Another Literary Inspiration for Classic Traveller: Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure

[creativehum]

I just started reading City of the Chasch, the first book in Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure series set on the world of Tschai. (The next three book are Servants of the Wankh, The Dirdir, and The Pnume.)

I know Miller has referenced Vance's Demon Prince series. But within pages I came across this:

Marin frowned, rubbed his nose with his knuckle. "I'll send down the scouts, then we'll back away, out of range."

Marin spoke a code-word, gave orders to the scouts Adam Reith and Paul Waunder.

"Fast as possible; we're being detected. Rendezvous at System axis, up, Point D as in Deneb."

"Right, sir. System axis, up, Point D as in Deneb. Give us three minutes."

Commander Marin went to the macroscope and began an anxious search of the planet's surface, clicking through a dozen wavelengths. "There's a window at about 3000 angstroms, nothing good. The scouts will have to do all of it."

"I'm glad I never trained as a scout," remarked Second Officer Walgrave.

"Otherwise I also might be sent down upon strange and quite possibly horrid planets."

"A scout isn't trained," Deale told him. "He exists: half acrobat, half mad scientist, half cat burglar, half-"

"That's several halves too many."

"Just barely adequate. A scout is a man who likes a change."

Note that the books begins with two scouts. By the end of chapter two, one of those scouts is dead.


And later, this:

Reith [the Scout] took the rapier which presently was tendered him. He hefted it, whipped the blade back and forth. Never had he handled so supple a sword, and he had handled many, for swordsmanship was an element of his training.

The story is basically a planetary romance adventure, but with more of an SF underpinning. A guy crashes on a planet, gets picked up by tribesman, learns more about several competing alien races who somehow have humans as slaves (even though no humans from Earth have ever logged this planet before) and gets caught up in adventures.

While it doesn't have the feel of the later CT line, I can easily see it being the kind of thing the could have inspired an entire campaign of Traveller back in the '70s. There's a mix of low tech and high tech, scouts defying dangerous odd, an exotic world to explore full of both ecology and culture as puzzle boxes to unravel if one is to survive.


I had never heard of the books before. Thought I'd mention them.

 

[Nightwind1]

Space Gamer 40 (I think) had an entire article converting various things from this series to Traveller stats.

 

[creativehum]

Thanks for this!

Just looked it up...
It was an Special Traveller Issue. Issue 40. June 1981. Here's the online PDF at the Space Gamer Archive.

Eight pages of the issue are devoted the world of Tschai, starting on page 17.

The article include a map of Tschai, random animal encounters, random NPC encounters, and descriptions of Tschai's warring races.