Spacewreck.pdf
mediafire.com/download/q1vwvqtq9y6urqp/TTA Handbook - Starliners.pdf

>I like some of the Foss ships that were assigned to specific Traveller ship classes,

They were spurious fits at best. No deckplans were possible because you can't make the T4 design work "fit" within the inspired craziness of Foss' illustrations.

What many still fail to realize is that Foss DID NOT produce any new art for T4. Imperium Games bought stock art from Foss' portfolio and then selected existing pieces which "sort of", "kind of", "just' , and "maybe" were close enough to T4's designs. Foss was never handed a T4 design and then asked to produce an illustration for it.

While it's the norm these days, T4 was unique for the period (mid to late 90s) in that it's development received a lot of focused input from the prospective customer base via the internet. For a few years the old TML was essentially acting like a virtual development lab with big chunks of T4's various splats being worked and reworked by volunteers. FF&S especially was written more by TML subgroup than IG.

Sadly, IG's Mongoose-like final editing process wasted most of the work the TML did.

Anyway, because many of the details regrading T4's development were discussed on the TML, it was know early on that Foss' stock art was in consideration and a vocal minority did not like that at all. When Foss was firmly decided on, they renewed their complaints and, as is usually the case, many of their predictions have proven to be correct. Many people still erroneously believe that Foss' art has a greater link to T4 than it actually does.

Damn... now you made me think of doing DieselPunk Traveller just for those colorful odd asymmetrical Foss ship designs.

Don't know if I'd stick with Classic or go with a more pulpy core system and simply hack the starship rules to get the required level of gonzo style.

Yeah. It was a bit of good luck when they had a good graphic design match a particular class.

It does make me wonder how much of the Foss collection they were allowed to choose from before publication.

Though I suppose FF&S could be used to hack the shipbuilding components closer to the Foss designs (obviously not ALL of them).

Now I'll have to check out the alternate starship tech in T5. Damn.

The T4 launch announcement to line failure was barely two years, the wider fanbase was essentially out of the picture after IG mishandled Starships (right after launch) and completely out after the FF&S debacle.

I wish the T4 system had lasted long enough to look at the other Major races and their technologies.

Imagine how eccentric the Vargr would be.

The T4 roller coaster experience is why a few of us with long memories didn't throw money at Con Man Whitman for his TV pilot. We knew better.

Both of these have been dewatermarked.

>The T4 launch announcement to line failure was barely two years

And in that time it was discussed intensively on the TML with recruitment for private work groups like the one which labored in FF&S taking place. In fact, the FF&S fiasco illustrates just how much about T4's products was known prior to release.

It was only because of the TML discussions regarding FF&S that the fanbase knew what FF&S should have been compared to what IG published.

That assclown is still getting money from people despite how many failed kickstarters?

People are stupid I guess.

>It was only because of the TML discussions regarding FF&S that the fanbase knew what FF&S should have been compared to what IG published

Say on, I wasn't on TML at the time. And this interests me.

>what FF&S should have been compared to what IG published
As a side note, I passed IG's excuse for the typography fuckups in FF&S (they blamed the printer) to a former GDW employee who had done layout and printer liaison. His response was "Complete and Utter Bullshit".

>Say on, I wasn't on TML at the time. And this interests me.

First, IG fucked up Starships.

It had been discussed with people throwing in all sorts of ideas, answering "what do you want to see? questions", straw polls being conducted to select or emphasize which ones most people thought were good or better, and so forth. Not much in the way of actual drafts were shared or discussed, but there was a general idea of what the book would be like.

Then the book came out. It was as if IG hadn't heard a fucking thing and people thought they'd been conned.

Meanwhile the idea of a T4 version of FF&S had been kicking around from the first. Whether you hated or loved TNE, everyone loved the FF&S supplement for it. A group was recruited via the TML to work on "translating" FF&S into T4. They'd pop up regularly asking for input on this and that or showing off small sections. Once again, everyone had a pretty good idea of what the book SHOULD look like.

Then IG channels their inner Mogoose and COMPLETELY FUCKS UP THE FINAL EDIT. They couldn't even manage to get the correctly formatted equations and formulas into the final draft sent to the printers.

The books get shipped, everyone on the TML is saying WTF?, the people in the working group pop up saying "That is NOT what we wrote", and they even begin posting parts of the manuscript they'd submitted.

That's when everyone finally realized IG couldn't pour piss out of a boot and that's when IG and T4 died.