Tralp and the RDE (variant, but OTU based)

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http://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Reformed_Dootchen_Estates

EDIT

I like some aspects of Tralp and the RDE, but I'm not sure I'd use it as is.
I am not knocking anybody's creative work in this part of the OTU.
Nope.
It's just that sometimes I see something I'd want to modify before introducing in a game I was running. Tralp and the RDE are in that category.


The first alternate I came up with is still pretty close:

Spoiler

The Boers came first, backed by a joint Netherlands-based corporation/South African gov't venture. The Dutch capitalists got a colonial foothold on Tralp, the Boer separatists got their own homeland away from other races, and the South African government peacefully rid itself some discontented citizens.

But not long after the founding many Dutch West Indians came to Tralp looking for safe, stable new homes as climate change and the wars with the Ziru Sirka endangered their homelands. The Netherlands was suffering frequent, dangerous floods at the time, and was badly overcrowded with high joblessness. The Tralp Company Charter allowed Dutch citizens to immigrate freely. The Boers had calculated that risk, but failed to consider a sudden mass migration from overseas provinces.

The Boers did not mistreat the newcomers. They simply kept apart. A planet like Tralp had vastly more arable land than old South Africa ever had, after all.

The newcomers formed their own community in a warm seacoast and islands region.

But not long after the trek, a plague struck the Boers. Most surviving women were left infertile.
With potential mothers at a premium, and incest and polyandry both unthinkable, Boer men who wanted wives and children couldn't afford to be picky about a woman's color.
The old racial separation quickly disintegrated.

By the time Tralp's population had swollen so much that younger sons looked offworld to found their own estates, the settler groups had mixed in so much that a typical Tralpian had light brown skin and a mixture of African and European features.

Forced labor began with Vilani prisoners of war and with the impressment of native criminals and vagabonds.


The 'slaves' on Tralp are actually indentured servants on renewable four-year contracts. The ones captured by Dootchen press-gangers are tricked or coerced into 'voluntarily emigrating' and entering service to pay off the debt incurred in passage.
Harsh vagrancy and debt laws combined with limited opportunities for children of servants and any non-Solomani leads the overwhelmingly majority of such children into servitude.
A servant who violates even a minor law gets time added to his contract, because the bureaucracy fines the master and the master is entitled to double restitution with interest from his servant.

I'm working on the assumption that the SolCon bans chattel slavery, at least of humans, as part of its historical-legal heritage. I'm not sure about how well this fits canon OTU lore.
It may have been the case that the Tralpians practiced chattel slavery during the Long Night, shifting to the servtitude system as a condition of admission to the Solomani Confederation.

Was Tralp ever under the rule of the Third Imperium?

In my take on this, the high law level doesn't apply to Home Guard members doing training exercises or domestic security work. In effect, Home Guard members can carry guns and other weapons around in public with a feasible excuse.
Natch, the bureaus in charge of recruitment do not allow servants or undesirables to join the HG, and the officer corps is drawn from the estate holder class.
The private lands of an estate holder are considered his home, just like his house. He can hunt and shoot there, using his Home Guard guns or blade/archaic weapons.

MOD QUESTION

Should this go in the OTU section? The IMTU section? Not sure.

 

[aramis]

It's fine in here - the section isn't OTU specific.

 

[BwapTED]

Tralp and the RDE alt version 2


Colony founder
ISW era:

Portia DuCheyne
CEO DuCheyne Agricultural Products



Tralp's founder, Portia DuCheyne, dreamed of a new world of yeoman farmers and agrarian democracy, a refuge for the hungry and dispossessed refugees of Earth and other Terro-human worlds.
More than that, Tralp would set an example of successful multiculturalism, taking not only a quota from all participating national governments, but also a contingent of Vilani POWs who would be set free at planetfall and made full citizens.
Tralp would be her legacy to future generations.
The Terran Confederation had agreed to heavily subsidize the transport costs for four years.





More to come...


Posting phone

EDIT
NOTES: I'm still kicking this one around, but I think I like it a lot better than my Dutch West Indies/Boer version in the first post. I plan to incorporate aspects of that first variant.


Other than some Boers being among the multinational settlers, this version won't have any notable Afrikaaner connection. Apartheid? An irrelevant, obscure, long-forgotten historical tidbit from old Earth/Terra.





I'm thinking something like this progression:

democracy--balkanized/anarchy--corporate state--oligarchy--bureaucracy




This Tralp does indeed have slavery, outright, and slave-taking expeditions. Non-Solomani are classified as inferiors by law and custom.
All that sort of stuff you find in the wikia article, but not derived from any 20th Century stuff.

 

[BwapTED]

Tralp and the RDE alt version 2


Colony founder
ISW era:

Portia DuCheyne
CEO DuCheyne Agricultural Products



Tralp's founder, Portia DuCheyne, dreamed of a new world of yeoman farmers and agrarian democracy, a refuge for the hungry and dispossessed refugees of Earth and other Terro-human worlds.
More than that, Tralp would set an example of successful multiculturalism, taking not only a quota from all participating national governments, but also a contingent of Vilani POWs who would be set free at planetfall and made full citizens.
Tralp would be her legacy to future generations.
The Terran Confederation had agreed to heavily subsidize the transport costs for four years.




History

(no dates yet)


captive government

Tralp is a TC colony.
Portia DuCheyne serves as the second Governor-General, after she resigns as CEO and moves to Tralp. She remains a major shareholder in her company.

democracy

Tralp transitions rapidly to self-rule, with Portia DuCheyne elected first president of the new democratic government of Tralp.

A mentally disturbed Vilani ex-POW assassinates President DuCheyne at her inauguration speech.
The democratic government survives the outbreak of civil violence and political troubles that follow Portia DuCheyne's murder, but fault lines deepen between Vilani and Terrans.
Controversial new laws are passed that extend certain security measures in regard to the ex-POW population. Land grants originally set aside for Vilani are given instead to Terrans.

In time, the descendants of the POWS form an underclass.

anarchy/balkanization

News of Terran victory over the Ziru Sirka reaches Tralp. Celebrations among the Terrans and mourning among the downtrodden Vilani.

When news arrives that Admiral Estagarriba has mounted a coup against the TC and named himself regent of the Ziru Sirka, Tralp's gov't declares itself opposed to and wholly separate from the new military government on Dingir. This move doesn't have the full support of the people, and the Terran population falls into political factionalism and eventually sets to fighting a low-grade civil war. The factions, ProRoM, and Anti-RoM, reflect existing fissures among the Terrans, based in part on cultural and nation enmities brought from Earth.

During these years, Vilani on Tralp migrate to a hardscrabble region where they create a state of their own.
Corporate state

The Anti-RoM forces claim victory in the civil war, but the conflict leaves Tralp divided into multiple statelets, with none strong enough to reunite the planet.

Brigandage rises to dangerous levels, with discharged soldiers and gangs of toughs plaguing the countryside and even occupying towns and villages.

Corporate gov’t

DuCheyne Agricultural Products had remained neutral during the conflict. It has emerged as the most stable and wealthy institution left, and when its managers organize their workers and some of their clients into militia units to clear out brigands, the effort gains wide public support.
The corporation, now separate from the offices on Earth in all but name, sets up a new corporate-controlled regime.
It conquers the Vilani secessionists and puts POWs to work on the farms.
Talk of new elections goes nowhere. Many Tralpians prefer the new, more efficient and direct, style of corporate rule to the messy democratic system that collapsed into civil conflict.

Things improve. Roads and canals damaged during the fighting are rebuilt using POW labor.

self-perpetuating oligarchy


The fall of the Long Night chokes, then kills, Tralp's all-important agricultural export market. DuCheyne Agricultural Products suffers record losses.
The board of directors holds an emergency meeting. The company is sold off in a private auction, with board members taking most valuable, viable assets for themselves.
The ex-directors become oligarchs who dominate politics and economic life on Tralp.
They replace lost members with others drawn from their families and social circle, keeping out any outsiders, especially Vilani.


feudal technocracy

The Board has devolved to a ceremonial group, with all the power now in the hands of the landholding families, those who can raise substantial household forces and collect large rents from the impoverished sharecroppers. These landholders control the grain silos, well-digging machinery, veterinary medical facilities, and other crucial technology and infrastructure, granting access in return for service.

The bosses deal with worker and renter revolts by creating racial laws in a successful bid to split Solomani from Vilani/mixed-race humans.
Contracts for the poorest workers become virtual slavery, while the middling sorts are brought in closer to the landlords or else encouraged to go off filibustering with younger sons of the lords.

(By now, anyone of partial Vilani descent is a Vilani under Tralpian social standards; few pure Vilani are left outside a handful of inbred backwater families)

bureaucracy

Clerks and bailiffs grow in numbers and powers until the old feudal order has become a bureaucracy.
Nobody but the clerks really understand the vast, complicated web of deeds, leases, inheritances, and so on that runs all the way back to the founding of the Colony.
And since the defeat of the last peasants uprising and the ill-fated Young Sons Rebellion, only the bailiffs are legally permitted to carry guns in public.
Slavery of the Vilani and mixed race has become normal and commonplace.
Younger sons of estate-holders are encouraged to emigrate off world, taking hot-headed followers with them. This opens new markets for Tralp, gets rid of potential troublemakers, and sends a stream of fresh captives back to restock the inbred and slow-growing slave populations.
The new colonies joined with Tralp to form the Reformed Dootchen (from DuCheyne) Estates, named in honor of the legendary First Founder of Tralp.

When Tralp joins the Solomani Confederation, its government agrees to end all filibusters and slave raids aimed at any worlds within the SC.
Tralpian raiders now play the dangerous game of hunting Aslan.
They fit captured Aslan with drug-injector collars that render the aliens complacent and tractable and use them as farm labor.
Sometimes an Aslan breaks free of control, maybe killing the overseers, and runs for the bush. Then all the local holders and their bully-boys from the Home Guard hold a ‘‘lion hunt'', a festive event.

 

[BwapTED]

Religion

Ubuism
/
Ubuist Scientific Socio-Physicalism

The RDE is officially a secular polity at the upper level, with any support for or restriction of religious bodies and customs left up to member worlds and local governments.

The ideas of the Feudal Period professor of sociology, Li Mak Ubu, have become very influential among bureaucrats on Tralp. Li Mak Ubu believed that a human society could only achieve optimal conditions for the development of both the individual and the species through a system of strong government regulation, social control, and full employment. He also believed that society required a slave caste to provide a controllable internal target for aggression that might otherwise endanger stability, and to give even the poorest citizens a sense of solidarity and fraternity with the ruling classes.
Later in life, the social scientist became more interested in metaphysics and theology. His rather arcane pondering in these matters provide the basis for later religious developments in what became Ubuism.

Li Mak Ubu justified suppression of the Vilani descended minority on grounds of political and economic necessity, yet some of his writings how how he admired aspects of the ancient Ziru Sirka.
His body of work was revised after the RDE joined the Solomani Confederation.
All positive references to the First Imperium were excised or altered.
Few Tralpians have seen original volumes. They might be shocked to see that Li Mak Ubu supported enslaving Solomani as well as aliens and "inferior"human races.

For years, rumors about Li Mak Ubu's ancestry circulated, kept alive by his most trenchant critics. Was he of partly Vilani origins?
No. At least, not according to the official RDE report on a genetic analysis of his remains. (No independent study was allowed).

Today, Ubuism has become religion in all but name. The tomb of the great thinker sees regular visits by pilgrims. Excerpts of Li Mak's works have appeared on propaganda posters across the RDE, and are ubiquitous on Tralp.