My mind was blown by how good the world of GURPS Reign of Steel, one of many great worldbooks from David L. Pulver.
Clearly an alternate conception of the Terminator universe, but instead of a single Skynet we get over a dozen demigod AIs who have divided the Earth between them, and each have widely varying attitudes to humanity and plans for what to do with us (all bad). This of course makes for (compared to Terminator) a richer world with more opportunities to move between different regions to keep the campaign interesting with the same characters.
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.
They not only brought a much more coherent game system (the original White Wolf system was famously bad), but also brought that GURPS worldbook rigour to the “research” that went into describing the world, the factions, the story hooks, the background, etc.
Like so many other GURPS worldbooks, I thoroughly enjoyed reading them often but never got into a game using them.
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.
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.
I recall discussion of Traveller in 'rec.games.frp.misc'. Can't dredge up more detail than that, though.