What is a Milieu?
Traveller has been around for 47 years, and has reimagined itself many times over the course of that history. (That makes it as old as the MRI, and a year younger than artificial hearts, if forty-seven seems like an overwhelming number.) Every new rules system brings with it one or more milieus, or settings, in which the game is to be played. These are often created by their very own game designers, but fans have also created as many beautiful variations on this world as there are games of Traveller out there. Just like a tale grows in the telling, a milieu grows in the playing, so a milieu guide, from the most unofficial to the most official, is only that–a guide. Still, a guide can be very handy when a GM wants to check what the official truth is about a fact of the setting before they make a decision for themselves.
Despite this constant cycle of re-creation, even the most recent Traveller milieus carry the weight of years of tradition, and like any almost fifty year old endeavor, that entails a great deal of decisions we have learned by now are bigoted. (Some, we really ought to have known were that way from day one, but out of professional courtesy, I intend to give the authors the benefit of the doubt in this series.) Less seriously, but still important, many decisions are outdated, following a 70’s understanding of science and history. All of these ideas are ripe to be challenged, and improved upon, in a new milieu which needs not pander to the brand’s established identity. I intend, in the creation of my milieu, to set the stage for a world which, while it feels deeply Traveller, feels empowering and exciting for the players, never forcing them to carry the heavy baggage of past choices but offering them the throughline of tradition where it is appropriate.
Phew, that’s a lot of big words and hefty ideas. But what actually is in a milieu?
Milieu Design
At its heart, a Milieu needs to tell the players everything about the world they are exploring. For Traveller, that usually means a sector or more of Charted Space, packed with planets to visit and controlled by an ever-shifting set of polities, the nation-states of the far future which hold land on the level of planets, star systems, clusters of star systems, or even in the case of empires, whole sectors and subsectors. But it would be a mistake to believe that a simple description of what worlds exist and who controls them constitutes a fully fledged milieu. The numbers in the names of the most favorite Traveller milieus are year numbers, and they are named that way for a reason–because the history that brought the world up to its present moment, and when that present moment is, is perhaps the most important part of a milieu. What do technology and culture look like? What trade connects regions? These polities that govern trillions of lives, who built them? What goals have its leaders espoused, both historically and in the present day? Which traditions are continued, and which ones retired, and which ones created anew? What does it mean that almost every inhabited planet maintains a spaceport, and what can you get to eat at that spaceport?
That’s a lot to break down, so many milieus include a summary of the biggest differences from other milieus and the information almost anyone living in the setting would know.
Milieu XX16: The Summary
It is the sixteenth year of an unnamed century, and it happens to be such by most every major reckoning in Charted Space–such confluences happen but rarely, and historically, great changes have been attributed to them. The most recent time this happened, a great Virus brought the computers of Charted Space to maddened life; the first time this happened, the great Ancients drew their last breaths.
We focus upon two great boundaries drawn in Charted Space.
The first, coreward, (towards the great black hole at the center of the galaxy, that is,) is the border the Third Imperium has drawn against the Vargr, and the near-perpendicular one the Zhodani Consulate has drawn against them. The Vargr themselves are not a single nation, but a species evolved from Terran wolves whose many societies have spread across the stars. Their history glorifies the dhoune (ðaʊnɛ), free spirits who make a living through raiding and protecting in the name of their people. To the bureaucratic Imperium, the Vargr need only make the simple decision of abandoning their alien nature and acting like humans to be brought into the fold. To the Zhodani, they are a fascinating culture that ought to be explored–in the past tense. The Zhodani are on a mission to uncover the truth of the origins of Charted Space and its inhabitants, and the everyday acts of living are secondary to that great goal. Using powerful psionics, they have reduced life to a perfect science, maintaining a massive happy populace through social and mental control which powers the Consulate’s search. The Imperium, ruled from far beyond this distant boundary, has its orders to enforce peace and free trade. Nothing less, and certainly nothing more.
The second, rimward, (towards the whirling edge of the galaxy,) is the border between the Third Imperium, the Solomoni Confederation, and the Aslan Hierate. Here there are no neat lines–planets and their settlements change hands faster than maps can be drawn. All three are hungry empires. The Imperium used to control this whole area; its rulers run on promises to reclaim it, insisting there cannot be peace unless the Imperium is the one moderating it. The Solomoni Confederation sprung up in this area, on a planet named Terra, and the iron fist its fascist leaders rule with relies on the rhetoric that anyone but humans of proven ancestry are worthless. The Aslan Hierate, populated by both humans and the leonine Aslan, nurtures a cultural tradition of limitless expansion, but they have nowhere else to expand to but these already inhabited systems.
Tying together these two far-flung lands are a people of my own creation–the original inspiration for this new milieu. The monsters, based on the monsters in Undertale, are tied to psionics, the magic of the world of Traveller, and the Ancients, its gods. Their home world has been transplanted by sufficiently advanced technology from the coreward to the spinward setting, and an adventure will be provided for travellers who want to explore that upheaval. They have moved into diaspora throughout the coreward setting, finding new homes and trying to survive the Imperial invasion which caused the upheaval in the first place. In the spinward setting, the surviving monsters of the creatively named Home are taking steps back out across their changed skies into a sector charged with political conflict. Adding monsters provides new options for character creation, new twists on established locations and conflicts, and a connection to the fantastical history of Charted Space in its modern day.
This setting draws on elements of Milieu: 1116. However, the Virus instead occurred an unknown number of centuries in the past, not in the upcoming present day. (It is mostly under control, its effects now rarely seen and only on ancient technology.) Other events may also be moved around or changed; I have not quite decided what yet. The average Tech Level is 13-15. Faster than light communication is not yet accessible, but the jump-drive is nearly as powerful as it will ever get, and new technology like the hop-drive threatens to tear open the current understanding of distance as we know it. Computers are fast, powerful, and small, even built into the brains of sophonts, and the only frontier left to the augmentation of their bodies is biological. Geneering (or genetic engineering, as we know it) is approaching mastery, as is terraforming. Weapon technology is catastrophic–fusion guns and battle dress dominate the battlefield, leaving behind scarred wrecks. If you can front the money to buy the best newly-developed tech, it seems as if you can do anything short of violating the laws of physics. And yet, most people still live without the benefits of these technologies, for lack of money or access, because they live in war zones or on frontiers, because they are the targets of discrimination or the victims of tragedy. Technological advance will not be the only solution to injustice.
Investigate Every Decision
The name XX16 comes from the choice to integrate Undertale‘s monsters into the Traveller world, the choice that inspired this whole undertaking. It started as a personal project, one I picked up and put down, but when I shared it with my friends, they became enamored with the world I’d created, and I decided to share it with other people more formally. Like Undertale‘s 201X, the year XX16 is both unmoored in time and incredibly specific. It both is and isn’t 2015/1116.
The choice to make Virus happen in the past was originally a flippant one, and one I considered a great deal before publishing. I might yet go back on it, but my thinking is that the world of Traveller is marked by great era-ending catastrophes, and here is one that is not obviously and only “the Imperium fell apart”. I don’t want the Imperium to be the main characters of this milieu–if I do my job right, there won’t be a sole main character. Virus makes a good reset point for the Third Imperium to grow out of that can also have impacted every other society, while remaining in the background unless and until a GM wants to spring a surviving Virus on their players as a villain.
The choice to center the mystery of the Ancients is one I really enjoy because I want Milieu XX16 to do something different with it than what has been done before. There is a lot of discussion of who the Ancients were–what they wanted, why they did what they did–in Traveller. Milieu XX16 asks the question, “Even if we knew, what should we do about it?” The goals of the Ancients have left marks on all of Charted Space, but the sophonts living today can and must choose their own paths. They are free to rebel against the Ancients, or try to emulate them, but they cannot have their guidance back no matter what they try.
The choice to center these two areas is largely personal, but I find them both interesting for similar reasons. The Imperium has maintained a facade of neutrality, but when it comes into contact with a culture it refuses to assimilate and one that refuses to assimilate with it, that facade peels away. The tension between expansionism and xenophobia reveals the glaring issues with both. For a game that shines a light on the problems with empire, imperial borders are one of the best places to set it. The coreward setting highlights my favorite culture in Traveller, the Vargr, as well as the Zhodani, who I am interested to develop more. The rimward setting is an attempt to tackle the painful issue of the Solomoni and Vilani and what they have represented throughout Traveller’s history, and I intend to tackle it after the coreward setting. The Aslan, who need a total redesign (what genius decided male lions were the hunters and guardians?) are there to disrupt the binary of Solomoni and Vilani and the idea that humans should live in “human empires”.
Just as important as the species I’ve chosen to center are the ones I’ve chosen to skip. The Droyne, descendants of the Ancestors, are excluded because I want the Ancestors to be well and truly gone, without a chance of returning. The Hivers seem to serve to equate altruism and respect for all life with irreconcilably alien biology and thought to claim that this is an impossibility for humanity, so they are also out of the picture. And the K’kree are… an extended vegan joke? Good lord, what’s going on in there?! I would start this next sentence with “jokes aside”, but there’s no follow-up for it–the K’kree are jokes, and I’m setting them aside.
Which brings us to the question of monsters. I’ve gone back and forth on this. I truly believe I could do this project without them. And yet, they’re what brought me to Traveller, and the thing that makes my milieu truly unique. It’s a one-word answer to what makes this milieu different from all other milieus, and while that seems facetious, I think that having a major sophont species that need love, hope, and compassion to physically survive, who were named as monsters by an outside, imperial, faction, living in a completely diasporic society is an amazing way to set the tone of this milieu. This is not a off-handed reference to the first four notes of Megalovania. In fact, it’s intended that you need not know anything about Undertale to understand the monsters, as they’ve been totally updated to fit cleanly into the world of Traveller. It’s more about bringing in a new, unique, species of sophonts that inspire the player to see the setting in a new light.
I intend to talk a lot more next week about tech level, so for now, I’ll leave my investigation of this decision here: the more money can achieve, the greater the gap between rich and poor, and the more clearly the injustice of social class can be shown.
That’s all for now! If you’re reading this in the future, the changelog and any links will be here.
[…] discussed my reasoning for including the Virus before here, but in brief–it is a convenient way to cause the Long Night which isn’t centered […]