The movie Serenity centers around a psion reading top government types with big secrets and the effort to recover said psion.
Yes, but it's not the Traveller-verse, though. In that universe, I think all, or nearly all, the psions were basically government prisoners? That's about the only solution I could forsee from politicians when Psions are a known thing.
While this is true, much of this is probably retroactive continuity. So much of what TNE presents is such anathema to the faithful. I always assumed that what everyone hated was "those psions" and not "our psions"... of course, that's just my opinion.
I'm pretty convinced that Joss Whedon had both The Traveller Book and The Traveller Adventure when he ran a Science Fiction role-playing campaign in college that he based Firefly/Serenity on. The NPC 'Shawna', which I think is only in The Traveller Book is very close to the character Saffron on Firefly. Plus, there are other things. Someone made a list at one point.
Ohyeah, there's a ton of things that make it clear that it's based on Traveller. No argument there. But there's differences, too, so I hesitate to use it as source material for Traveller. OTOH, you could absolutely run a Traveller game in the Firefly universe. That sounds pretty interesting actually (but a subject for another thread).
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They could just as easily become shop keepers or some other mundane job somewhere where no one thinks they're anything special like that. They just become another neighbor in some sleepy low-tech little town on a forgotten rock, and so long as they keep it that way the government doesn't do anything about it. Think, something like the Incredibles or maybe this guy:
Yes, but ... So the tables in the book also say that 1 in 36 are nobles or something questionable in that vein. The discussion came up elsethread and I can't find it, but I think the takeaway was that the encounter tables weren't a complete cross-section of society, but a sampling of interesting people. So one in 36 people you might meet and have interaction with might be psions (or nobles), but 100% of the hoi polloi that are not considered are not. This makes sense as most PCs aren't going to stop and have conversations with just any wageslave that happens to be standing around waiting for the bus. If you need to find an insurance adjuster for some reason, that's a separate thing. They obviously exist. They're just not important enough to make the table of interesting people you might encounter..
Eh - that's a bit of a stretch - we only know of the *one* "academy" that River Tam was trained at. There are numerous other tidbits suggesting that while psionics isn't common, at least the concept (and, in some cases, religious overtones and interpretations - see the episode "Safe") aren't limited to government power.
I will defer to your Firefly lore, I last watched way too long ago and had forgotten that detail. But if Psionics are suppressed on one planet, how do they prevent psions from arriving from other planets? Also, do they just admit to horrible human rights violations in the name of public safety, or explain away their own psion's presence some other way? It seems hard to sustain if it's not polity-wide.
Under the impression psionics are not well understood and reliably taught and is being surgically enhanced to work.
Good heavens. I've read both of those books. DKM is a favorite author, I've read The Long Run more times than anything else. I recall enjoying Path of the Fury as well.
I'd see it handled more by propaganda if psionics were known but the government wanted them suppressed. You have a sustained campaign that spreads propaganda about how "dangerous" psionics are. You instill a fear and loathing of them in the public. Over time, someone who displays psionic powers ends up being reported to the authorities by witnesses who have been indoctrinated to do just that.
