Freelance Traveller/The RICE Archives

RICE Paper #0-B: Letter from the RICE Trustees

1202-314

To All who have benefited from the RICE Papers:

Over the past year, the composition of the Board of Trustees has changed, and with those changes have come new ideas. After long and difficult debate, and consultations with various individuals and groups throughout the Regency, a decision has been made that will have a significant (and, in our opinion, positive) impact on the scope of published RICE Papers.

We have long viewed the Regency as the sum of its component parts - its member planetary systems - and no more. However, we now realize what we overlooked before - that interstellar communication, migration, travel, and government affect culture, and are indeed a culture themselves. More, there are ethnic groupings that have carried significant portions of their cultures from their homeworlds, and retained them, even after up to 1500 years of settlement on worlds far from their original homes. These can no longer truly be considered planetary cultures, and they cannot truly be addressed within the context of a single RICE Paper focussed on a single planetary system.

It is for this reason that we have decided to expand the scope of the RICE Papers, to allow our researchers and reporter to write on any aspect of Imperial culture (to which we of the Regency are the heirs) that they feel worthy of note - from topics as simple as the traditional Vilani game of saalir, ranging up through the traditions of the various Imperial Yachting Cup competitions, or of shipboard etiquette, all the way up to the complexities of the Terran faith of Binay Abrim, or of the interaction between Vilani, Sylean, and Vargr social traditions in the coreward areas of the Regency.

To do less would be to break faith with our Charter, which charges us with furthering "Cultural Education". It is our hope that you, as we, will find this change to be for the better.

Jeff Zeitlin
Chief Archivist, for
The Board of Trustees
Regency Institute for Cultural Education