Examining Every Decision: The Timeline, in Broad Strokes

This is likely to be a long post, so let’s get right into it!

The Ancient Era

The Ancients are a really interesting aspect of Traveller canon. On the one hand, they represent the unattainable ideal to which Traveller posits society must strive. On the other hand, they shaped the cultures of Charted Space to suit their own selfish whims, often textually holding them as slaves and always attaining their goals through eugenics, the “science” of applying principles of selective breeding to sapient people, only to destroy themselves entirely in a horrific war. If this is really the future we are striving for, it would only be right to fear to keep going. But I do believe we can do better.

But perhaps there is something we can learn from this dilemma. We inherit so many things from the cultures and the people who came before us. Often, we inherit their particular cruelties, the things they believed were just part of the dirty work of living which we only later learn constitute violence beyond our imaginings. We are faced, often suddenly and at our weakest, with the choice to continue a legacy of violence or live in a world we no longer understand. The goals which we were raised for are clear, but we have no obligation to fulfill them.

So, then, how do these Ancients fill the role of the perfect and absent progenitor? I begin by making them without a physical form for the player to imagine. This is intentional–in canon Traveller, they look like the Droyne, but I don’t want to tie them to one single species of Charted Space. They aren’t humans in rubber masks and cheap face paint, they are something we cannot understand. At the same time, I don’t want them to be fundamentally unlike the species of Charted Space in their biology, because I don’t want it to be too easy to ignore their choices as a potential future. They are a species not too different from Humaniti, the Vargr, and the Aslan, one with the same biological needs and presumably the same ways of perceiving the world. They have psionic capabilities, but so do the other species; they are no longer mortal, but that is explicitly caused by their efforts in genetic engineering their own species, something that other species could perhaps achieve should they follow the path the Ancients did.

On that topic, there are things they achieved that are meant to be enviable: infinite lifespans, a post-scarcity economy, science advanced beyond all modern understanding. The artifacts they left behind are incredibly desirable, and it would be easy to feel that what they achieved really is the pinnacle of what a society can be. Most of what they did wrong, however, is not yet understood to the people of Milieu XX16, such that a GM can reveal it to the characters at just the times when they have grown to really believe that the Ancients represent an ideal future. And the things they did wrong are intentionally unforgivable, treating the lives of sophonts as experiments and fads to be picked up and thrown away at a whim and raising them as livestock and slaves, and defending that control with weapons capable of destroying entire star systems. It should be clear to anyone who understands the scope of what they did that following in the footsteps of the Ancients, while it might grant unimaginable power, would mean abandoning one’s compassion, and dooming oneself to eventually suffer the consequences of doing so.

I did choose to, since I’ve removed the Droyne from this setting, reconceptualize the Grandchildren as the members of sophont species of Charted Space which the Ancients used to help them administer their experiments. Just like the canon Grandchildren, they rose up against their Grandfather (in this case, the whole species of the Ancients, not just Yaskodray) in the war which caused the annihilation of the Ancients. Their story is deeply tragic–never having been given the ability to build a community outside of their service to the Ancients, they rebelled, and even succeeded in their rebellion, but although they destroyed their oppressors, they weren’t able to survive in the world that was devastated during their struggle for freedom. One of the themes of Milieu XX16 is the incredible cost of war, even wars conducted for the right reasons, and you’ll see this throughout this post.

The Forgotten Era

Traveller has a huge gap in its canon between the unimaginably distant past of the Ancients and the relatively modern era which begins with the development of the Vilani jump drive. I don’t know what to put here any more than they do, but I will at least nod to the fact that something must have been happening, even if we aren’t privy to it as players and it doesn’t affect our games. Charted Space is just too big and alive to go millions of years without anything at all happening.

The Early Jump Drive Era

This era is meant to sort of mimic the European Age of Exploration, with aggressive colonial powers “discovering” and carving up a vast area of desirable land regardless of its inhabitants’ wishes. I might change the Aslan not having any humans near Kusyu; I’m undecided on a lot about the Aslan still.

The Collision Era

The Ziru Sirkaa/Third Imperium are very centrally located so that Traveller can revolve around them, which makes for interesting worldbuilding troubles when one doesn’t intend to center them as the default experience. I’ve tried to analogize the other groups of the Coreward and Rimward settings such that they all tend to behave similarly at similar times, but this does require a bit of timeline fudging. I’m not entirely happy with how long the Gvurrdon Pact conflicts in the Coreward setting are over before the Solomani even develop the Jump Drive, and I might come back to this. The important thing, though, is to establish that the modern day of Milieu XX16 is not an unprecedented political situation–these interstellar empires have run out of room to expand and collapsed before, and it does not strain credulity at all to imagine that they will again.

The Virus Era

I’ve 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 around the Vilani and their Imperiums. I did a lot of thinking on how and why the Virus might operate, because there is a lot being said at the moment about AI and I want to speak intentionally on it and not out of panic or greed. I do want to maintain my general intention for Virus to be a minor part of the setting which can be written out without changing very much, since I feel that the AI zeitgeist will shift soon and much of what I have to say about AI will be laughable within a decade, much like early 2000s writing on the cellphone feels laughable now. If you come across this when AI has evolved far beyond our current understanding, please laugh politely and take the time to grow the Virus beyond my limited work. Of course, with a name like this, one can’t help but also evoke COVID-19 and the response–the ongoing response–to it. The Virus isn’t just about killer AI. It’s really more about the human response and the capitalist response to a catastrophe that threatens life itself in such a way that the economy must be sacrificed to save the people, the way that corporate interests defend the hollow idea of the company even as the people who make it up are dying. I have a lot more to say on the topic of Virus, but I think it deserves an article of its own.

The Revival Era

This is where the major empires of Milieu XX16 establish themselves on the modern stage.

The Third Imperium is pretty much the same as it ever was; it’s a little older than it is in Milieu 1116 because of some timeline fudging. Sylean Federation, ambitions to control the worlds of the Ziru Sirkaa, aggressive expansionism, done. If there’s a big difference from canon Traveller, it’s that I have no interest in the idea that every world of the Third Imperium joined willingly. When this is put forward by canon, it’s almost always to gloss over the issues with imperialism so that the players don’t need to examine their biases when they play as the cogs in its capitalist arm. The Third Imperium may pretend that all of its worlds were acquired willingly, such a large empire could only spread through force of some kind, whether financial or physical or political.

The Solomani Confederation so far remains more or less politically what it is in canon, although I might make some changes here if I need to to support anything I develop later. One important difference is that the modern Solomani Confederation was started post-Long Night not by the people of Terra itself, but by Terran supremacists who idealized it despite never having lived there. I think that just adds realism to it as a movement that is altogether less concerned with the history of the real Earth and its cultures as it is the idea of Terra as a symbol of biological purity. Plus, it sidesteps the idea that the vile Solomani Confederation beliefs arose directly from some specific real-world group taking power in the not-too-distant future. The typical Traveller canon line is to blame them on the nebulously and racistly defined “Third World”, which generally amounts to something not unlike Holocaust inversion as a rhetorical tactic, which is obviously bad, but claiming that real-world white supremacist groups will one day lead the world also feels like a bad look. I’d rather attribute it to the real and common phenomenon of cultures and their people being coopted as symbols of an ideology that never came from them or included them and make a distinction between the real Earth and its peoples and the Solomani as they appear in Traveller.

The Julian Protectorate still exists during the modern day of Milieu XX16, but not in the main settings. They are quite different to the Julian Protectorate of Traveller canon, and are important to setting up the Vargr Extents as I want them to be in the modern day. They’re somewhat of an oddity in that they’re much less of a monoculture than a lot of the other empires in Traveller–even the Imperium, for all its talk of inclusion, is seriously biased towards Vilani/Solomani humans to a point where member worlds outside of those cultures have trouble getting political, social, and economic influence, and worlds settled by the Imperium are almost all settled by such humans. The Julian Protectorate, though, is made up of both humans (of many origins) and Vargr in equal measure and influence. It’s still an empire, though, and that means it’s not innocent whatsoever. They are motivated by religious fanaticism, and expand aggressively through overwhelming force, and they consolidate their power through aggressive propaganda, including the standardization of a huge variety of Vargr languages into their chosen dialect and the rewriting of millennia of history to suit their policy. The Vargr groups of the Spinward setting must all reckon with this homogenization even after their successful rebellion against the Protectorate itself, one which was undertaken for various reasons good and bad.

The Zhodani Consulate more or less remains the Zhodani Consulate. The Spinward setting isn’t even close to their centers of power, which makes it somewhat difficult to say interesting things about what they’re doing, since it largely consists of “trying their hardest to ignore their Rimward border and pushing further Coreward” in a small variety of different ways.

While I haven’t quite decided yet what the Aslan Hierate is all about, I like the idea of a conflict between early immigrants to the Rimward setting, who came as equals and to some extent as refugees and intended to live peacefully in an area far from Kusyu, and the later arrival of the Empire in full force, offering to give them everything they had left for the lack of in exchange for ceasing this unauthorized separate life that they had created.

Of course, as I mentioned, this era ends with the life cycle of empire beginning to repeat. There is nowhere new that can be easily taken, and the booming success sours to endless war.

The Cold War Era

I wanted to highlight that the end of expansion isn’t necessarily immediately outright war. There’s a period first of cold war, economic conflict, and tension which comes well before the outright war between empires, and can be just as costly if not more for the smaller polities being wielded as weapons.

While the Coreward Setting has a large number of these smaller states, and follows a fairly typical trajectory, the Rimward Setting is largely a clean meeting of these three borders, and that means that the war is much less cold, eventually ending this era and leading to the outright wars which lead up to the modern day in Milieu XX16.

The Border War Era

50 years feels at once far too long and not long enough for this era. I wanted to make very clear that this wasn’t 50 years of protracted war along all borders–there aren’t enough resources in Charted Space to sustain even a year or two of that, considering that the wars are being fought with handheld nuclear weapons and massive fleets of starships. It is just that this period where such border wars are considered reasonable has been going on for 50 years.

One of the things that turns up in this narrative a lot is the choice of imperial powers to intervene in humanitarian emergencies with an invasion of the perpetrator which ends up far more focused on taking their land and resources and killing a designated acceptable enemy than on saving the party whose mistreatment was used to justify the war. This is, I assure you dear Reader, very intentional.

Another important theme here is the incredible destruction and desolation caused by the wars, rendering them unsustainable. This is the real instability going on in Milieu XX16, with the confluence being a mere narrative device; things will change soon because they can no longer continue as they are, bringing us to the final era.

The Depletion Era

No empire can survive a constant mobilization of its people without the spoils of freshly conquered land for long. I’m not certain I’m happy with the details of the collapse as it stands, but it’s meant to inspire GMs to think about what happens without the player characters, not to be a canon “ending”. A detail I do really like is that these collapses seem to offer a chance to return to the old eras of expansion, but that these are false hopes and that empire cannot be sustained at the moment in a world of scorched earth warzones and fractious motherlands. Trying to plug the holes in the system with expansion will not work when things have already gotten this bad. Like I said, change is crucial; the system cannot continue as it stands.