TNE setting distant enough?

[whartung]

The overall meta-point, however, is that ALL of these events happened, somewhere. There are everything from planets nuked to a shiny, glassy sheen up to completely ignored worlds suffering little more than a lack of spare parts and slow decay, to the Regency which has hi tech worlds that missed the mayhem completely.

If you're on one of those blasted back to the stone-age worlds with no outside contact, then, yes, the world, and, in fact the entire Galaxy died one day, with little more than the ramblings of old men to remember by.

Interstellar society in the large "didn't forget", as that's much of what's behind the entire premise of the RC, struggling to get back to the stars that had burned so brightly once before. But depending on which corner of the map you're in, it may well seem that everyone else is dead, and you're all alone now.

There's something for anyone.

 

[LeperColony]

Another interesting preservation source is Virus itself. After the suicidal and homicidal strains are dealt with, you'll be left with AI's who were active participants in the 3I's collapse. Plus, they'll have a clear (if incomplete) memory of the 70 lost years. Any decently sized ship should have an Imperipedia or whatever too.

 

[kafka47]

No, but the number of warheads available was limited, so instead of carpet-bombing each world, the Virus only used enough to make each world so treated uninhabitable. That meant that lots and lots of small, out-of-the-way towns and villages remained physically unscathed. And, as the TNE books so clearly show, many worlds wasn't even visited by Doomslayer Viruses; indeed, a lot of them wasn't visited by Virus at all.


The original, homicidal Virus didn't know any such thing. Most of the evolved Viruses didn't care. And the few that did was up against the existence of ultra-tech data storage devices, most of which (if not all) were surely non-volatile.


People would be far too busy to survive to go hunting for village libraries and burn them down. And once they started to regain civilization, those old books would become valuable antiques.


Quite a few worlds in the 3rd Imperium aren't even using computers. And I have an excellent idea of what the results of the collapse were. The TNE books describe several dozen worlds. Some of them are completely devastated. But a lot more are not completely devastated. And it only takes one surviving copy of a book in all of Charted Space for the information contained in that book to survive.

And all that is before we even consider deliberate knowledge preservation caches.


Hans

I think it is the case of the Monty Python line about the Spanish Inquisition in regard to the Virus. Even worlds have some notion of what was going down nothing could prepare them.

True, Doomslayer did not wreak havoc on all the worlds in Chartered Space but not all worlds had TL at their max due to the Black War which did leave a lot of rubble. Remember, that late MT era had very few safe areas. TL and repositories of knowledge had been declining for some time.

Furthermore, in the highly integrated economy of the Imperium, I can see whole worlds being just turnkey factories for a neighbouring world. So, while TL C world might manufacture grav sleds they rely upon their neighbour at TL F for the grav modules. As trade ceased so the TLs drop and without local knowledge how replicate it...they rely upon simpler technologies.

Again, you keep on coming back to the notion of printed books, we are dealing with a civilization that has long since digitalized their knowledge. And, when the means of accessing that knowledge is gone - either through Virus, TL drops or just sheer destructive madness.

Your village library is merely a terminal that connects to the Amazon kindle site - not really possessing real books. Furthermore, as austerity in the world today shows libraries are being threatened by closures and with that the book disappears. And, as a said think of a world without oil combined with nuclear strikes and generalized madness. And, this is all before basically everything you touch turns against you (ie Virus).

And, the notion that the Virus evolves into something more benign is questionable assumption in TNE Mk I. Yes, Sandman is nice, but one never knows when Sandman might evolve to believing that he is greater than his maker again. When I ran TNE, I used Frankenstein as the model - so even as the Monster becomes more civilized, he does descend further into madness. Furthermore, his creator (which you can count the fragments outside of Oasis and the RC) wants to eliminate him/it - so how will Virus respond there. Self-preservation which accounts for Borgified K'kree.

 

[rancke]

True, Doomslayer did not wreak havoc on all the worlds in Chartered Space but not all worlds had TL at their max due to the Black War which did leave a lot of rubble. Remember, that late MT era had very few safe areas. TL and repositories of knowledge had been declining for some time.

All it takes is one. And we know for a fact that the entire Regency survived intact, as did a good part of the rest of Charted Space.

Again, you keep on coming back to the notion of printed books, we are dealing with a civilization that has long since digitalized their knowledge. And, when the means of accessing that knowledge is gone - either through Virus, TL drops or just sheer destructive madness.

It's an unsupported assumption that even the high-tech and ultra-tech worlds all abandoned books completely. It's an untenable assumption that the medium-tech worlds abandoned books at all. It's an unsupported assumption that ultra-tech data storage will not be legible when technology recovers the means to read them. And all three assumptions are also irrelevant, since we know for a fact that many ultra-tech worlds in the Regency and elsewhere did not suffer a loss of technology in the first place.

Your village library is merely a terminal that connects to the Amazon kindle site - not really possessing real books.

This was in connection with the world-wide collapse of civilization on Earth today example. My village library has plenty of books.

Furthermore, as austerity in the world today shows libraries are being threatened by closures and with that the book disappears.

All of them? Every single one? I think not.

And, as a said think of a world without oil combined with nuclear strikes and generalized madness. And, this is all before basically everything you touch turns against you (ie Virus).

I and others already refuted that one. Plenty of worlds never even saw a Virus-infected appliance. The Imperial mission on Alzenei won't have dead tree copies of the AAB encyclopedia or the Encyclopedia Galactica, true, but it will have digital copies of them and plenty of other encyclopedias. And so will Alzenei's own national library. And so will plenty of other worlds in the Far Frontiers. And in Yiklerzdanzh Sector. And Tsadra Sector. And Tsadra Davr Sector. Etc. etc. And none of them ever had a visit from Virus.


Hans

 

[LeperColony]

Sorry to necro this thread, but Dave if you're around, any chance of a comment?

 

[Sifu Blackirish]

The New Era is my favorite Traveller setting, but I sometimes wonder if 70 years is a sufficient span of time for the psychological and ideological changes the universe assumes...
Should TNE have set its time period a little further forward? 100 years? 150?

Being a TRAVELLER devotee, I bought TNE when it came out. Never played it, did not understand the task system until some time later, still read it for its entertainment value.

But really. A measly seventy years? IMHO it would take much longer for what I call in my ATU as a 'cultural reversion' to happen. As an example, Chichester in England has a magnificent example of a Roman frontier settlement, still available for examination after two thousand odd years.

For a real reversion, there should be nothing left for 'remnants' to use as identification. There should be very little to nothing left of 'high' technology or information.

 

[Frewfrux]

70 years after the fall of Rome, there were still Emperors in Constantinople who called themselves "Romans," and there were still Romans who knew of their cultural, social, and political links with Constantinople.

That's because Rome still existed. The capital of Rome was Byzantium as of 330 AD, and in 395/405 AD the Roman Empire was divided into East and West. Both, however, were still Roman and a part of the Roman Empire. When Rome was sacked, it was targeted as a political statement, not because it was the capital of the empire. And, it was sacked many, many times.


- The first “sacking of Rome” occurred in 410 AD and was carried out by Visigoths under Alaric.
- The second was in 455 AD by the Vandals under Geiseric
- Next was 546 AD by the Ostrogoths under Totila
- Then again in 846 AD by the Saracens
- Again in 1084 AD by the Normans under Robert Guiscard

There may have been more, not sure. When people place the 'fall of the Roman Empire' at 476 AD, they do so having remained – more than a millennium after the fact – the Eastern Roman Empire to the Byzantine Empire. It's fine to rename empires after they're gone, but we should keep in mind what they actually called themselves at the time they existed.

They were still calling themselves the Roman Empire until the death of Constantine XI and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 AD.

All that is to say that, despite more written records than anyone can actually count, we frequently still get it wrong when it comes to what actually happened then. However, it has been almost 600 years since the fall of the Byzantine Empire so I think we are more than justified in getting a few of the details wrong.

So, is 70 years enough? Absolutely not. 200 years? Historians would probably just be starting to make some errors in their judgements at this point and public opinion may be starting to be biased against the records. (Oh yeah, the profession of Historian would not have gone away just because technology did.) I would think that 400 years would be more what's required.

Oh, and technophobia as a result of machines rising up against man? Well, what would you think if your toaster started attacking you and all the machines started to try to kill you? Would you think that technology in general is something to fear, or that someone, somewhere must have some sort of wicked doomsday device?

Don't get me wrong, TNE is my favourite setting for a lot of reasons. I just do it slightly differently (more realistically in my opinion) then presented in the official rules.

 

[Tarondor]

Certainly there are some planets in TNE where the 3I has been forgotten, typically those dominated by Virus or the more virulent forms of TEDs, but as I read it, most people remember the 3I just fine. It's simply about as relevant to their lives in 1202 as was the Western Roman Empire to those living under the rule of the Goths in 540 AD.

The Empire collapsed, killing a trillion people, and today the struggle for nearly everyone left is simple survival. They tell their kids and grandkids about the Imperium, but for most people, those are just grandpa's stories of the old days, interesting but unattainable now.

 

[Tarondor]

Oh, also, the first sacking of Rome was in either 390 or 387 B.C. by the Celts under Brennus.

 

[Uxi]

Forgetting Jump Start caches... while some were likely destroyed and/or looted or otherwise lost there were probably enough to accelerate (re)development and preserve at least some measure of Imperial knowledge. The net would be far better than the info we have on the Roman republic. Future purges could still eliminate that and/or muddle what was what, however.

Empress Wave is still coming to do to psionics what Virus did to AI.

 

[Tarondor]

I do think that if I were writing the TNE setting, I would have put it a a much greater remove in time from the Collapse. At least 200-300 years, maybe more. Enough so that no one living (outside a cryotank) has first-hand knowledge of the Final Imperium. As it is, too many people are simply going to be able to remember how it all worked. It would be more like a mini-Long Night.

I've toyed with the idea of a campaign set 500 years after the Collapse, reminiscent of the world in "A Canticle for Liebowitz." Which, if you have not read it, you must go read immediately.

If I were writing what became the 1248 material, I'd put it farther away from 1200, more like a century than forty-eight years (which in the future is likely to be a single generation!).

But having said that, so many worlds were so hard hit first by the Final War, then by Hard Times, then Virus and then the Collapse that many worlds might look very much like The Walking Dead (sans zombies). A mere 70 years later, survival is still the order of the day, not rebuilding. You might be camped out in the ruins of what was once a vast city, but you're a lot more concerned about your crops and your hunting than you are whether you can get that old TRS-80 to boot up. Or even where the local library might have been. Some folks should probably know a lot about the technology of Imperial Times, but most will simply be too damned busy staying alive to try to recreate any of the higher-tech aspects of it.

So maybe it's not that they've forgotten the past so much as it's simply not relevant to the lives of most people.

 

[Uxi]

I like TNE's Short Nap. It could possibly have extended to 1250 to 1300 with very little changes in it's own timeline for those that like it. The Hivers simply reach into Old Epanses a bit later and most of the rest is about right.

I think 1248 was definitely timed to close... seems it's conception was to Answer the Questions instead of taking a better approach and jumping past it enough that the details wouldn't/shouldn't matter. 1400'ish would be my choice with the answers more vague than anything as most of them don't matter.

 

[Chuck Anumia]

My Thoughts

I believe 1201 was OK but 1248 is better. The Ships, information and other technology still floating in space are mines of information and machinery still useful and usable to the "survivors" (those people who are living now and have a desire to reach out beyond their planet in an attempt to reconnect with other worlds).
Some people will simply want to live where they are and with what they have always had.
They will not be adventurers however but may support them or even provide markets for the goods the adventurers return with.
Sure, Great-Grandpa remembers the way it used to be. He may even have some stories about places where the adventurers will want to start looking for the technology/information they need to rebuild/defend themselves/recreate the life Great-Grandpa had.