Appendix N- 3. John Grimes and Traveller’s Character Creation
Welcome to Appendix N, where I take a look at the literature that influenced some of our favorite roleplaying games and comment upon their gaming legacy, evocativeness and utility for today’s game masters. It’s easy to find the influences upon Dungeons and Dragons, since Gary Gygax was kind enough to list them in his Appendix N. But not all games had such a list of suggested readings. Traveller RPG was designed by Marc Miller and published back in 1977, making it one of the first roleplaying games. I could not find an official list of influences for the game, but instead I have found numerous secondary sources declare a list of authors that most likely helped formulate the feeling of the game, such as E.C. Tubb’s Dumarest tales and Poul Anderson’s Dominic Flandry series. But James Maliszewski mentioned an author and series I had never heard of before when he wrote on his Grognardia blog of A. Bertram Chandler’s John Grimes series of novels, which started in 1967 with "The Road to the Rim". Upon reading the series I’ve bought into the idea of Chandler’s influence by noting small touches, such as one of Grimes’ ships being called the Far Traveller (spelled Traveler in some US versions), the fact that Grimes starts off as a citizen of a nascent and fast-expanding federated Empire competing with others, the use of psionic humans and their alternative culture, the prominence of scout survey ships manned by small crews, and how career paths result in different types of skill sets amongst the crew.
Chandler’s obscurity in the United States is no mistake, but instead a product of our modern times. First, Chandler was an Australian science fiction writer, and although Canadian and British writers do attain popularity in our American market, Australians and New Zealanders do not seem to be afforded the same level of access. Also, reading Chandler can be uncomfortable at times with his depictions of ethnicities in space, such as when he nicknames an African American cook on board Grime’s ship ‘Aunt Jemima’ or his portrayal of a pair of Irishmen as hotheaded revolutionaries or a Japanese inventor who specialized in robotics and computers. Chandler was definitely a product of his times, and he brought certain stereotypes into his writing that I believe make his Grimes book more difficult for science fiction aficionados to recommend to others. And yet, I find Chandler to be more complex, for despite the stereotypes, often it is the Anglo-Saxon characters that Grimes is working against in order to aid aliens or set upon humans against elements inside his own government, like when he fights for land rights of the descendants of Australian aborigines against white Australian descendants trying to colonize parts of their planet. John Grimes is an interesting character as he doesn’t really have a side, but will become involved to defend those that he feels are being treated unfairly, even going so far as to protect the members of a crew that mutinied against him.
Of course his unpredictability comes at a cost to Grimes, as he decides to quit what was a promising officer career as a naval commander in the Imperial Navy. This leads to him trying a career as a private courier and sometimes trader, where he has more adventures, burns bridges and meets new contacts. He has a stint as a ship captain for a system of border planets and another as a pirate (or privateer as Grimes unconvincingly insists), before becoming a Rim Worlds commodore.
Time travel and alternate timelines are more prominent than what I would prefer to see in my science fiction, but it serves to show John Grimes and others if they had made different career choices, something that I believe had an effect in the character generation of the Traveller RPG. In some timelines, John Grimes is still an officer in the Imperial Navy and the Rim Worlds incorporated under the Empire’s increasing reach. In other timelines he becomes a governor of an unimportant planetary colony, growing drunk and out of shape and unhappily married while his antagonist climbs the ranks through sheer charisma and manipulation rather than skill. In the John Grimes series, important career changes come every few years, as would be expected in a professional military where members are either promoted upwards for their achievements, released due to their lack of distinction, or put into unimportant positions if they muddle somewhere in the middle. But just because a character might not always succeed in their adventures, it doesn’t mean that their lives of action are over, as John Grimes shows throughout his occupational changes. The adventure always continues, and a good GM should turn the results of one campaign into the start of another.
Chandler also stands out for focusing on members of Grimes’ crew, and the crewmembers of other ships that are encountered. Although he is the ship captain and renowned for his piloting, often Grimes has to delegate such duties to others because of official procedures, with mixed results depending upon the junior officer. The engineering section is split into different sections with various chiefs, such as for the engine room and its maintainers being separate from those handling communications or structural integrity. Interestingly enough, Grimes states that he’d rather have a competent crew of personable engineers than an abrasive crew of superb engineers because long space trips can result in violence when the crews cannot get along. Grimes develops into a character who has marked talent in piloting, navigation, small arms, throwing weapons and administration. On the other hand, he often needs to rely on others when it comes to social interactions, espionage and melee combat.
Other crew positions in which I never gave much thought come to the forefront in Chandler’s works. The ship purser is in charge of the expedition’s finances, as they are needed in a far-reaching military survey ship and especially in a trading vessel. There are farms on board the ships that take human waste and reprocess it into food which require skilled hands. Finally, the cook always becomes an important character in a Grimes story since a good cook can make a bitter crew happy by tailoring recipes to the needs of each and by having their machines generate decent alcohol. One Grimes story had him flying a courier run by himself, but the engines broke down. He fixed the engines, but an alien humonculus that was kept in a glass cylinder was released and died. He threw the corpse into his waste disposal system, which broke the dead creature down but the regenerating leftovers became tadpoles. He flushed the alien tadpoles out into the farm system, but then they survived and became humanoid while feasting on the vegetation and destroying his food supply. On and on it went, and I could not help but see this as a Traveller RPG adventure where faulty technology required constant attention and a skilled crew to survive in space.
I would definitely suggest the John Grimes series for a referee who wanted to run a space opera with a crew of player characters. I will admit that the series doesn’t have enough popularity to say that it influenced RPGs outside of Traveller, and the grammar and language is not evocative like a Moorecock or Vance novel. However, it does have a great feel to it where the protagonist lives in an imperfect, overly bureaucratic universe where he is both constrained by society but has a frontier to romp around. There are good and evil people in each culture that Grimes visits, and he has to use his wits and conscience to sort out what is best for the communities he encounters and his own crew. The books have great utility for today’s GMs and I will admit that reading them caused me to dust off my old Traveller RPG booklets and roll up some characters.
May the Dice Be Forever in Your Favor,
Deuce Traveler
For those of you that lack the RPG, you can roll up characters here for kicks:
http://www.signalgk.com/cgi-bin/ctcg.pl#output
Next Up: Three Hearts, Three Lions, Some Elves and a Troll
