Some thoughts Mis-Jumps

[PFVA63]

Hi,

Forgive me if something like this has been covered before but I was just curious about something and thought I'd ask to see if anyone else have had similar thoughts.

Looking over a link that someone provided on an Integrated Timeline for Traveller suggests that the Vilani Empire expanded to within 3 parsecs of Earth in -3400 (which if I am doing the conversion right was about 1120 AD in our calendar) but never made contact with Earth until -2422 (2089 AD for us) because they had not yet discovered the ability to travel further than Jump 1.

However, if I am understanding correctly, mis-jumps are possible which can lead to you ending up further than a Jump-1 distance away. As such, has anyone run a mini-campaign or adventure set in our past or even present where a Vilani ship misjumps into our area of space.

I guess there are alot of possibilities available. If you were the crew and needed to try and repair your ship;

- would you land on the Mall in Washington DC, or outside the UN, or in Downtown London, Paris, Brussels, Moscow, Bejing, etc and say "Take Us to your leaders"
- or would you try and contact one or more world leaders in secret
- or would you maybe try and secretly hide somewhere while fixing your ship
- or maybe just settle in and use your skills and what tech you may have to either lead a comfortable life here or perhaps try and become a powerful local figure.

It seems like it could lead to alot of interesting possibilities like maybe Leonardo Da Vinci or Bill Gates or Napoleon, etc are/were really lost Vilani travellers stranded here and decided to a) try and make the best use of the tech available to repair their ship b) just decided to settle in to a comfortable life style as a Terran selling off there tech and knowledge or c) decided to try and take over a large part of the known world.

I guess there are a lot of other possibilities as well.

Oh well, just some odd thoughts that I wanted to see if anyone else had any thoughts.

Regards

PF

 

[Spinward Scout]

You could have them crash in New Mexico in 1947.

 

[deniable]

Alien Autopsy

The true secret of the alien autopsies is that they look just like us.

 

[jfetters]

Interestingly, some of those scenarios are discussed (albeit breifly) in the Interstellar Wars GURPS supplement.

Here is another MisJump question for the masses - When a misjump occurs, do you keep it within the rules (D6 X D6) or do you place them wherever you want, regardless of whether or not that places them outside the 36 parsec max?

 

[BlackBat242]

The last mis-jump that happened in my Traveller game, the characters made a "parallel universe move"... but that was a failed attempt to jump out of a black hole's gravity well, so....

They did also do the 6-parsec move, but the ship was a total wreck. The 2 crewmembers only survived due to one of the character having a Psi ability to create a force field around her and the other guy. I had them come out of jump right next to where a scout ship was, and they were recovered before their vacc suit life support ran out.

She was in a coma for a week, while the other guy recovered right away. No one, even the other survivor, ever realised what she had done, but she had real problems with erratic functioning of her psionics for a long while after that.

 

[PFVA63]

Gurps

Interestingly, some of those scenarios are discussed (albeit breifly) in the Interstellar Wars GURPS supplement.
QUOTE]

Hi,

Thanks for that info. Other than the "Straports" supplement, I'm not real familiar with any of the other GURPS Traveller stuff.

Regards

PF

 

[jfetters]

Hi,

Thanks for that info. Other than the "Straports" supplement, I'm not real familiar with any of the other GURPS Traveller stuff.

Regards

PF

Neither was I. THe IW supplement was the first GURPS Traveller product I ever purchased. Very highly recommended. Its a good read just for the background info, even if you don't use the GURPS system.

 

[Icosahedron]

"Take me to your leader" is probably the least likely thing for me to utter, especially given the Earthlings' propensity for wholesale slaughter of anything and everything that is 'different'. Considering what they do to other Earthlings who differ only in race, colour or creed, I really hate to consider the fate of an alien *without* the ability to take over the planet!
I'd rather take my chances in the Siberian wilderness of 1908 than ditch in the Thames estuary and spend the rest of my days as a lab rat.
Any 'visitor' with something worth having (eg advanced technology) had better be able to defend it, or else keep it very, very quiet. Remember that if your ship is beseiged, your crew are facing odds of around a billion to one, cos every soul on the planet will want a slice of your cake.
Personally, I'd park up in a cave in Antarctica and send out small away teams in an air raft or 'flattened sphere' small craft to abduct anyone whose skills or knowledge I wanted.
Females would make very good abductees - they reduce the chance of a mutiny, and the medic can always 'fix things' if necessary.
Best to keep a close eye on the indigenous technology, though - especially when it reaches TL6/7. That's the time to up-sticks and park on a nearby planet. Uplifting planetary technology to enhance your party's survival and that of its descendants only works to the point where the natives are able to find you!

Gotta dash, someone at the door; looks like a couple of guys in black suits and a van with an antenna on the roof...

 

[Darkhstarr]

I used to have my own home rules misjump table. I don't like to use it much
since it always seems to roles the age-regression result.

 

[Icosahedron]

Ditto, but I use mine. My table has the conventional result on rolling 6,7 or 8, so that is the most likely (but not the only) result of a misjump. Ever had your Engineering Section disappear into the wide black yonder, leaving the rest of the ship behind?? :devil:

 

[Plankowner]

Mis-Jumped once and the entire ship was turned inside out! That made for a fun time...

 

[PFVA63]

Interstellar Wars

Interestingly, some of those scenarios are discussed (albeit breifly) in the Interstellar Wars GURPS supplement.

Here is another MisJump question for the masses - When a misjump occurs, do you keep it within the rules (D6 X D6) or do you place them wherever you want, regardless of whether or not that places them outside the 36 parsec max?

Hi,

I just picked up a copy of Interstellar Wars this weekend, and I'm very impressed. It's very well laid out, the art work really supplements the text, and it gives enough background and nice little tidbits to serve as inspiration for gaming/adventuring ideas.

I particularly like the fact that they provide a couple images and gaming stats for the Starleaper One ship that ended uo making first contact (though sadly they don't provide any deck plans for that vessel, though from the design rules in the book and the pictures you can probably come up with something reasonable). They do provide deck plans and stat for a number of other vessels as well, and I'm currently working on making a spreadsheet to help automate the ship design rules so I can start messing around with designs from that era.

Although I've messed around with Traveller since the late 1970's/early 1980's I kind of drifted away from it during the MegaTraveller Era (the Rebellion didn't appeal to me that much and I kind of found the layout and organization of the new books kind of confusing). Also about that time I started to get into Traveller: 2300/2300AD, which was an era that appealled to me more.

I remember reading something earlier on about Traveller: 2300 which had suggested that it was going to be a version of Traveller but set during the Rule of Man, right after the fall of the 1st Imperium, which I thought would be really interesting, but later GDW clarified that it was instead going to be based on the Twilight 2000 timeline instead with different tech from Traveller. In a lot of ways the Interstellar Wars book kind of fills that niche though.

Anyway, I'm really impressed how they help fill in some of the stuff to help explain how Earth went from a small back water Balkanized planet, to uneasy single world government, to a confederation, to a threat to a 1000 yr old empire, and also how a 1000yr old relatively stable society could be susceptible to such a threat.

One brief aside though. Maybe its the artwork, which shows the Vilani ornate robes and other clothes, or maybe its the note that they had relatively long life spans, or maybe its the description of their inherent conservatism but in some way the Vilani in this book remind me just a little of how the Vulcans were portrayed on Star Trek: Enterprise (but not so much how they were portrayed in the other series).

Anyway, just some thoughts.

Regards

PF

 

[jfetters]

Thanks for the thoughts PF, interesting takes on the material. I am happy that you are enjoying the book.

I remember back at the time, too, thinking that 2300 was going to be Traveller in the year 2300, but the nice aspect of the sourcebook is that you can set up an environment at any time between now and the Second Imperium, so in that respect it does make this the product to fill that gap.

Now we just need them to produce a Rule of Man sourcebook.

 

[PFVA63]

The Rule of Man

Hi,

I agree that a Rule of Man sourcebook would be really interesting. A couple things that I noticed in the Interstellar Wars book were;

- one of the small pictures on the cover showing a Terran Naval Officer sitting in a very ornate throne as he talks to some people that I presume are Vilani. It reminded me a lot of something I read many years ago in some Traveller booklet or supplement about how the fall of the 1st Imperium and beginning of the Rule of Man resulted in situations where fairly junior Terran Naval Officers ended up being pressed into service as subsector governers and the like.

- in the section on Hiroshi Estigarribia, it notes that he was destined to a higher office than Grand Admiral, but that story is "beyond the scope of this book".

It all just gets me wanting a Rule of Man sourcebook all the more.

Regards

PF

 

[PFVA63]

Along those lines...

You could have them crash in New Mexico in 1947.

Hi,

Yesterday while flipping throught the channels, I came across one of those UFO shows on The Learning Channel (I think) about some guy who had claimed to be a military officers back in the 1960's in charge of exploiting the alien technologies he claimed had been recovered from Roswell.

When discussing the supposed crashed starship he claimed that the military's best understanding of the way the ship worked was that it didn't so much travel faster than the speed of light as it "jumped" from our universe into some other dimension (or something like that) and then exited that other dimension into our reality at some other point.

My first though when he said that was "wow, it sounds like the junp technology in Traveller. I guess they were Vilani afterall". If only the sketches/computer graphics of the ship had looked more like a Beowulf Class or Sulieman Class I would have been totally convinced.

Regards

PF