I've written in the past on the topic of worldbuilding, and some techniques
that one can use to achieve good results. In case it's not inherently
obvious, worldbuilding isn't just for Traveller or other RPGs; it applies
equally to fiction. When doing it for fiction, you don't necessarily
produce a sourcebook for _public_ consumption; instead, it becomes a sort
of "writer's guide to the «insert culture here»".

When doing worldbuilding for fiction, your goal is the same as it is when
you're doing it for a game: you want something that feels real, and has an
existence independent of the particular story you're telling. Some authors
do this well; others ... not so well.

Diane Duane is one who does it well. In her _Star Trek_ books in the
_Rihannsu_ subseries[1], she presents Romulan - Rihannsu - characters not
merely as "bad guys" opposing the United Federation of Planets, but as
people from a culture in its own right, with its own history and
influences, its own attitudes, its own goals, its own perceptions shaped by
its past.

She has done the same for Vulcans in _Spock's World_, showing the
development of the culture we feel we are familiar with. For both the
Rihannsu and the Vulcans (she never gives us the name that the Vulcans call
themselves), she shows that concepts that we translate simply, "honor" for
the Rihannsu "mnhei'sahe", "logic" and "suppression/control of emotion" for
the Vulcan "cthia" and "arie'mnu" respectively, are _not_ simple concepts
so easily translatable, and that our standard translations are shallow at
best and misleadingly wrong at worst, and just maybe not consistently
either.

In both _Rihannsu_ and _Spock's World_, one is left with the feeling that
the characters are independent of the stories - that they, and the culture
they come from, have an existence that is _not_ dependent on Duane's
writing. This should be the goal of _any_ story, but to do it for cultures
that don't actually exist is an achievement, since the author must present
the necessary cultural material without turning it into an overt lecture
that breaks the reader out of the flow of the story. Duane does this by
presenting much of the history as prefatory material, at the beginning of
the respective books, but before the actual story begins.

In both cases, even though neither are human, nor truly have human outlook,
one can be comfortable with the idea of calling a Rihanha or a Vulcan
"friend".

(It should be noted that within the _Traveller_ milieu, Andrea Vallance has
achieved almost as much with the Luriani, in _Minor Alien Module 1_ and
_Funny Fish_. It's something of a shame that further development of the
Luriani didn't occur...)

Walter Hunt does not present Duane's level of detail in his _Dark Wing_
series, but well before the end of the series, the reader is brought to the
point of seeing the Zor as a society in their own right. They are clearly
not human, but - as with Duane's Rihannsu and Vulcans - one can comfortably
imagine calling a Zor "friend".

If one can get past the very in-your-face "Mary Sue" aspects of the main
character, Janet Kagan does some decent, if incomplete, culture building in
her _Star Trek_ novel _Uhura's Song_. The parts of Sivaoan culture that are
presented in the novel are interesting and tie together well, but one does
not get the sense of a well-developed history as in the Rihannsu and Vulcan
cases.

[1] Five titles; the internal chronology places them in the order _My
Enemy, My Ally_, _The Romulan Way_, _Swordhunt_, _Honor Blade_, and _The
Empty Chair_.

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