Non OTU: Alternate Traveller Settings

[bjjones37]

Whenever I think of an alternate setting for Traveller, C. J. Cherryh comes to mind.

I get so tired of so-called aliens that are humans with brow ridges. Oops, there goes another alien. I can tell, he has a brow ridge. I want an alien to be, you know, alien. Not just some guy with a plastic face attachment and a phony language.

C J Cherryh has some of the best aliens. I am specifically referring to Serpent's Reach, though there are others. In Serpent's Reach, you have a planet with a small but very elite group of extremely long-lived humans that are on the verge of civil war. But ultimately it is the indigenous alien population that must decide who will succeed and their motives are ... alien. A fascinating read with a lot of potential.

If you prefer a medieval feel, the Gate of Ivrel is straight up science fiction but has a strong fantasy feel to it. Horsemen with swords and bows and a lone woman with a laser pistol and something far more deadly on a lonely mission to close an interdimensional portal that is corrupting the ecosystem and affecting the sanity of those near it.

If you are into interstellar trade, Mechanter's Luck has possibilities. His family was killed by pirates - or possibly rogue elements of the Earth fleet. His family, the crew of his ship. Now he is forced to cope with an empty ship filled with the ghosts of his memory. And replacing a crew of four with partial automation and the recorded voice of a dead relative...

They are some of my favorites and two of them are from the Alliance-Union Universe.

If you have read these, please comment. If you have not, please read them. And comment.

 

[flykiller]

I want an alien to be, you know, alien ... C J Cherryh has some of the best aliens.

(her aliens are not all that alien - probably why you like them)

how alien? most players wouldn't know what to do with any kind of real alien. I'm not sure what I'd do with them either. games are about action, meaning player character action, and that means the action has to mesh with the player character's format and the player's understanding - thus rubber-suit aliens.

 

[Adam Dray]

How about aliens like in Arrival?

 

[Ex_Pendable]

The aliens offered in the Pride of Chanur, especially the Hani, I thought made for excellent aliens.

Have you read the Well of Souls series by Jack Chalker? I thought that he had some interesting aliens in there. Wouldn't that be a fun world to get stranded on?

 

[Enoki]

There seems to be plenty of aliens in Traveller and you can always make some more up if you don't like the ones there are.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

How about aliens like in Arrival?

Always the double-edged sword of aliens. Not different enough and you have humans in funny suits. Too different and there will not be enough points of commonality to work together.

 

[bjjones37]

That is just the thing. I like the idea of being able to overcome barriers of understanding through a combination of intelligence and empathy (I see a dice roll there). But only partially. Not ever fully. There must always be concepts that will never be translatable lending an air of unpredictability to the relation dynamic. I find unpredictability interesting, at least in theory. But if they exist in our physical universe then there will always be certain points of commonality that can be used to identify areas of common interest. And of course motive must remain one of the most obscured areas, providing some mystery. But ultimately we are usually more concerned with outcome than motive. And why does intelligence have to be humaniform in appearance? Dolphin intelligence is considered to be on par with that of a young human.

And yeah, I found the Arrival aliens to be physiologically interesting, but would have preferred if their thought processes and motives had remained more obscured, just revealing a little bit. Really liked the movie though.

 

[bjjones37]

There seems to be plenty of aliens in Traveller and you can always make some more up if you don't like the ones there are.

No complaints there, it was largely a poke at the "aliens" in Star Trek. I have difficulty finding anything alien about them. I find the droyne of particular interest, but I was mainly trying to suggest the possibility of using one of these three books as a setting.

 

[bjjones37]

(her aliens are not all that alien - probably why you like them)

how alien? most players wouldn't know what to do with any kind of real alien. I'm not sure what I'd do with them either. games are about action, meaning player character action, and that means the action has to mesh with the player character's format and the player's understanding - thus rubber-suit aliens.

Have you read "Serpents Reach"? I considered the Majat to be excellent aliens and the story-line would suggest how to interact with them. Then there is 40,000 in Gehenna.

I see your point about not knowing what to do with them though. It is not easy to see the potential strengths of an unidentified diversity. Culturally we tend to stick with the knowns.

 

[bjjones37]

The aliens offered in the Pride of Chanur, especially the Hani, I thought made for excellent aliens.

Have you read the Well of Souls series by Jack Chalker? I thought that he had some interesting aliens in there. Wouldn't that be a fun world to get stranded on?

I did enjoy reading the Chanur series and thought they provided an interesting culture.

I did try reading a book by Jack Chalker, don't remember which one, but I found certain elements in it to be personally distasteful and it overshadowed the rest of the book for me. Same with Gregory Benford. I have no intention to disparage their abilities as authors.

But Frederick Brown, Larry Niven, and Frederick Pohl have also provided some interesting examples of aliens.

 

[Gray Lensman]

Niven and Pohl did some good ones.

A couple of the sources I use (both as is and for INSPIRATION

Star Wars

Other Sci Fi

 

[aramis]

Niven and Pohl did some good ones.

Niven also wrote episodes for Land of the Lost...

But in his known space, the Kzin are Samurai Cats.

The puppeteer and moties are so iconic that inclusion is disruptive to verisimilitude.

The Gumidgy almost unplayable. (Sentient whales)
The Grogs are sessile, and so barely playable as well.

 

[Timerover51]

Barlow's Guide to Extraterrestrials is a good source for inspiration, and I have a couple of copies around here somewhere. I have read maybe half of the books covered by it, and the best aliens for me are still the Mesklinites created by Hal Clement.

However, there is a distinct limit as to how "alien" an alien can be, as it has to be able to relate to humans, who are the readers or players. If you go with a totally different way of thinking and operating, how are the players going to deal with a being who has no concept of why the humans think that way and vice versa. When teaching my World War 2 class, we used the Japanese Imperial Conferences notes to show how Japan went about deciding to engage the U.S. in World War 2. The only student in the class that could follow the thinking was from Korea. The thought patterns and concepts the Japanese were using simply were not understandable by someone with a background in Western European thinking.

Conversely, I had a Chinese professor in college who taught folklore, and whom I spent some time with talking. He had major problems with some concepts in Western European folklore, which Western Europeans assumed were universal, such as the Oedipus Complex, that simply did not occur in Oriental folklore. That was a case where the idea was totally alien to him.

Basically, if the "alien" is not a human with a rubber suit on, the readers or players will not be able to relate to and have some modicum of understanding of their thinking or motivations.

 

[RandyB]

Niven also wrote episodes for Land of the Lost...

But in his known space, the Kzin are Samurai Cats.

The puppeteer and moties are so iconic that inclusion is disruptive to verisimilitude.

The Gumidgy almost unplayable. (Sentient whales)
The Grogs are sessile, and so barely playable as well.

And the Bandersnatch...

 

[RandyB]

Barlow's Guide to Extraterrestrials is a good source for inspiration, and I have a couple of copies around here somewhere. I have read maybe half of the books covered by it, and the best aliens for me are still the Mesklinites created by Hal Clement.

However, there is a distinct limit as to how "alien" an alien can be, as it has to be able to relate to humans, who are the readers or players. If you go with a totally different way of thinking and operating, how are the players going to deal with a being who has no concept of why the humans think that way and vice versa. When teaching my World War 2 class, we used the Japanese Imperial Conferences notes to show how Japan went about deciding to engage the U.S. in World War 2. The only student in the class that could follow the thinking was from Korea. The thought patterns and concepts the Japanese were using simply were not understandable by someone with a background in Western European thinking.

Conversely, I had a Chinese professor in college who taught folklore, and whom I spent some time with talking. He had major problems with some concepts in Western European folklore, which Western Europeans assumed were universal, such as the Oedipus Complex, that simply did not occur in Oriental folklore. That was a case where the idea was totally alien to him.

Basically, if the "alien" is not a human with a rubber suit on, the readers or players will not be able to relate to and have some modicum of understanding of their thinking or motivations.

OTOH, an "alien" alien gives the players the opportunity to invent and express their own behavioral and moral standards without being judged according to human (or Western) norms.

 

[aramis]

And the Bandersnatch...

Then there are the moties....

 

[kilemall]

Basically, if the "alien" is not a human with a rubber suit on, the readers or players will not be able to relate to and have some modicum of understanding of their thinking or motivations.

I don't know that it is necessary for players to understand the why- just that the ref does, and is consistent within the aliens' reality.

One minute they are handing over fist-sized pure iridium nodules for novelty dipping birds, next they are slaughtering every human on the planet- gives you the heebie-jeebies, lets everyone know they are not in Kansas anymore, and the player that can figure out the why gets untold riches being the only person able to deal with a whole race.

 

[kilemall]

OTOH, an "alien" alien gives the players the opportunity to invent and express their own behavioral and moral standards without being judged according to human (or Western) norms.

Heh , I fully expect we would run across aliens where they 'violate' genetically coded norms we didn't know we universally had and generate disgust we can't help but feel.

 

[mike wightman]

If you want alien aliens look to the Cthulhu mythos for inspiration...

 

[mike wightman]

They are some of my favorites and two of them are from the Alliance-Union Universe.

Did you know they are all from the Alliance -Union universe, its history spans nearly every book Cherryh has written.
here's the Wikipedia page on her universe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance–Union_universe

If you have read these, please comment. If you have not, please read them. And comment.

I have them all, I am a great fan of her work. Some like Rimrunners and Tripoint make good fodder for Traveller adventures, the Chanur sequence has a lot of Traveller similarities (the Hani and the Aslan are pretty close) and as you say some of her aliens do have motivations that make them believable as aliens.

I'm quite a fan of the alien races in Traveller 2300 too.

My summer project this year will be to detail the T5 introduced race the Abyssals for my Traveller universe.