Non OTU: Traveller ATU How To #1: Dumarest

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Useful tips, features, color, and rules to give your Traveller game a "Dumarest"-like feel.

CHARACTERS

1. Military background is OK, but it seems as though all military is local to a system.
Thus, there is no recognized military rank beyond one's own system.
Mercenaries do exist.

2. The other careers seem to exist normally.

EQUIPMENT

Traveller equipment seems to be well-adapted to Dumarest. That includes the wide variety of vehicles and portable equipment available, including grav belts.

There appears to be a greater-than-typical use of stunner-related equipment. Other than that, the full complement of blades and guns seem fine.

 

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Useful tips, features, color, and rules to give your Traveller game a "Dumarest"-like feel.

STARSHIPS

1. I suspect that this setting strongly favors Small Ships. I would suggest that ship hulls are Tech Level constrained, so that you COULD design a large ship, but something makes it not worth your while (cost, structural support, power requirements, whatever).

2. There's really a defocus on starships in Dumarest, so it would seem that the Traveller "Adventure-Class" starships are designed well for the setting.

3. That said, ships travel via Erhaft Drive/Erhaft Field... whatever that is. It envelops a ship in a blueish halo, which both protects and motivates the vessel, and that the Drive is powered by crystals of some sort. Gravitics are silent -- ships land and lift off silently, even stealthily.

You could easily wave this as just words on top of Traveller. The "Erhaft field" could be a type of jump field, and it could require Zuchai Crystals.

Travelling on ships is difficult, time-consuming and costly (so much so that many services and products are quoted on the basis of how many “High Passages” are to be paid to the seller).


TECHNOLOGY

Traveller technology appears to follow Dumarest closely, including medicine.

 

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Useful tips, features, color, and rules to give your Traveller game a "Dumarest"-like feel.


BACKSTORY

The Dumarest universe that is so much the base for Classic Traveller is a bleak universe, where life is cheap, slavery common, death pit fight very common. Much of his works describe society as Sci-Fi Dickens.

Terra was the source of the current sprawl of interstellar colonization, but an ancient cataclysm on Earth has turned it into legend and myth. This suggests that Earth is in the middle of a large backwater. It could simply be on an ignored rim of settled space.

There is no empire -- no ansible and small starships means no means of creating or enforcing Empire. So instead you have loose networks of worlds that have regular but small amounts of travel and trade between them. There appear to be scattered kingdoms, merchant houses and families which control at most several planets and constitute their governments.

Worlds tend to be Conanic: the rich are Roman-style pleasure lovers, with arenas and the like. The poor live in squalor and eke out an exploited living. There appears to be little or no middle class.

The Cyclan is a technocratic brotherhood of bio-engineered people. Synthesized with an enigmatic quasi-psionic lifeform buried in their brains, they can achieve an Ansible-like hive-mind state through careful meditiation. This is not without its long-term problems, as it affects Sanity. The Cyclan appears to want to bring the galaxy under their control.

They essentially sell their supreme analytic Vulcan-like intellect to world governments. This inadvertently allows them to influence people in those governments.

The Universal Brotherhood are a pacifist benevolence organization. I have no idea what motivates them; however, one stipulation of receiving certain aid from them is that they psionically or psychologically imprint non-violence into your psyche. After this, you would be unable to use violence, even to defend yourself.

There are no aliens, and (apparently) no AI.


READING LIST

#1 - Winds of Gath is required reading.
#2 - Derai (probably)
#4 - Kalin is required reading.
#5 - The Jester at Scar (maybe)
#8 - Veruchia (maybe)
#12 - Eliose (maybe)
#13 - Eye of the Zodiac is important.
#31 - Temple of Truth is important.
#32 - The Return is important.

And maybe six more of them, but fewer than half of the published books are worth reading.


ADVENTURES

Dumarest adventures typically underscore the dangers of visiting worlds. You often can't trust the environment, the individuals in power, the local wildlife, the governments, and the non-governmental organizations there.

 

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APPROXIMATING THE DUMAREST UNIVERSE USING CHARTED SPACE

Because Traveller is built on fundamental Dumarest-like ideas, it's not hard to do this. I could do this with homebrew sectors, which is ideal for short adventures or short campaigns. But, I can also use Charted Space.

Here's how I'm currently approximating a Dumarest universe, using the OTU.

I wind the clock forward to around Imperial Year 1900.
I remove all the Big Empires. Of course we need "terrain features" so there are large pocket empires per Marc's directions.


The two items I would need to House-Rule-Inject are to make the Zhodani pocket empires of year 1900 into two opposing entities:

The Cyclan. Since they are very nearly a psionic-technic society, I just need to make sure the Zhodani Powers in 1900 are spooky like this.

The Universal Brotherhood. Simimarly controlling, but in the other direction -- instead of working on the top-level powers, these Zhodani work from the poor and needy. The aims, however, seem the same Zhodani drive to manage everyone.