T
Trent
Guest
If you can ignore the melodramatic title and a few other relatively small and fixable flaws, you'll find a mighty fine Traveller adventure waiting for you.
"Planet of the Damned" (No, it's not about earth...) is a SF novel by Harry "the stainless steel rat" Harrison.
Written in the 60's it's a fairly hard SF novel with few superscience devices, like FTL tech. The gadgets are quite constrained.
In sum, the ruling class of the planet Dis are intent on a suicidal war with their neighbors, and a group of interstellar peacemakers and philanthropists recruit a superman to help prevent the extermination of an entire planetary populace and the cultural destruction of it's neighboring civilization.
The people of Dis are descended from humans marooned there after a great collapse, and have adapted to a harsh, brutal world. While they've become nearly barbaric, they are still recognizably, and in some ways admirably, human.
The ruling class, known as the Magters, are quite different from the typical Disan, and do not behave in any normal fashion. They've issued an ultimatum to their neighboring world demanding total surrender and the natives have reluctantly decided that total nuclear destruction of Dis' surface may be necessary.
A group of peacemakers recruits a young superman to help them, and he reaches Dis with just 72 hours before the bombs begin dropping.
The novel has flaws beyond the melodramatic title. The main character is a full blooded ubermensch (Yeah yeah I know it's supposed to have an umlaut over the U, I don't know how to make this keyboard do one...) next to whom characters like Indiana Jones and James Bond would appear quite human and realistic.
There's the obligatory female lead who is properly weak and helpless, having to be carried about by Ubermensch, and who's main skill is to be certain of her own inability to do anything until, of course, Ubermensch tells her she can do it, whereupon his uber confidence fills her (Stop snickering, dammit.) and she can suddenly accomplish anything.
YAAAWN. Sheesh, I'm a borderline misogynist and I found the portrayal of women in this book annoying...
While feminists would have bookoo problems with the novel, the author pretty much makes everyone else into total untermenschen (Yeah, yeah, still no umlaut.) in order to make Ubermensch appear even more uber.
Asides from those easily correctable issues, there's a pretty good SF story here, and, even better, one that would easily be adaptable to almost any version of Traveller with minimal effort. Change a few gadgets and you've got it. The basic plot and secrets require no real change.
So we have a good, fairly hard 60's novel by a well known and renowned writer that would very easily port over to a traveller adventure. Anyone want anything more? Well, how about getting it for 1$? I found a copy of it, new, at a dollar general store recently, so you can likely scrounge one up fairly cheap, a lot cheaper than buying a traveller adventure, for sure.
The novel's not too well known, so odds are you can spring it on your traveller group without anyone knowing WTF is up with the magter from page one.
"Planet of the Damned" (No, it's not about earth...) is a SF novel by Harry "the stainless steel rat" Harrison.
Written in the 60's it's a fairly hard SF novel with few superscience devices, like FTL tech. The gadgets are quite constrained.
In sum, the ruling class of the planet Dis are intent on a suicidal war with their neighbors, and a group of interstellar peacemakers and philanthropists recruit a superman to help prevent the extermination of an entire planetary populace and the cultural destruction of it's neighboring civilization.
The people of Dis are descended from humans marooned there after a great collapse, and have adapted to a harsh, brutal world. While they've become nearly barbaric, they are still recognizably, and in some ways admirably, human.
The ruling class, known as the Magters, are quite different from the typical Disan, and do not behave in any normal fashion. They've issued an ultimatum to their neighboring world demanding total surrender and the natives have reluctantly decided that total nuclear destruction of Dis' surface may be necessary.
A group of peacemakers recruits a young superman to help them, and he reaches Dis with just 72 hours before the bombs begin dropping.
The novel has flaws beyond the melodramatic title. The main character is a full blooded ubermensch (Yeah yeah I know it's supposed to have an umlaut over the U, I don't know how to make this keyboard do one...) next to whom characters like Indiana Jones and James Bond would appear quite human and realistic.
There's the obligatory female lead who is properly weak and helpless, having to be carried about by Ubermensch, and who's main skill is to be certain of her own inability to do anything until, of course, Ubermensch tells her she can do it, whereupon his uber confidence fills her (Stop snickering, dammit.) and she can suddenly accomplish anything.
YAAAWN. Sheesh, I'm a borderline misogynist and I found the portrayal of women in this book annoying...
While feminists would have bookoo problems with the novel, the author pretty much makes everyone else into total untermenschen (Yeah, yeah, still no umlaut.) in order to make Ubermensch appear even more uber.
Asides from those easily correctable issues, there's a pretty good SF story here, and, even better, one that would easily be adaptable to almost any version of Traveller with minimal effort. Change a few gadgets and you've got it. The basic plot and secrets require no real change.
So we have a good, fairly hard 60's novel by a well known and renowned writer that would very easily port over to a traveller adventure. Anyone want anything more? Well, how about getting it for 1$? I found a copy of it, new, at a dollar general store recently, so you can likely scrounge one up fairly cheap, a lot cheaper than buying a traveller adventure, for sure.
The novel's not too well known, so odds are you can spring it on your traveller group without anyone knowing WTF is up with the magter from page one.
