defelination of the Aslan

[Ran Targas]

Dave, I like the idea of a Bast sect in Ancient Egypt worshipping lost Aslan explorers. Makes sense too that Bast is female; a female would be leading any Aslan expedition.

And just maybe a Vargr corsair, captured in route to Earth, escaped the scouts and gathered his own followers to war against his captors. Thus the Anubis cult was created. It could actually fit nicely into the history of MTU.

Hmmm, this could be a fun premise for an adventure; a typical mixed race traveller crew discovering a world where Aslan and Vargr are worshipped as gods by the bronze age human inhabitants. One rules the day and one rules the night. And when the avatars of their gods arrive from the sun god's domain, both sides want to control them and their sky chariot. Lot's of fun!

 

[Darkhstarr]

I like it.
My Aslan player would agree wholeheartedly.

You see, Aslan don't look like earth cats, earth felines look like Aslans.

When the Grandfather and his childern were running around borrowing genes from various places one of them left a Aslan scientist(slave) behind accidently on Earth (terra). Being the only one of its race it got lonely.

Thinking about what its masters did, it decided it would do the same. It started messing around with Sabertooths and after a few decades of trying to make the perfect docile feline it came up with cats.

The lion, tiger, panther etc were just the throw aways that did not met its needs. Of course it had no problem with earth covered with felines.

Why do you think cats were worshiped for so long.
LOL

Have your players dig around a bit and then discover that Aslan are not genetic cats/felines but that cats/felines came from Aslan genes.

Dave Chase

 

[ThunderChilde]

Feh, In my tu The Aslan are based off of Cherryh's Hani.:devil:

In a universe postulated to have abundant life on many worlds, with an unknown number of experiments preformed, a convergent appearence for a certain type is almost inescapable. Form follows Funtion. Get over it already.

 

[Rev Round]

Genetically altered humans makes more sense. More creepy and somehow more alien than novelty pet cats and novelty pet dogs in spacesuits coming from the What If Whimsy Empire. :frankie:

 

[Easterner9504]

Major Races

There are many secrets in the TRAVELLER universe, some are known to players & GM's others are not.

The Major races, love 'em or hate 'em are tied to one of those secrets and that secret is still mostly transparent to our body of knowledge.

COYNS

The 6 major races are present on Droyne coyns. This seems despite the fact the six major races didn't even exist in the Ancients day or were created by the Ancients and none were major or worth 2 cents back then. Yet despite this they earned a coyne.

That would indicate the Ancients saw something or changed or manipulated the ancestors of these 6 for some PURPOSE.

So players have to realize that they may not like this or that TRAV Alien but that the 6 majors have something about them we've never learned and their appearance to cats, dogs or cows jumping over the moon is irrelevant. All probably had "something" done to them be it genetic changes or accelarated evolution to see what comes.

 

[aramis]

Except that, somewhere in canon, is a reference that the coyns changed, and that the older sets didn't contain the aslan.

 

[Easterner9504]

Coyns

I'll leave springing odd canon to Rancke.

Original GDW: Droyne alien Module

The final, most mysterious enigma concerns the coyns
themselves. Six of those coyns contain pictorial representations
of the major races: Humaniti, Droyne, Vargr, Aslan, K'kree and
Hivers. While the Ancients could have left traditions of the three,
the others did not exist at the time of the Ancients, and at the
time the coyns were introduced, there was little to mark them
as particularly exceptional species. How then came these six
races to be portrayed on the coyns? No reasonable explanation
for this has ever been produced.

 

[rancke]

I'll leave springing odd canon to Rancke.

Original GDW: Droyne alien Module

The final, most mysterious enigma concerns the coyns themselves. Six of those coyns contain pictorial representations of the major races: Humaniti, Droyne, Vargr, Aslan, K'kree and Hivers. While the Ancients could have left traditions of the three, the others did not exist at the time of the Ancients, and at the time the coyns were introduced, there was little to mark them as particularly exceptional species. How then came these six races to be portrayed on the coyns? No reasonable explanation for this has ever been produced.

"[Grandfather] found that without help, the Droyne lost their caste-system, so he instituted the system of coyns -- small coin-like disks which helped in deciding Droyne caste assignments when children came of age. He continued to refine these coyns in light of what he found in his studies; over time, they came to show various other races (Aslan, Hiver, K'Kree) which did not even exist when Droyne ranged the stars." [Secret of the Ancients, p. 32-33]​

Note that coyns existed at least as far back as in Ancient times. My explanation for that is that the coyns were originally used in the same manner as tarot cards (IMO they go back to primitive Droyne hunter magic), and that Grandfather seized on them as suitable props when he needed to shore up the Droyne caste system 225,000 years later.


Hans

 

[Gadrin]

Dave, I like the idea of a Bast sect in Ancient Egypt worshipping lost Aslan explorers. Makes sense too that Bast is female; a female would be leading any Aslan expedition.

And just maybe a Vargr corsair, captured in route to Earth, escaped the scouts and gathered his own followers to war against his captors. Thus the Anubis cult was created. It could actually fit nicely into the history of MTU.

Hmmm, this could be a fun premise for an adventure; a typical mixed race traveller crew discovering a world where Aslan and Vargr are worshipped as gods by the bronze age human inhabitants. One rules the day and one rules the night. And when the avatars of their gods arrive from the sun god's domain, both sides want to control them and their sky chariot. Lot's of fun!

Yes, very nice.

With some tweaking (getting around canon) you could easily have resurrection (cloning & braintaping) and many, many other things. Should either die, their clones are always there, in frozen sleep naturally.

I've used the Chronos Series Bioroid from GURPS Bio-Tech to establish a
non-canon, biotech firm that creates them to fight the Zhodani (done during the settling of the Far Frontiers). The Chronos Series looks dog-ish, but has human-like legs and are built for combat.

They'd be nice soldiers in Anubis army.

>

 

[Ran Targas]

^ IMHO, there need to be more terrifying secrets than just the mystery of the coyns in the Traveller universe. Things that go bump in the night and cause PCs to lose their sense of reality and sanity! Stranger than we CAN imagine, in deed!

I'm sure Grandfather or his children must have visited Kusyu just as they did other worlds looking for candidates for uplift; they just didn't pick the Aslan, leaving them to develop on their own. Knowledge of but no manipulation of. That or they did do some gene mixing but the results weren't up to their expectations so they put the whole thing on the back burner.

 

[rancke]

^ IMHO, there need to be more terrifying secrets than just the mystery of the coyns in the Traveller universe. Things that go bump in the night and cause PCs to lose their sense of reality and sanity! Stranger than we CAN imagine, in deed!

Well, you can see a few of the mysteries and illuminated groups that conspiracy theorists believe in in my article The Illuminated Regina on JTAS Online. I had a lot of fun writing that one. It was very refreshing not to have to worry about self-consistency . I only scratched the surface, of course. I was putting the final touch to another article, a collection of library data about various legends of the spaceways, when my computer broke down six weeks ago. It's still in for repairs, and I've actually invested in a new computer, but I really, really hope the old ones comes back soon, so I can finish that article and submit it.


Hans

 

[ThunderChilde]

Hey Hans, so your the author of that, well done, read it the other day trolling through the archives.

 

[Easterner9504]

Mysteries

a collection of library data about various legends of the spaceways




Sounds interesting.

 

[Gvadakoung]

Could, but the immediate disadvantage is the player already has a problem with them looking alike. He doesn't belive it possable for evolution to work like that. Imagine the reaction if I told him they share DNA with cats?

Don't pin it to DNA. Just have your party get stranded at an Imperial Research Station on the edge of Aslan space and have a senior academic belabor them with Morphogenetic Field Theory until their brains accept that Aslan look like cats, and wondering why is too much of a headache to worry about:

"Information is not spatiotemporal in its behaviors and, because of this, evolutionary events in one species create opportunities for chreodic re-channeling along the available mutational pathways of other species to a degree proportional to the similiarities already present via whatever mechanism, regardless of spatial or temporal isolation of the relative species observed..."

 

[ganymede]

Well, you can see a few of the mysteries and illuminated groups that conspiracy theorists believe in in my article The Illuminated Regina on JTAS Online. I had a lot of fun writing that one. It was very refreshing not to have to worry about self-consistency . I only scratched the surface, of course. I was putting the final touch to another article, a collection of library data about various legends of the spaceways, when my computer broke down six weeks ago. It's still in for repairs, and I've actually invested in a new computer, but I really, really hope the old ones comes back soon, so I can finish that article and submit it.


Hans

What... you didn't get the hint??? They're watching you...!

 

[ganymede]

The Kzin predate Traveller by a few years.

Just saw that recently... I stand corrected. Someone else apparently made their feline race as a nod to Traveller's Aslan; I now need to figure out where I saw that!

 

[aramis]

Let's see...

Webber's Orion (Starfire Game then novels) are clearly Kzin with the numbers filed off, and are based upon SVC's Orion, who were even more clearly Kzin with the serial numbers filed off. Ca. 1979

Traveller's Aslan show some nods to the Kzin, but really are a different mold, what with sentient females and women economists.

Wing Commander's Kilrathi seem to be a tribute to the Kzin; so much so that someone pointed it out on Wikipedia; "It is highly likely that the Kilrathi are heavily influenced by Larry Niven's Kzinti, also a felinoid aggressor species. In tribute, a scenario in Wing Commander II takes place in the 'Niven Sector.'" There are more similarities to Cole & Webber's Orions, tho', and the similarities between WC and Starfire run VERY deep.

Space Opera (1981) had the MekPurr, scottish engineer cats. Think Aslan in scots kilts, with a propensity towards producing engineers of Mr. Scott's caliber.

Other Suns had a felinoid race, too. But I don't own OS, so can't say for certain what they are like.

The Arcanum's Cat-people, the Andaman, are a lion-man pastiche without the gender separations. Plus, it's a fantasy game.

Fantasy Hero has a feline race, but again, it's not got the gender separation issues of either the Kzin/orion tree nor the Aslan tree.

SFB's Lyrans are derived from SFB's Kzinti, themselves based upon Niven's STTAS Kzinti, a self-pastiche of his Known Space Kzinti.

 

[Gadrin]

Traveller's Aslan show some nods to the Kzin, but really are a different mold, what with sentient females and women economists.

GURPS Traveller suggests they're similar to Star Trek Klingons (I forget if it's newer or older -- I use the TNG/DS9/Voyager/Enterprise) which I think is kinda fun.

I've been slowly molding a group of them for some adventures, to get an idea of how they might act/react to various types of happenings in the TU, using the Reaver's Deep Sector, stuff I have.

One of the Keith's wrote an article in JTAS, that gives insight to them, but I think the Klingon version is more fun. I'd use the JTAS article for the "higher ups" in the clans.

>

 

[DaveChase]

Let's see...
...
Other Suns had a felinoid race, too. But I don't own OS, so can't say for certain what they are like.

...

They are more like large house cats in look and attitude. The way they are written up, it seems that the author intentionally avoided making them sound like Kzin.

Dave Chase

 

[ThunderChilde]

Just saw that recently... I stand corrected. Someone else apparently made their feline race as a nod to Traveller's Aslan; I now need to figure out where I saw that!

C.J.Cherryh's Hani. Stable merchant minded females, males so territorial and prone to blood driven rages, more so than Aslan.