Back when Traveller was first getting popular, its parent company farmed out sections (or, properly, “sectors”) of its giant map of space to individual companies and their licensees. These folks were then able to develop their own Traveller products within those designated areas. Each “sector” was made up of 16 “sub-sectors.” This distribution of “space” to other companies was known as “the great land grant.” The “Theta Borealis” sector was given to Group One. FASA got the “Far Frontiers” Sector. The Judges Guild got the Gateway Domain – which had a total of four sectors in it: Crucis Margin. Gateway Sector (aka Maranatha-Alkahest), Glimmerdrift Reaches, and Ley.

When all the companies went under, and their stuff went out of print, these settings obviously floundered. Some were redone completely – like the Judges Guild sectors. Others faded into obscurity. Of all of the “lost” sectors, the one that went to the industrious and prolific Keith brothers – William H. Keith, Jr. and J. Andrew Keith – and their short-lived “Marischal Adventures” company has always interested and intrigued me the most.

The name of that sector? Reavers’ Deep.

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Some years ago, James Mishler produced some interesting materials to go with the Judges Guild’s “Wilderlands” campaign. This was not the only attempt at reviving this iconic D&D environment, nor was it the best known of these efforts. I have managed to obtain most, if not all, of his work in this area and was always impressed with his ideas.

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When I look at my childhood and the books, films, plays, and poems that informed it, I sometimes see a jigsaw puzzle. Certain parts all fit together well. Each Oz book – those by L. Frank Baum and others – is a piece that snaps into place. The Narnia, the Tolkien, the Edgar Rice Burroughs – they all go together. Here and there, however, some pieces seem to be missing. Did they fall on the floor? Did they get stuck in some other puzzle? Did the missing pieces get thrown away by accident on some rainy afternoon?

Then what happens when you find the pieces again? I never saw some of this stuff before, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t fit.

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So I went down to the local game store and bought my reprint of the AD&D (1e) Player’s Handbook. I was fortunate enough to find really, really nice copies of the other books in the original version of the series on eBay, and so I really only needed this one. I wanted to support the OSR, to show TSR they needed to start reprinting other things like this, and to have a copy that was better than the one I had been able to find.

But…

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“A very midmost of this dreary theatre rose up a huge and monstrous tree, whose topmost branches were even the horns which they had seen from below the hill’s brow. Leafless was that tree and lacking of twigs, and its bole upheld but some fifty of great limbs, and as they looked on it, they doubted whether it were not made by men’s hands rather than grown up out of the earth. All round about the roots of it was a pool of clear water, that cast back the image of the valley-side and the bright sky of the desert, as though it had been a mirror of burnished steel. The limbs of that tree were all behung with blazoned shields and knight’s helms, and swords, and spears, and axes, and hawberks; and it rose up into the air some hundred feet above the flat of the valley.”

– William Morris

One of the things I’ve noticed, while reading some classic and even recent fantasy novels, is a kind of “higher plateau” point that some of the best works in this genre feature. This leads me to wonder how such a state might be reproduced or approximated in D&D.

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Who is in charge of the city’s finances?

Varying treasury departments are staffed and guarded by humans and some humanoid types working for the Artificial Intelligences presiding over locations within the City of Hrodjack. Whether these departments are connected or not, or even if each of them is still functioning as designed, is not known.

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1) I tend to divide the D&D people I know into two groups. On the one side, there are the people who are more influenced by material that was around before the advent of D&D (in, say, 1974) and, on the other side, there are the people who are more influenced by post-D&D material. The folks in the first group tend to be influenced by the same things that had a big impact on Gygax and Arneson themselves. These are the DMs who have already read the books in “Appendix N.” For them, it wasn’t a matter of being introduced to these ideas and tropes – it was about rediscovering all of them in the context of the game. Even though I was a kid in Junior High when I started playing, I had already been steeped in the “Appendix N” books before I had ever heard of D&D. D&D, for me, wasn’t about something new in that sense. It was more like coming home.

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Fortified by Zak S.’s brilliant Vornheim, inspired by my memories and re-immersion into the Judges Guild’s CSIO, and tantalized by the other D&D city guides old and new (100 Street Vendors of the City State, Tarantis, City Encounters, etc.) that I greedily snatched up, I thought my return to DMing would include many city-based adventures – hence the name of this blog.

That turned out not to be the case.

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When Traveller and D&D were hot in the late ’70s and very early ’80s, the people playing these games – myself included – had fanzines, APA-zines, and more professionally produced magazines like The Dragon and The Journal of the Travellers Aid Society to go with them. We always knew we were part of a larger, and exciting, game culture. I didn’t think it would ever come to an end.

If these games get rebooted… will that culture get rebooted too?

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It may be hard for people to believe this now, but Traveller was once big enough to support two separate independent magazines devoted to it. I’m not talking about lowly fanzines (thought they may have begun that way), but really professional, slick-looking journals: Traveller Chronicle from Sword of Knight Publications and Traveller Digest from Digest Publications Group (DGP). There’s more on the latter company here.

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