Freelance
TravellerFive Absurdities of the Official Traveller Universe
This article was originally published in Alarums and Excursions #504 and reprinted with permission in the May/June 2026 issue of Freelance Traveller.
1. Grandfather
We are told that “grandfather” (aka Yaskoydray) was a supergenius born into a TL10 society who pretty much single-handedly led his people to the stars. From Adventure 12: Secret of the Ancients, page 42: “He decided that he needed help with his experiments, so he took over the world. He decided that he didn’t want to get old and die, so he found out how to live forever. He wanted to know some facts about the stars and about other worlds, so he invented the jump drive and went to visit them. Then he decided that the Droyne were not intelligent enough to help with the really important projects, so he decided to have children.”
I don’t care how smart somebody is. You can be Einstein times ten. You are not going to be able to do this. Progress takes time, and there’s usually politics that gets in the way. One might argue that although this abbreviated history doesn’t make sense in a human context, it still might be possible in the context of an alien race with a very different socio-political system. Hence, maybe this is just a failure of imagination on my part, but I’m just not buying it. For one thing, if he was able to find a way to live forever by using TL10 as a jumping off point, why hasn’t the Imperium been able to find the same at whatever its maximum tech level happens to be? No, there’s just too much here that doesn’t add up.
2. Humans/Earthlings being all over the place
Here, we are led to believe that “grandfather” in his infinite wisdom, took a liking to human beings and decided to bring them to various star systems where they were able to create their own star-spanning civilizations. This is so that the Imperial History can conform to the backdrop of the board game Imperium.
But how realistic is this? I mean, putting aside what I just said about “grandfather”, how realistic is it that humans would become the primarily beneficiaries of this sophont/slave transplant program? Consider that you get two human “empires” as a result of this, the Vilani and the Zhodani. Futhermore, the Vargr, albeit not human, began as earthlings, so out of the six major races, two of them just so happen to derive from Earth, and between them they control over half of known space. It just seems sort of incredible that humans/earthlings ended up being so lucky.
3. Solomani Take-Over
Speaking of the Vilani, how likely is it that the upstart Solomani would be able to defeat them? This has been talked to death on the Traveller Mailing List, and the main argument in favor of this are that the Vilani had been pushing their weight around for too long, and so the Solomani came around at just the right time to topple their house of cards.
But if the Vilani Imperium was primed to collapse, then why was it the Solomani humans (the privileged race from the privileged planet) who got to end up being the benefactors of extraordinary timing and not some other race or society? Once again, we have to bear in mind that this whole history comes out of a board game. One could argue that I’m suffering from a lack of imagination, but to my way of thinking, the whole premise just seems terribly unlikely, as unlikely as, say, Boudicca’s army conquering Britain and then marching through France and Spain and on to Rome to conquer the Roman Empire.
Granted, if GDW had adopted my mindset, Imperium (the board game) wouldn’t have been much fun to play. And when it comes to board games, I would agree that playability is definitely more important than realism. But when you port that same setting into an RPG, now you’re dealing a whole different animal, and so things sort of need to make sense.
4. Psionics
I know that psionics is a trope coming out of the pulp-SF literature, but it’s absurd. It feels to me like somebody was trying to wedge magic into science fiction, and the result is, predictably enough, science fantasy. That’s fine if that’s the genre you want, but just understand that that’s the genre you’re getting.
5. The Imperium
This last one is potentially a very long topic, and I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but my main premise is that even putting aside the unlikelihoods of “grandfather”, his human/earthling seeding program, and the Solomani takeover, you still have to deal with the final unlikelihood of there being a massive, star-spanning, mostly human-governed empire that lasts for over a thousand years but which still somehow manages to remain essentially hands-off with respect to the politics of its member worlds.
Politically and historically, I find this final premise to be inconceivable. If there is anything we have learned from history, it is that power begets the use of power, and the use of power begets the abuse of power. Granted, not all empires throughout history have been the epitome of evil. One could argue that the British Empire, in particular, did a lot more good than evil, but, of course, this may have been a function of the increasing influence of parliament, something that has no analogue in the Imperium save for the largely toothless Imperial Moot that has but one power that it seems very unlikely to ever use.
Having said all this, I don’t think we can really fault the game designers. Traveller’s Imperium was birthed fairly early in RPG history, and so it probably wasn’t put through the sort of critical review process that a modern RPG would be subjected to prior to publication. Likewise, we have to remind ourselves that the setting grew out of a board game, and given the nature of board games, it doesn’t seem to me that you even need a critical review process. After all, board game settings are not typically explored and detailed to the same extent as RPG settings.
Hence, I think we should respect the OTU (Official Traveller Universe) as being remarkable for its time, sort of like we might view the 1st edition of Greyhawk. In short, it is a triumph of early RPG literature, but we should look to move beyond it, either by modifying it, which many have done, or by creating our own unique settings which may be substantially different in a number of ways. I think the biggest mistake that Traveller players have made as a community is their apparent determination to stick with the OTU for so long when the resources have long been available to create wholly new Traveller settings, each of which could have its own unique set of standards and assumptions.
Granted, a proliferation of such alternate Traveller universes would substantially change the feel of Traveller, perhaps even spawning a variety of Traveller offshoots. Purists and those longing for a sense of nostalgia would rue the day the fan-base fragmented, but I think that ultimately it would be for the good, as although Traveller has been kept alive by a succession of publishers, my sense is that it has grown increasingly out-of-touch with the changing face of science-fiction in the 21st century.
Too Much Information
“I don’t know how to thank you for this,” Ty said, putting down the playback unit that showed him the revenge his heart so badly needed.
I’d just killed the man who’d raped his daughter. I made the man beg for his life on the promise that I’d let him live. Then, after he’d confessed at length and in detail, I pointed the body pistol squarely between his eyes.
“You promised you’d let me live,” he looked at me, somehow incredulous that I’d break my word.
“I did let you live…for an extra five minutes, and now it’s time to die. Any last words, m’lord?”
Baron von Grukiigarii began to make the usual noises that people make when they’re being shown the black door of death. I wasn’t recording it for my pleasure. I was recording it for Ty’s. After what this son-of-a-bitch had done, I knew it would soothe his soul.
We’d been mates since boarding school. From the very first day, we had each others’ backs against the other students, the dorm captain, and even the headmaster. Later, we’d both gone into the Imperial Secret Service. I became a sniper and eventually an assassin, while Ty was put into the administration. As he rose through the ranks, I eventually transferred to Imperial Army Special Forces, but we kept in touch.
We’d meet up maybe once every two or three years. There was always a lot of catching up to do, and there was a lot that neither one of us was supposed to talk about to the other, but we’d always drop a few tidbits about what we were doing. It made for some interesting conversations.
The level of stove-piping was so strict that we knew this might jeopardize our careers, but we had a level of trust where we didn’t even question what we were saying to each other, so when Ty told me about how his daughter had been raped by this well-connected baron, and there would be no justice because of the other nobles in the judiciary, well, I just knew what I had to do.
“This… what you did… this goes beyond friendship, Jake.”
“You would have done the same for me,” I replied.
He seemed at a loss for words, so I took the liberty of opening his liquor cabinet.
“How can I ever thank you?”
“Let’s get drunk.”
So we drank. And we drank some more. And we talked about old times. And we drank still further. And we talked about topics that were off-limits, operational stuff. And we drank past the point that we should have stopped. And then we were drunk, and all that was left to talk about was politics and history, the two never-ending subjects, stuff that Ty knew a hell of lot better than me given the sort of intelligence he had access to, stuff that would make your hair stand on end, though even with me he would circumscribe his words, no doubt skipping over areas that were far too sensitive even for the very closest of confidants.
Not tonight, however. Not tonight.
“History?” Ty snorted as if the word itself were a sick joke. “History is nothing more than a pack of lies,” he slurred the last few words together. This time, he’d really had too much to drink. His face was beet-red, and he teetered on the edge of his chair like he might fall off.
“A pack of lies? What part is a pack of lies?”
“All of it; all of it,” he said it twice as though I might have missed it the first time.
“I realize that you’re not supposed to talk about these things, so… I won’t ask again.”
There was a moment of silence, and then he looked at me and said, “You think you can keep your mouth shut?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“You’re sure or you guess?” he asked, his tone suddenly sharp.
“Okay, I’m sure,” I leaned in. “Anyway, who the hell would I talk to?”
“Nobody,” he replied. “Anyone who doesn’t already know the truth will never believe it, and anyone who does will kill you on the spot. I’m not exaggerating. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“There’s so much… so much disinformation,” he said with a faraway look in his eyes. “Politics and history… it’s all built on a mountain of lies.”
“That doesn’t exactly surprise me.”
“You remember last year, when I told you that the service was bringing together ancient artifacts recovered from all over the sector?”
“Sure. You said the eggheads were trying to figure out who this ‘grandfather’ character was mentioned in the old texts.”
“Yaskoydray,” he said. “At first we thought he was a great scientist… an inventor. The texts spoke of him like he was some sort of supergenius. But that was a complete fabrication. New evidence shows that he was just a businessman and politician of sorts. When the Ancients discovered anagathics, he somehow got control of the supply, and with that, he was able to bribe all the powerful people into recognizing him as their king.”
“Sounds reasonable to me.”
“He became dictator for life, but as is often a repercussion of anagathics, he slowly began to lose his sanity, and since there was no means to replace him, he became a tyrant. Every achievement of his people and every discovery by his scientists would be attributed to him. Like many tyrants, his need for adoration was a bottomless pit. That’s why they wrote that he single-handedly discovered the secret to jump space. In actuality, he didn’t know the first thing about jump drives.”
“I see,” I nodded. “Well, that doesn’t sound too far-fetched, but what about this business you mentioned before about the Ancients making humans into slaves and spreading us all over this area of the galaxy?”
“Yes, they did that with many races, not just humans.”
“Many races?”
“Well, yes, the Virgoans, the Kithihari, the Namudians,” he went on and on, naming ten or twenty others that I’d never heard of.
“Well, what happened to them?”
“We exterminated them over a thousand years ago.”
“What?!”
“Sure,” he said. “There are great wars in our past, wars that nobody ever talks about. During the first century or two after the final extermination, it was verboten to even mention these events. Immediate death. Immediate. Then, as the knowledge slowly began to die, anybody who tried to talk about it was thoroughly ridiculed as making up nonsense before being disappeared. After a few centuries of that, the knowledge was gone, at least to the general public.”
“Why?”
“Because, Humaniti is prone to fits of guilt over its past misdeeds, and as soon as the Individualists sink their teeth into this sort of stuff, they try using it to liberalize the entire society around democratic values. You can understand why the Imperium cannot allow that to happen, can’t you?”
“Sure,” I nodded, not really knowing whether I understood it or not. “But what about the Vargr,” I said. “You told me before that the Ancients created them.”
“We created them,” Ty shook his head. “The Vargr and all their kith and kin, the Animen, were genetically uplifted by humans. For centuries we used them as slaves and later as soldiers. But the Vargr revolted.”
“Okay…. This knowledge was suppressed too?”
“It was a decision that was made early on, and my guess is that it was political. Think about it. If the supposedly infallible Emperor ordered a new slave race to be created that would eventually revolt and kill humans by the millions, then that would be viewed as a mistake, right? So what then about that infallibility… you get my drift?”
I nodded, seeing the logic. This was a lot to take in.
“Then was it the Vilani or the Solomani who created the Vargr?”
“Both.”
“So they were created after the original Solomani-Vilani wars?”
“There…” he shook his head and then laughed. “The Interstellar Wars are pure fiction.”
“What?!”
“The Vilani realized Terra was their homeworld. The Vilani Emperor saw the historic importance of bringing it into the Empire peacefully, rather than rendering it a nuclear cinder, which was the other option, so he went to visit Terra himself, to talk to the Solomani directly, to pay them the respect of a state visit and personally negotiate their admittance into the Vilani Empire.”
“The Emperor went to Terra? That’s insane.”
“He was on anagathics. All the Vilani Emperors were. Insanity was usually part of the deal. Anyway, quite naturally he was captured, but since he was still alive, he was still able to issue orders as Emperor, so Terra became the new seat of government, and he basically did what the Solomani told him to do.”
“But… all that shit we had to memorize about the Interstellar wars back in boarding school?”
“All lies,” Ty said. “I told you, history is a pack of lies.”
I sat back in my chair and stared at the wall for a long moment, trying to take it all in.
“What about the Zhodani?” I finally asked.
“What about them?”
“Well, the Frontier Wars happened, didn’t they?”
“Uh… well, yes and no.”
“I don’t suppose you’d care to expand on that?”
“Well, it’s on a schedule, you see. It’s all planned out in advance.”
“What!?”
“It’s a long story. Trust me, you don’t what to know.”
“I want to know,” I counted.
“No, you don’t. Your brain will explode.”
“I’ll be fine,” I insisted.
Ty sighed and then rubbed his face.
“Well,” he said, “it’s sort of like this. The Zhodani, long ago, were part of the Empire, but then the Emperor had a great idea. Being that he was on anagathics, it wasn’t actually so great an idea, but he thought it was, so who’s going to argue with him, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You see, back then, he had everyone thinking that his secret police were telepathic so that everyone would be afraid to think bad thoughts. The idea was that this would enhance social and political stability.”
“Like the Zhodani,” I said, “who are ruled by psionic adepts.”
“Except that they aren’t,” Ty replied. “There’s no such thing as psionics.”
“What?!!”
“Keep your voice down. You’re going to wake up Margaret.”
“Sorry.”
“This is what I was trying to explain,” Ty lowered his voice. “The whole thing was social manipulation at its finest, but people were beginning to figure it out, so the Emperor’s great idea was that there should be this Zhodani Consulate which would be an outright, bullshit-based society, a sort of meritocracy based on a talent that doesn’t even exist.”
“So nobody could argue with it,” I was beginning to see the big picture.
“Right. How can you argue with it? All your life you’re told that there is such a thing as psionics, and you know you don’t have it, so then… no point trying to be a big hero… no point trying to be a leader. Even think about it and you’re going to jail. It’s a masterpiece of social manipulation.”
“But then why not do that with the whole Imperium?”
“Because the Imperium has to be the good guys,” Ty said. “We’re the open society, comparatively, or so everyone is made to think. That’s why we clamp down on psionics. Because we don’t want to become like how the Zhodani supposedly are.”
“But what about the Frontier Wars?”
“Oh, that’s the best part,” Ty grinned. “So the Emperor puts the loudest dissidents and all the other people he’d like to get rid of along the Imperial-Zhodani border, and the Zhodani high counsel does the same thing. And then boom, oh my gosh, there’s a border incident, and all these people are dead. How sad. My, how unfortunate that was. Both sides rattle their sabers, but behind the scenes, we cooperate with them all the time. I mean, they serve the Emperor just like you and I, except for them it’s a secret.”
I stared at Ty for a long moment, suddenly wondering if he was pulling my leg. I’d just killed a guy, a baron, no less, for him and his daughter’s honor. Was he deliberately messing with my mind? We’d known each other so long there was no disguising this impression. He could read the doubt on my face as easily as the morning headlines.
“It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it?”
“I… just… you better not be fucking with me.”
“If that’s what you think then yes, I’m fucking with you.”
“What!!?!”
“I already told you, keep your voice down.” He sighed. “Look, I honestly couldn’t give a Bwap’s ass what you believe, but this I will say: don’t ever repeat any of this. Not to anyone. Not ever. If you want to think it’s all bullshit, be my guest. I can only lead you to the truth. Whether or not you believe it is up to you.”