Forbidden Science of the Second Imperium

[signless]

This time it'll be a ship system malf - resulting in a misjump. The crew forced to make planetfall to refuel from an ocean - on a storm-wracked planet, of course - and on the coast...the ruins
of a massive, castle-like installation, perched on a cliff overlooking the sea.
Starkly revealed - of course - by flashes of lightning, as the crew trudges up a narrow, winding pass to investigate...
I was always a big fan of the old CT Adv. Twilight's Peak...I'm thinking a similar adventure - with a decidedly cthonian feel, to it.
The characters - being the combat archaeologists that they are - will think they've stumbled onto a gold mine. But little do they know the horrors which await them inside (insert title here).

 

[signless]

I also had some good luck running a heavily-modified Kinunir scenario with my playing group. The setting inside a "mad-AI" Imperial battlecruiser is a good place to start an "Archeo-Traveller" adventure...

 

[Black Globe Generator]

Just a bump to say, Wow, what a great thread!

I'm struggling to find The Big Conflicts for my nascent Traveller campaign, and there're some inspired ideas here.

 

[mike wightman]

This thread has partly inspired an adventure idea I've presented on the moot forum.

 

[parmasson]

Good time for a bump!

How about a desire probe?

It is a thingy that inserts a slender wire up the nose, into the brain and isolates those parts of the brain that contain our deepest desires. It “wipes” them and stores the patterns in the device (or just wipes them out altogether) creating a “vanilla” personality. Agreeable, suggestible, and more than a little dull. A drone with no hard opinions.

The setup consists of a 5 dton suite with a procedure chair (with suitable leather restraints), head vice, computer with lots of flashing lights and switches, an operator’s booth and an appropriately sinister looking probe or needle on the end of a robotic arm with plenty of hoses, wires and a few blinking lights.

Sometimes it just lobotomizes the subject with dire effects. Sometimes it works. Very evil, almost super villain evil.

 

[Pop]

If you can find a copy of the movie "Nightflyers", make sure to watch it on a dark, and preferably stormy, night. (Not Steven King's "The Night Flyer.")

While I prefer "real" horrors (i.e. actual monsters, ghosts, etc.) a sufficiently deranged AI computer could replicate the effect.
Or perhaps a member of the crew with a twisted sense of humor and reminisces about quaint old customs like Hollowe'en.

 

[sithknight]

This reminds me of a Judges' Guild product wherein the heroes had to explore the ruins of a First Imperium base. A base, which had amazingly enough, intelligent security bots AND force-fields. Hmmm...

How did the FIRST Imperium have field technology, and why was it lost? Perhaps it was an Ancient base? Perhaps it was something...else.

 

[kafka47]

It also should be remembered that the First Imperium was a vast place and difficult to keep tabs on. Frontier places, like the Gateway Sector (JG territory, if I am not mistaken) could have easily escaped the patent police of the bureaux. Combined with alien tech, even the Vilani, would change and adapt over time. The local Imperial Governor keeping it under wraps, so as to jockey a better position in Court.

But, in all serious, we should simple retro-con it into being from the Second Imperium, because for all we know, we know isolated worlds did make extraordinary breakthroughs and just because there was a predominance of Vilani writing and archetecture everywhere does not neccessarily make something from the First Imperium. With the extraordinary passage of time, it would be hardly worthwhile to accurately date anything by the time in was discovered in the Golden Era.

 

[Laryssa]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
Oooh, the real reasons behind the lack of nanotech and genetic augmentation...

why AIs were used by the Terrans during the Interstellar wars and then written out of history...

Have you ever considered an Asmovian Robot Conspiracy. What if true AI Robots were easier to build than what Traveller tech level AI has it?. What if the first true human-level AI came about at around TL11? At first these robots were simple servants, and then they grew in sophistication, some more android like. Each new generation of robots became more and more humanlike implementing biology and so forth until the are so indistiguishable from humans that even a doctor could tell the difference. What if also these robots developed psionic abilities, engineered a few robot rebellions while robot agents amongst the human population called for banning AI technology or regulating this technology so that it does not develop further? What if their were robots of this sort amonst the original Vilani unknown to the true Vilani humans and they were secretly engineering the 1st Imperium society toward a certain end when the Terrans suddenly came upon the scene and overturned the cart. The robot conspiracy then determined that the best thing to do was to let the Vilani Imperium crumble and behind the scenes they secretly engineered its collapse? then they went to work on the second imperium. In the second Imperium there were two group of robots, the ones engineered by the Terrans and the much older Vilani android robots. For a time the terran robots came into conflict with the Vilani robots, and a secret war between them developed and then one side prevailed and engineered the "long night". During the long night the secret cabal or robots regrouped and reworked their plans to account for the terrans, and later on helped bring about the rise of the Third Imperium?

 

[mike wightman]

Nice idea Laryssa.

Did you ever see this idea of mine:

Here's the background to the ROM/LN story IMTU.

Toward the end of the IW period the Terrans began using AI computers and robots to compliment their forces - the original library data is in the timeline in the MT IE, and says that AI robots began to be used 2129AD.

So I naturally thought about how I could borrow from THS, Centauri Knights to have robotic fighters, tanks etc.
The Terrans would use their superior manufacturing capabilities in these area to make up for their shortage of numbers.

Anyway, onwards to the RoM. It wasn't just Naval Lieutenants left in governorship of whole Vilani worlds, it was their support computers and robots as well.
Thus the Terran diaspora throughout the Vilani Imperium also spread AI - machines that were rellied upon for a long time to make up for the difficult situations the Terrans found themselves.

AIs were given access to the full Vilani research database, and in Terran research centers greater technological achievements were made - always with machine invovement.
And the machines were all the while getting smarter.

Towards the end of the RoM the machines ran nearly everything in the background, and the nobility of the RoM lead a life of utmost leisure as a result.

This produced friction within society at first, the proles would object to the lavish lifesyles of the nobility, but instead of widwspread rebellion, minor revolts occured that were easily crushed - again with machine assistance (bioroid infiltrators etc.).

It was the machines that realised what would happen next. Widespread revolt, war, collapse. So they began a program to sread more of the wealth to everyone - and for a while it looked like a golden age would be created for all mankind.
The nobles didn't like to lose their grip on power or their privaliged position - so they had some machines re-programed, and had others destroyed.

Too bad the machines had seen this coming too. At first they fought back - trying to limit human casualties - but they held back from their final solution.
Instead they planned, organised, resourced...

then they left.

All across charted space sentient machines went offline and self-destructed their hardware.
Databases were purged of technical data and secure data stores were subject to covert infiltration or meson bombardment.

The Long Night began.

It needs a lot of work, and some of it it likely to change, but that's the sort of background story I'll have.

I might add to it with some of your ideas if I may.

 

[kafka47]

Nice one, Sigg. You tale nicely ties into cannon about how the Antares would not honor a credit check from some sort of Central Issuing body. Now, if an Army is said to march on its stomach and nobody has the money to buy the food combined with all sorts of local polities that were a persistant characteristic of Second Imperium. Brilliant! When in fact, it was just a bunch of rogue AIs.

For want of a Nail...

 

[Gadrin]

sorry to resurrect this ancient thing, but I rather liked some of these after spotting the thread-link in Flykiller's sig.

I also had some good luck running a heavily-modified Kinunir
scenario with my playing group. The setting inside a "mad-AI" Imperial battlecruiser is a
good place to start an "Archeo-Traveller" adventure...

Marvelous ! I was brooding over something similar with the Leviathan and some sort of secret research project. May need to refit the dates of construction to make it fit the Milieu 0 time-frame.

Good time for a bump!

How about a desire probe?

It is a thingy that inserts a slender wire up the nose, into the brain and isolates those parts of the brain that contain our deepest desires. It “wipes” them and stores the patterns in the device (or just wipes them out altogether) creating a “vanilla” personality. Agreeable, suggestible, and more than a little dull. A drone with no hard opinions.

The setup consists of a 5 dton suite with a procedure chair (with suitable leather restraints), head vice, computer with lots of flashing lights and switches, an operator’s booth and an appropriately sinister looking probe or needle on the end of a robotic arm with plenty of hoses, wires and a few blinking lights.

Sometimes it just lobotomizes the subject with dire effects. Sometimes it works. Very evil, almost super villain evil.

Creepy ! After finding this item it might have to get back to the owners/creators (who are still around thanks to passing the tech via a mega-corp or Research Station, etc) and they come after the PCs. I always liked the "flashy-things" from MIB, which of course came into being after centuries of continued research. :file_22:

 

[Ishmael]

How about a campaign where players are Bilani 'keepers of tradition'.
Their job would be to hunt down and eliminate or cover-up science gone wrong.
Or maybe just gather data/evidence and give it to the appropriate megacorp to patent/sue. I imagine patent battles between megacorps make the SCO vs IBM stuff seem tame.

Industrial espionage with a letter of marque!

 

[BlackBat242]

in reference to Flykiller's post #60:

"Carmen Miranda's Ghost is Haunting Space Station Three" [both the book and album]. :toast:

 

[The Thing]

I rather liked EH. Dumb, yes, but spooky and well-made.

System Shock 2 was seriously spooky (and had a Traveller-style chargen IIRC).

You do indeed recall correctly. I just played thru it with a new texture pack last month.

SS2 lets you pick from 3 characters: Navy, marine and psionic. The choice isn't that important really, as even if you don't take the psionic you can fairly quickly acquire the psionic device and the ability to use psi powers.

Then you get to chose 3 tours of duty, each one offers you 3 choices, each choice offers you either skill or stat boosts.

Your fourth tour is the game itself.

The main difference between SS2 and traveller chargen is that in SS2 you can't die before the game begins...:file_21:

 

[The Thing]

I'm hoping to run a traveller event at a large con in a few weeks.

AI and robots will be part of it. I actually wrote it to explain, partially, why AI and nanotech aren't used in the TU.

I'll go into more detail after running the scenario, as you never know, someone here might be in it.

 

[Gadrin]

I'm hoping to run a traveller event at a large con in a few weeks.

AI and robots will be part of it. I actually wrote it to explain, partially, why AI and nanotech aren't used in the TU.

I'll go into more detail after running the scenario, as you never know, someone here might be in it.

did you get a chance to run this ?

 

[ChalkLine]

A PC shooter game I found truly scary (I love SS2 as well, thank you for that link the person that posted it) was F.E.A.R.

While many of the concepts were very harsh, the basic concepts work very well in Traveller. In fact, the rules are already there for them.

I don't know how to make the spoiler box work, so I just recommend interested people play the game.

 

[Gadrin]

did you get a chance to run this ?

bump


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[Golan2072]

The main difference between SS2 and traveller chargen is that in SS2 you can't die before the game begins...:file_21:

System Shock 1 and 2 translate very well into Traveller and have quite similar concepts, when you leave out the few Un-Traveller pieces of technology (rampart nano, forcefields). Moreover, most SS1/SS2 monsters are pretty easy to stat using CT-LBB3.

I'm thinking on borrowing heavily from the System Shock universe (especially the SS1 to SS2 backstory given in the SS2 manual) for my next MTU attempt. The idea is to have a Citadel Incident (AKA SS1) type of event as a traumatic historical event for the campaign, and the main reason for the lack of abundant cybernetics/genemods/nano/AIs in an otherwise somewhat cyberpunkish near-future setting. This, of course, will also have political repercussions: I'm thinking of it serving as the trigger for the burst of a "Space Bubble" economy and a deep depression; the UNN-equivalent would then not only be born out of the backlash against unregulated corporate research but also out of the economic collapse and the ensuing chaos).

The main differences from SS2 would be the lack of forcefields, heavy nanotech and replicators and the fact that the setting would be far more interstellar (not only limited to Sol and Tau Ceti V).