Horror in TNE

[kafka47]

With TNE being a much darker setting than mainstream Traveller. I was wondering if one wants to talk about the horrors that now would inhabit Chartered Space. By horror, I mean the sheer destruction invoked by the virus and the final days of the Black War. TNE alludes to graveyard worlds but can we think of others?

For instance, coming across xenophobic planetary population where once a peaceful minor race inhabited.

Old automated planetary defence shields that buried within an approaching planetoid, and the players must race to stop it, not, knowing if the virus has animated the station or the old Aslan protocals are active which are set to kill non-Aslan.

The leftovers of a space fleet whose jump engines were disabled, partially salvaged, partially active.

Finding an emergency beacon active on a previously "uninhabited" former Red Zone planet with scantly Library Data.

 

[doomhunk]

TNE isn't automatically darker IMHO, although I tend to slant it that way myself. The old Imperium offered very many opportunites for horror, just what *is* on all those many interdicted worlds? The New Era does lend itself more towards new hope and optimism, after the horrors of the Black War and Hard Times. I tend to go for the hope/disappointment contrast that seems to abound in TNE. I deepen the disappointment troughs towards the fourth act of the story arc, and then hit home with something stark at the climax, with the players snatching optimism out of the jaws of horror 50% of the time, and emerging with dignity, wiser but with less sanity the rest of the time.

What's been interesting for me is how my players reacted to TNE - in all our classic Traveller games, no matter how much I saddled them with dependents and loved ones and reasons to come home, they felt no ties to home and ranged far and wide through the universe. As soon as we started playing TNE and I got the feel of the New Era across to them, they kept going home to check that their wives and kids were safe. From feedback, they seemed to feel that the RC was a much more coherent universe.

Anyway, I used their newly found sentiment to great effect by threatening their families in a drug-fuelled crime wave on their homeworld, and by endangering their headstrong kids who tried to run away from home and conquer the stars like mum & dad, by stowing away on merchant ships. Needless to say one of the kids died and another is still held hostage out in the Wilds.... I guess if I was really chasing the horror angle I'd have really nasty stuff happen, but I prefer to tug at the players' heartstrings more gently....

I think the horrific things that are out there in the Wilds are mainly a lot of basic things that were previously eradicated or kept under control by the old Imperium.

Disease is the biggie IMTU, with lots of new nasty diseases running rampant and unchecked through many of the planetary systems. IMTU there was a LOT of biological warfare during the Black War. My PCs have been quarantined quite a lot on their way back from expeditions (sort of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within kind of feel to it).

Religion is the next one - despite my own faith I recognise that more people on Earth are killed in the name of religion than for anything else, so I have transferred that to my TU. Loads of religions have sprung up in reaction to the Hard Times and Long Night, and I have managed to get even my players suspicious of certain high tech devices (they just can't shake the boogieman stories they were told as kids about Black Globes, Lucanian technoology, etc).

Avaricious self-interest is the next. I'll cite the bad guy from FF:TSW as a good example. M TU has psychotic robot inventors, deluded scientists, ill-advised politicians, harmful supposedly 'helpful' genetic modified crops, etc.

I began my campaign with all this endemic in the RC, and when the players got out there into the Wilds it was all there times ten.

Individual horrors have been:
the discovery of the planet-wide practice of wiring disobedient citizens into machines that torture them for the rest of their lives;
the child-labourers of the planet moon who are worked to death so their parents can live in luxury;
the botched cloning experiments of the science community on a paradise planet in the Wilds;
a planet whose ruling military elite experiment with germs and chemicals on their own troops in battle;
the tragic artificial lifeforms of former high-tech planets who have lived through the dark times thinking they were human until they met the PCs from the RC and suffered critical culture shock that destroyed their stable society (nice one Star Vikings );
planets where the arrival of the PCs brought germs that wiped out the un-immunised planetary population within months of arrival (that adventure was the subject of a cover-up and war crimes trial back on Aubaine);

etc

All my horrors are human-based, it seems to hit my players harder that way, than say an old doomsday device etc. When they have to go to a boneyard world I always make sure they encounter the real lies that once lived there. It helps that one of my PCs is a remnant, and that player is very good at playing the distraught melancholy that comes from being part of the civilisation that caused all this destruction.

 

[wrandrews]

I do not use the TNE background (never cared for Virus), but for horror I like to concentrate on the effect war has on individuals. Widows, orphans, homeless pets, and so on.

Robots are good as well, and can prove to be quite dangerous.

I once used an Ancient (warrior) with great success, but this cannot be done more than once.

 

[kafka47]

Originally posted by doomhunk:
TNE isn't automatically darker IMHO, although I tend to slant it that way myself. The old Imperium offered very many opportunites for horror, just what *is* on all those many interdicted worlds? The New Era does lend itself more towards new hope and optimism, after the horrors of the Black War and Hard Times...

I agree that TNE need be all dark and there is very much the thread of keeping the Flame alive. But, it would be interesting to have one Milieu showing the folly of Humaniti's ways and the sheer arrogance of pride. That is why I think TNE is perfect for a darker milieu, as you can see in my prose dealing with the Fourth Imperium.

So draw the curtains, and see the Nightfall (as in the Asimov SS) and watch a civilization go completely and utterly mad. All sorts of cults could also roam through Chartered Space looking for converts and sacrifices (afterall, who is to say that Vargr will not go on a bloodlust in all the chaos)...

 

[Golan2072]

Originally posted by doomhunk:
All my horrors are human-based, it seems to hit my players harder that way, than say an old doomsday device etc.

Exactly. That's why (if I'll ever run TNE) I'll greatly downplay the role of the Virus - a Doomsday Machine by itself - in the Imperium's fall. Human stupidity, Human greed and socio-economical contradictions that have existed years before the Rebellion are the reasn for the Collapse. The tragedy is in that no external force has felled the Imperium - it fell because its leaders were short-sighted and arrogant, because each of them wanted it all for himself and ended (in most cases) with nothing; the corporation then tried to flee to their well-defended central worlds, "cutting their losses" by leaving the masses to starve behind...

Not all horror in TNE should be post-aplcalyptic. Not every world is dead; some are worse than that. Petty dictators who rule extremely ruthlessly simply because they can and because they know nobody will come to stop them; nobles who keep themselves alive by anagathics (manufactured at a great economic cost) while most of their subjects die from easily-prevented deseases; leaders with good intentions who eventually find themselves comitting atrocities because the harsh conditions leave no other way around to keep their pocket-polity alive as a whole; crazed fleets, crewed by anagathics-treated crews, fighting destructive battles for causes which are dead for almost a century; thugs who have power by a fluke of chance and who abuse it brutally.

 

[Antony]

One world sprang to mind, can't remember its name but it was an interdicted world in the Solomani Rim. It's the one where the local bisphere contains an organism which extracts metal from ships, from blood etc. It was colonised, all the colonists died. The scout service interdicted it.

It looks like a garden world. What if the interdiction satellites have failed/been destroyed and some hapless person(s) land there and depart before being killed by the organism (I recommend this not be the PCs).

Then some government or the PCs discover this visit and have to stop that ship touching another world etc. A shipload of refugees, women and children, they are not showing any symptoms yet but...

 

[Badbru]

I don't go in for horror as such in my games though I have made my players feel... lets say "queesy" once or twice.

The first I can recall was way back when we first started Traveller by converting/hijacking their T2k players to Uragyadn of the seven pillars. The group had done no intel gathering prior to getting stuck in to blowing up the trains. Ergo the first train they hit is full of slave miners too sick to continue working being rotated out of the mines. Describing the carnage of a train derailed from an elevated monorail line full of malnourised overworked slaves bought the situation home.

The second was much more recently. In my current game the group went to a world which still has a minor virus infestation. Trouble for the virus is that the world was predominately TL-8 at the time. TL-8 is the lowest end of the spectrum for virus and more particularly for robots. So what is a virus to do that wants to see and control its world but is limmited to TL-8 production?
Well this one rounds up humans and lops off their arms at the shoulder. It then adds via a backpack/harness style arangement two lightweight robotic arms and communication and survielance equipment. It now has mobile (leg mobile) observation units which are dependant on the virus to stay alive. Cold, Brutal, and barely functional the local free populace has come to call them, among other things, Symbibots.

My players are yet to deal with this situation but needless to say they were appalled by it and it is very high on their things to rectify list.

 

[alanb]

Originally posted by Employee 2-4601:
leaders with good intentions who eventually find themselves comitting atrocities because the harsh conditions leave no other way around to keep their pocket-polity alive as a whole;

This was one of my favourites.

I used two main settings back when I was playing TNE. One was the Hiver Client State in the Hinterworlds, and the other was a pocket empire in the Wilds.

The PE's location varied - I never found a location I was perfectly happy with - but it was consistently the weakest possible state that I thought I could get away with. To put it simply, it was a TED with a handful of rustbucket ships.

This meant that access to resources like health care was distinctly uneven - there wasn't enough high-tech stuff to go around. Furthermore, the state's tiny fleet meant that it still had to try to buy off Vampire Fleets with new crew members and recovered technology.

The state itself was, of course, a dictatorship. I generally based it on the "Diasporan Star Empire" (Kide) from Path of Tears. The theory was that sooner or later the PCs would get around to launching a coup - and then have to deal with running the state themselves...

I never got to run a campaign long enough for this to happen.

 

[mike wightman]

I think that a lot of the stuff that came up in the dark secrets of the second Imperium thread - the serious bits anyway - could be adapted to a TNE setting instead.

 

[Golan2072]

(OOC: this is from my Unity of Gaia variant polity in my variant on TNE; Natalia Myron was the President of the Unity of Gaia between 1137 to 1157; the following was written in 1171, a year before Natalia Myron's death at the age of 92.

From the writing of Sister Natalia Myron, 1171
"I can already hear you, my future critics, sharpening your pens, growing fat in your soft couches of whatever comfortable future you live in, pouring out tons of bleeding-heart arguments against my work, against my dream, against what I had to do.

But I do not live in that hypothetical prosperous, peaceful future; I live here, in the twelf century by the outdated Imperial calander. Imagine yourself for one, my future critics, in these times, in my place.

Have you ever been forced to choose to which cryo-compartment to divert the remaining power of a failing starship, knowing that whatever you do, half of the cryo-passengers would die, and all you could do is choose who lives, and who dies?

Have you ever found yourself ordering your SDBs to fire on a fleet of large civilian transports carrying refugees from the Outlands, knowing that if you will spare the refugees, you will most likely recieve the deadly Virus carried by the transports' computers?

Have you ever faced, as an administrator, a massive, subsector-wide food shortage? Have you ever faced hoarding, speculation and black-marketeering of the few remaining food supplies, knowing that these hoarders, speculators and black-market men are profiting over the very lifeblood of untold masses? Could you imagine yourself sticking to the usual, long-drawn democratic procedure of investigation and trial of these criminals when the masses starve? I used force; I used what you'd call draconic methods. But the speculators were dead in short order, and the masses were fed.

Have you ever faced the pressing and urgent military need to eliminate an important supply station for one of your bitter enemies when the only thing you had in your disposal was a small raiding force only capable of a single hit-and-run attack? I used nuclear weapons against a planet which also had a civilian population. But otherwise the enemy would have done worse things to my people.

How do you think it feels to fight all your life for the right of the masses to freely elect their leaders, and then suspend the elections because you are fighting a desperate war on atleast four fronts, are facing shortages of almost every possible crucial resource, and know for certain that traitors and spies lurk beneath every stone in your territory, and thus your polity simply doesn't have the time and resources for the complex process of interstellar elections?

How do you think it feels to lie in your bed at 5:00 AM local time, after a sleepless night, scared of what the next day will bring, scared of what you will have to do, and then get up because you know that there are so many things that have to be done?

How do you think it feels to look into the mirror and see yourself slowly transforming into the very monster you were fighting for your entire life?

I have killed people. I have used what you can call tyrannical methods. So much blood is on my hands. But the most important thing, the Unity of Gaia, survives as a single flame of hope against the night of decay and barbarism. I did what I did because there was no other choice. The people have voted me into the office of Presidency, they have entrusted me with the task of coordinating their fight for survival against the forces of the encrouching night. But I had so little time, so few resources, to do the job with which I have been entrusted. I had no other choice.

Why don't you leave me alone to roll over in my grave in my eternal agony over my own choices, and go instead to investigate the leaders of the late Third Imperium? Why don't you point your sharpened pens of scholarly criticism at those leaders who had almost unimaginable power at their hands, who ruled over so many sectors of space, who lived in a well-fed era of peace, who had all the potential to peacefully and gently solve the problems of their time, yet, out of the greed and lust for power inherit to the aristocratic ruling class to which they belonged, took the road of total war, of unlimited violence? And for what? To die among the burning ruins of their Imperium?

In 1154, the Council tried to put a motion to build statues of me and place them in every major city of the Unity of Gaia. I used my power of veto to prevent this stupidity from being carried out. As long as the Unity of Gaia exists, it is a living monument for me and for my work, making any stattue utterly unnescery. If the Unity of Gaia will fall, what use would be shattered stattues of a woman who's dreams were all shattered?

When I die, bury me in the radioactive mass-graves of Dingir along with my victims; do not build any mosuleum or monument for me; do not attempt to preserve my body after my death. Remember me by carrying on my work, by ensuring the survival of the Unity of Gaia, by spreading the light our Revolution further into the night.

And, to all of you who will end up leading your people, know that such leadership will bring you to betray the things you hold most dear, but also know that if you truely belief in these things you will have to take the position of leadership. I only hope for you that in your time the material conditions will allow you to betray your ideals less, to use more truely democratic methods to push your dream forward."

 

[Erik Boielle]

+++++Human stupidity, Human greed and socio-economical contradictions that have existed years before the Rebellion are the reasn for the Collapse.+++++

Well, I would argue that the Virus, as 'Something man was not mean't to mess with' that they messed with as a result of human failing is fully representitive of the kind of thing you want.

The Virus is also a victim, since it was bred to live live short lives of suffering from which suicide was the only release.

So in falling the Imperium caused more grief for everyone, and its fall was fully their own fault and responsibility. Only a matter of time before the firecrackers got out of hand like...

As for horrors, I'm kinda fond of the idea of a space habitat like Gateway or similar filled with many millions space preserved corpses when the virus blew out the air.

 

[mike wightman]

Employee 2-4601, that's an excellent piece of work, "From the writing of Sister Natalia Myron, 1171".

Thanks for sharing it, I will be using it somehow

 

[Talby]

One area that I found to be fun in generating a feeling of horror in the TNE setting that was not as common in previous Traveller time settings was the ability for a person or small group of them to be isolated very easily. From the relatively empty areas of space to the zero population worlds destroyed by the Virus to J-space (not unique to TNE, of course) it can get pretty lonely out there.

I do like the use of human reactions to the collapse of the Imperium and the things people do to survive, especially those in power. Similar to where humanity is now for us, the things we do to each other tends to be far worse to anything any external forces do to us.

 

[Golan2072]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
Employee 2-4601, that's an excellent piece of work, "From the writing of Sister Natalia Myron, 1171".

Thanks for sharing it, I will be using it somehow

Thanks for the kind words.
Its part of the background material for my variant on TNE, if I'll ever run it. Sister Natalia Myron is one of the prominent historical figures for that variant, especially if the campaign is set in the formet Solomani Rim (renamed to Gaia) sector.