Scott Ruggels

Mutants and Masterminds has a lot of supporting material and a huge company behind it pushing it into stores, conventions, etc.  Champions has to rely on being a really good game and that's not enough to really get it out there.  The lack of real support material doesn't help (a world setting etc doesn't actually help very much when you sit down at the table, you need real stuff to run and play with).
 
I know that adventures don't sell quite as well as other books, but the perspective has to be more than just "does this make money right now."  A game has no future without content to play, and that small amount of earning from adventures gives your game a future, building players and market share in the long term.

once I know how many copies are to be had, I will post something further on this
Polaris will be handling the sales etc on this batch
 

Absolutely. This should be presented as its own game, and complete within itself. it should have no reference to other books (except maybe the 6e Rules book for specific details...maybe). 
 

We were big players of Traveller.  But unlike many people I have met, we stopped when the available adventures and source books shifted from "insert anywhere" to being tied to their setting. 
 
I look back and laugh because these days I am so used to modifying things to fit my own campaign I almost don't notice and back then we simply didn't consider doing it.

The biggest conversion problem is exactly skills, ironically.
 
Classic Traveller had very few skills- I think seventeen?  Going from memory, and the author himself,never considered them,to be that important.  I cannot- and would not dream of doing it- speak for him, but having watched him,run a com game decades ago, and having found online accounts from others who were as fortunate, skills were quite literally "does that seem like something your character would know?  Do you feel like you would know that?"
 
If thw answer was yes, then "where or how dis you learn it?" And the justification itself seemed,not to matter; only that there was one.  "Okay, you know that. Keep track of that; write it on your sheet."
 
In the game I witnessed, Miller, when a roll was called for, invariably selected a characteristic roll and went so far as to allow the player to pick the characteristic.
 
If the roll was successful, he would prompt "how dis that characteristic help you overcome the situation?"  You could not re-select any characteristic until you had used each characteristic once.
 
That was thw author's take on skills.  During a Q and A, he was asked about his style versus the skills in an the variius published expansions, and gave a nice crowd-pleasing answer to the effect of 'the fans kept demandinf skills- more skills, and more opportunities to gain skills.  That is why the new skills and advanced xharacter generation exist.  You guys wanted it; I never envisioned it working that way.
 
 
At any rate, that was my first exposure to "rules light" and "narrative-focused" gaming.  I can see that going South with the wrong group, but it was surprisingly elegant the way he handled it.
 
To get back,on track though:  that kind od thing is absolute _anathema_ to HERO's die-hard core fandom.  Let's take a step back and remember that these are the guys and this is the game wherein once upon a time, one grognard invented a campaign flavor that took _skill levels_ -- not even skills, mind you, but just skill levels- froze their effects, dipped their prices just a bit, and renamed,them Martial Arts Maneuvers, and not only,did the fans _like_ it, but  for the last roughly thirty years they have demanded that this interesting flavor game for a single campaign is, in fact, necessary and inviolable core rules of the game itself.
 
This is indicitive of the incompatibility issue with how Traveller uses (or used; I think today everyone plays Traveller like any other game, where a lack of skill means you cant do it, period, and probably don't even know what it looks like.  (Sorry, Mate.  I just checked my sheet and it seems i don't have "open doorknob" skill.  Unless you picked it up, we're stuck here...)
 
Hero, though, went so far as to provide a list of fifty skills and then add three "blank categories" to invent your own skill in case you sisnt see one you liked, and has kind of a tendency to push infinite cascades of specialization into those categories, etc, etc.
 
The upshot of all that is that the base principles of the skill systems are diametrically-opposed as to make-, well, if not the HERO System then the die haed HERO fans- totally,incompatible with the old career path system or any variant "lifeboat" system.
 
If you _do_ want to make it work (and you can, but you have to have people that want to play Traveller more thsn they want to exploit the HERO System, is to create youe charts with their lists of skills, assign the default to either a Characteristic Roll or 10-, and declare that this is _it_; these are all the skills that are availabke in this campaign, period.
 
Like any other campaign, they may or may not go for it.  Just for the love of everything you hold dear, make sure you are wearing heavy clothes, padded armor, and a catcher's mask when you point out that Martial,Arts is off the table.  
 
 

 
 
 

If I might make a suggestion/request: remove any references to/dependencies on Terran Empire or other Star Hero sourcebooks.
 
The Traveller universe is, or should be, its own standalone setting; the core TH6e book(s) should be self-contained enough that they make no reference to anything except, maybe, Star Hero. I don't mind books from other settings listed in the "Recommended Reading" section, but I just don't feel I should ever see a sentence like this:
 
"For Senators and Representatives, use the Senator package in Terran Empire, page 108, but change the major contact to the appropriate leader."
 
Followed by a conspicuously missing template box for the Senator professional template.

I too am late to the conversation, heard from Kevin and Polaris recently.
It's been a while, so my memory of the various issues and constraints is somewhat murky.
Psionics, I had no information in the Traveller source material to use as a gauge on what the energy use (END/REC) would convert to, so the END rules were best guess. 
Profession templates - as Kevin already said, we couldn't reprint the existing material, since it's owned by HERO. 
Races - again, can't do an direct reprint of the existing material, since someone else owns it.  I do remember someone commenting we should have included a method to randomly generate characters and their backgrounds the way Traveller does. I didn't think about it at the time, HERO is about spending points to build what you want and Traveller was about random, so I went with HERO, since it was Traveller HERO.
But all in all I think it turned out fairly well.
 
Sounds like Don and Kevin and group are making progress with Marc Miller on making things available again, so fingers crossed.

I never said it couldn’t be done, it’s just a trope of fantasy movies that’s always bugged me.  😜

Well the whole Lars Anderson/ Legolas schtick is highly important but it has their precedents. I believe that it would be necessary. Also spear tricks as well because spears are more common and easier to train than sword and board. 
 

 
 

Well the whole Lars Anderson/ Legolas schtick is highly important but it has their precedents. I believe that it would be necessary. Also spear tricks as well because spears are more common and easier to train than sword and board. 
 

 
 

Another factor in a city's growth is how aggressively it pursues extending its influence, not necessarily by conquest. Look at the Italian city-state of Venice. During the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance it was a significant mercantile and maritime power through establishing colonies and trading posts across the Mediterranean to control trade routes. Phoenician cities like Tyre and Carthage took the same course.

Yeah, if you enjoy wading through hate mail from the woke, you should definitely go for that.

Which is pretty much the sense in which I used the term.

Very much a Golden Age GM/Player. Class of 1105 😁

Very much a Golden Age GM/Player. Class of 1105 😁

Very much a Golden Age GM/Player. Class of 1105 😁

https://i.imgur.com/HUBaCzl.mp4

I dropped info dumps, several "books" on the players, but I come from a time where GMs Home brewed their fantasy campaigns from scratch, as there weren't any FH Published materials other than a Grimoire, and a Bestiary.  Also running the campaign for years generated more written material.  I may publish some of it later when I can put it all back together.
 
Character Generation consisted of "Package Deals" that, at the time gave you discounts on points, and the deals were organized as "Race/ Species", then "Cultural", and then "Military".  They would "stack (especially Military"), but Disadvantages of the same type would not. This was all 3rd Edition/ Fourth Edition rules. 
 

 
The current campaign has some templates for races, but not a lot of development past that, since it was more of a PBP game.
 
 

Killer Shrike has the right Idea, but I generally take a much further back approach, by starting with the geology. Until you get to some sort of industrial revolution, water traffic is going to be the primary source of movement of bulk items to that city. So work out the flow pattern and the traffic on that river. Because of that river, as well, farms and docks along that river will be how farms, ranches, and mines will move the enormous amount of resources needed to feed and clothe the inhabitants of that city.  Putting the city near the lake outflow is logical, but so it putting it near multiple water sources at the other end of the lake. But work out the geology and topography of the area and the site will make itself known. I never start a fantasy game until I have mapped it out. Is the northern sea north enough to be ice bound or not, as that will effect trade quitye often if there are seasonal stoppages.

https://i.imgur.com/HUBaCzl.mp4

I thought SAS was playable.
 
I played it a couple of times, and I have to say that I liked the d20 version _way_ more than I liked the tri-stat version.  Don't get me wrong: for a quick-and-dirty fast action game, Tri Stat is right up there with the original Traveller engine.  It's just that playing supers with Champions since the early days-- I just found that tri-stat wasn't meaty enough to make me happy.
 
The d20 version was buggy, and there were bits here and there were you just accepted "this is how that works; keep movin'...", it worked perfectly fine for what it was.
 
 

Just out of curiosity, as per the title of this thread, is there still an active effort to bring Traveler Hero to 6th ed.?

The flow pattern Killer Shrike ably describes above applies to North America's Great Lakes when taken as a whole. Each lake, except Michigan and Huron which are hydrologically one lake, is at a different elevation and flow into each other: water flows from Lakes Superior and Michigan to Huron, then through the Detroit River to Lake Erie, then over Niagara Falls to Lake Ontario, and finally down the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean, ultimately the only outflow for all the Lakes.
 
The St. Lawrence and its region may be relevant examples for how circumstances might have influenced the evolution of Mr. R's cities. Upthread I already mentioned Quebec City, the capital of the province, built overlooking the St. Lawrence; but Montreal, farther upriver, is a far larger and more economically important city. It's built on an island in the middle of the river, so river traffic almost has to stop at it (and could easily be forced to if naval power was applied). Montreal is also near the point where the Gatineau River, Quebec's longest, joins with the St. Lawrence. Thanks to the St. Lawrence Seaway, the river is the sole route for deep-water shipping between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic, and Montreal is smack in the middle of it. In this case the benefits of location outweigh those of being a government center.
 
That weight also shows in comparing Montreal to Ottawa, capital of Canada. Ottawa is built at the juncture of the Gatineau River and the Ottawa, another major river and traditional trade route. The incorporated city of Ottawa is over a million population, and its whole urban region adds to that by nearly 50%; but the city of Montreal is more than half again as large as Ottawa, and its urban region almost triple that of Ottawa's. (The city and urban region of Quebec City are close to 550,000 and 800,000+, respectively.) Ottawa and Montreal are around 100 miles/160 kilometers from each other, and while water travel between them is rare today, road, rail, and air travel is extensive.

I would do it procedurally, starting at the first regional settlement(s) in antiquity and walking forward in time introducing various events (wars, famines, new technologies, natural disasters such as floods, rivers changing course and / or getting damned and / or bridged (etc), over / under population, trade imbalances, and so on). Layer it up over time, to attain verisimilitude.
 
Also, it's useful to remember that contrary to common belief rivers flow downhill, not toward the equator, not toward a particular cardinal direction, and not in arbitrary directions. Thus the topography (particularly in regards to relative elevation) of the region should be carefully considered. If you have a giant lake with a bunch of rivers flowing into it, then it would logically need to be at a lower overall elevation to the areas the rivers are flowing to it from. If there is one river flowing out of it, then that outbound river would need to be flowing towards an even lower elevation, and there would need to be some barrier between that even lower elevation area and the adjacent areas or else some of the rivers flowing into the lake would actually flow towards that even lower elevation area instead.

So far that has not proven to be the case.