Urban Legends in the OTU

[MT++]

Everyone on this list is probably either a standing expert on urban legends or a massive disseminator of the same.

What are the urban legends in Traveller?

Vargr in the microwave? Aslan must yield if you call out their true name?

How about the Protocols of Zion? Still around?
Only now they are called "Protocols of the Hiver Overlords"?

How about spooky legends? Solomani have a thing about the Gene Wars...maybe there is a story about an immortal who vowed to return and rule all the lesser men.

For some reason I picture Vargr as having more of these stories than Humaniti (and that means a LOT)

Some are lessons, some are lies, some are old myths dressed up again.

And then again, some are true.

After all, a cousin of mine was telling about this friend who knew this guy....

 

[themink]

Sternmetals (a large insterstellar corp) have had a glitch in their distribution software.

Shipping a 4dT standard container of live shellfish (with internal batteries for the life support) from one world to the next, the destination code became corrupted to "Next world spinward" and the return code is "Next World Trailward".

Since then the container has travelled the length of human space twelve times bouncing when it hits each end.

The contents have thoroughly rotted and if anyone actually opens it they will have a suprise.

The first occurance of this legend was in Solomani space pre ISW1 and it regularly re-appears. Known variants include the container being damaged when loading, being stolen and being accepted by a customer.

PS I had the container stolen from my players once - they had a big "rogue" adventure recovering it - to have sternmetals say "It isn't on our books" - they opened it.

 

[Shadowdancer]

I like the one about "something" living out in jump space. Makes a good source of "bogeyman" stories while in jump space, and can even be used to adapt real-world urban myths to it: The hook-on-the-door-handle sort of thing.

I had players looking for a stable wormhole to a sector clear across the known universe way before "Deep Space Nine" came on TV. It would have shortened travel time to Gateway Sector from the Foreven Sector to one week. They never found it. Just didn't look in the right place, I guess.

Also used an urban myth similar to the shellfish cargo mentioned above, but it was a passenger in a portable low berth unit that gets passed from system to system. It gets shipped to a system, no one comes to claim it, the starport personnel don't want to do the paperwork, so they just ship it on down the line. Will even pay extra to get it off their hands and so someone will take it. After having a passenger on their far trader tell them the story, a couple of months later a portable low berth unit shows up at the starport. with destination being four parsecs away. Payment is twice the normal rate. The players had to sit down and debate whether to take it or not.

I also created a "ghost ship" urban myth based on the tale of the Mary Celeste. Then threw the adventure "Annic Nova" at them. I didn't think they were going to leave their ship to explore the mystery ship.

 

[themink]

Originally posted by Paraquat Johnson:

Also used an urban myth similar to the shellfish cargo mentioned above, but it was a passenger in a portable low berth unit that gets passed from system to system. It gets shipped to a system, no one comes to claim it, the starport personnel don't want to do the paperwork, so they just ship it on down the line. Will even pay extra to get it off their hands and so someone will take it. After having a passenger on their far trader tell them the story, a couple of months later a portable low berth unit shows up at the starport. with destination being four parsecs away. Payment is twice the normal rate. The players had to sit down and debate whether to take it or not.

I love that - That's brill

It leads the players to a "missing heir" plotline heir is now three generations missing and one of the players (noble) finds out that he was shipped as a "mystery lowberth" by the second son. Second son's family now owns the title and will probably act in a naugty way when the party turns up with the true heir!

 

[BigBadRon]

Well, I heard from a vargr that his cousin's best friend's uncle found a planet two sectors over where there is an Ancients device that can turn any metal into iridium, in batches up to starship size!
But you have to travel there, because the device is too big to move.

And I heard about the things in J-Space too, I know a man who's sister once worked on a ship where the purser told her that a ship he was on before that one misjumped one time. The jump was perfect until something hit them in J-Space. They got lucky and made it to port in one piece, but there were toothmarks on the hull!

It's all true...

 

[themink]

It appears that the startown arround the C Class spaceport on "Whistle Stop" has an unusually high birth rate.

When the IISS sent an expert to investigate the phenomunomunom, for the first three months they couldn;t find the cause. There was nothing unusual in the water, the off-duty personal movement wasn;t unusual.

After a late party one night, they was unable get back to his ship due to high levels of alchohol and so slept at a friend's house.

At four O'Clock in the morning, the fuel skimmer landed from it's late night skimming run, and the scout woke up to the distant sonic boom. Still very sleepy, they cuddled up to the friend they had spent the night with. The next day they sent off a report indicating that people woken from sleep are much less likely to be "careful".

The report sent in to the IISS has resulted in a much slower reentry pattern for the skimmer and the scout has settled down on Whistle Stop to raise their child.

(OOC: I first heard it about a WA town called Toodudlakin, since then I've heard a texas and a russian version)

 

[RainOfSteel]

From an elderly scout.

"What? You haven't heard the story of the Transverse Scepter? Oh, my! Heh, heh. Well now, gather round, and I'll tell you all a very old legend.

"Once upon a time, a way over in Core sector, right before the dawn of the Imperium, a group of troubleshooters working for Cleon Zhunastu (this was before he crowned himself Emperor) were on Ion/Core, well before it was terraformed. A group of ordinary lanthanum miners working for Zhunastu Heavy Industries uncovered an Ancients ruin just below a the seam of bastnasite they were extracting, a thousand meters below the surface.

"In it they found a jeweled scepter, about three feet long, though none could determine the nature of the jewels. A notice was sent to corporate headquarters, and Cleon's troubleshooters, already being on world, arrived to take possession of it right away.

"When they boarded their ship for a jump back to Sylea (as Capital was called back then), they found the jump took only two days. In fact, they quickly discovered that any ship they were on when they had the Scepter took only two days to jump. They found that any fleet jumping with them on a synchronized jump also benefited from the Scepter's powers.

"Cleon uses the Scepter to ferry his biggest and best battle fleet around, it could completely out maneuver any opponent. The power of the Scepter is a big factor in what allowed Cleon to expand the Imperium so rapidly, and with so little effective opposition.

"In his final years, he had the Transverse Scepter locked away in a vault below his palace (the old one, not Arbellatra's new palace). It's been there ever since, standing guard as the Emperor's ultimate weapon to be used against any overwhelming foe that should appear to face off against the Imperium."

 

[Golan2072]

I know that this thread is OTU only but these legends are strictly IMTU:

Something lives in Earth's datanet; it layers in old, abandoned computer systems left out from the Stagnation (MTU's century-long "twighlight war"), running in abandoned military compounds on emergency power. That something sometime emerges from its layer, to devour the mind of some unsuspecting datasurfer or hacker.
<<partially true>>

The Matriarchate have some way to totally avoid misjumps; it has something to do with their brain-machine interface and the fact that all of their jump-pilots are psinically-active.
<<Nonesense - Matriarchate ships misjump like everybody else's, and not all of their pilots are psionics; their Interfaces coinfder realspace benefits, but do not help at all with Jumpspace.>>

If anyone is killed in Jumpspace, his ghost hounts the spacelanes and might appear in jumping ships; if a ship loses all of its crew in Jumpspace, it becomes a ghost ship, travelling on its own will without any need of fuel or repairs, fueled by the ghostly energies of the netherspace.
<<Unverified, but no evidence support this>>

The first permament outpost on Mars, back in 2017, found some kind of an underground structure created by an anchient culture; contact was lost with the outpost soon after. The investigation team sent by StellarDream Inc. to re-establish communications was attacked by inhuman beasts from Mars' distant past; only two of the crew narrowly escaped, after blowing up the base, and were driven mad by their experiences. The official story about an anti-terraformation terrorist attack is nothing but cover.
<<False; no artificial structure was ever found on Mars. Both survivors of the recovery mission managed to flee from terrorist captivity, and to blow up the base's reactor - but had sustained brain damage from crude cybertorture applied by the terrorists.>>

 

[siefertma2]

*Scientists developed FTL communications and/or instanteous jump travel years ago, but the Imperial Navy/Megacorporations/Vilani Nobels/Scouts/Hivers keep the technology surpressed.

*If a child is conceived in jump space (What else are couples going to do during long jumps?), they will be born psionic.

*Upper class Aslan have taken to hunting poverty-stricken humans for sport... and lunch.

*ANAGATHICS ARE MADE FROM SOPHONTS!!!

 

[jappel]

The real reason the Sollies threw in the towel in the Rim War is that their intelligence discovered that the Imperials were bringing a Darrien star trigger to use on Sol. It was onboard one of those J5 Lightning class cruisers.

There's a couple of different versions of what happened to the star trigger. In one, the Imperials have it implanted in Sol and use it to keep Terra hostage against a renewed Rim War. In another, the carrying vessel was destroyed; some say that it was the Bard Endeavour, and that the real reason that the Solomani commander boarded her at the battle of Kagushakken was to recover the star trigger. Some people say they were successful and that the Solomani have the trigger; others say they captured it but lost it later; others say they were unsuccessful. Still others say it was another vessel entirely, also lost, but that the hulk is still out there waiting to be found...

And you know about that lost underwater colony of Vargr on (fill in the name of a convenient water world), right? They've been there for millenia.

Then there's the sleeper/generation ship the IISS recovered back in the early days of the Imperium. Problem was, backtracking the vector shows it came from Terra, but to be where it was it would have been launched before Sputnik.

Ling-Standard Products air/rafts have a built-in backdoor override code that lets LSP security agents take control of them. That's why I only use Sternmetal air/rafts myself.

Don't bother buying a psionic shield helmet. A wet towel wrapped around your head works just fine. Why do you think those Zhodani nobles all wear turbans? Of course, it has to be made out of a particular kind of fiber to work.

If you drink a carbonated beverage before going into a low berth, your stomach will explode.

The company that makes Everfresh sandwiches is really a front for a Hiver research group.

John

 

[jasper]

The ship Edmund Fitzwater has an ancient jump device which allows you to jump to your designation in 24 hours with only 10 % fuel useage of a normal jump. However everything in the ship ages a week and after repeated jumps crew members have been known die of old age at age 30.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by Employee 2-4601:
I know that this thread is OTU <snip>

This is the IMTU forum, so this thread is also IMTU.

 

[Burocrate]

I read jappel's post and immediately thought of the movie "So I married an axe-murder." with Mike Meyers playing the main character and his own father. Specifically, the scene where the father explains how Col. Sanders is part of the global-controlling: Triumbilate (spelling?). "It’s the Col., he puts something in the chicken that makes you crave for it nightly, Smartass!" (This line must be read aloud with a very heavy Scottish accent.)

Ob Trav:
What's that you say, nano technology in the Everfresh sandwiches? Well of course, how do you think we keep them so deviously fresh? Do you really believe that dreck about a secret mind control agenda? Never! That would be unethical! Something like that the Goddess would surely frown upon. All Hail the Goddess in Her infinite Wisdom and Power! You are strangers here so I take no offense, but you should know it is customary to look down when someone invokes the imagery of the Goddess on this world.