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.