Ancients never existed - What If?

[Shadowblayde99]

I'm thinking about an alternative to the Traveller Universe and wondered what it would be like if the Ancients never existed.

The first thing would be that Vargr wouldn't exist because they weren't uplifted.

Neither would the Zhodani or Vilani so Humaniti would literally just spread out from Terra.

Humans would bump up against the Aslan and Hivers but would be free to expand rimward and coreward but would only go so far in the roughly 3000 years between discovery of jump drive and 1105 of the Third Imperium...maybe expand into Daibei, Diaspora and the Old Expanses?

Would Humaniti as a whole be like some Solomani in the OTU and feel that they are the only ones with the right to rule or was that a consequence of meeting the Vilani? Would Humaniti be constantly at war with everyone or would there be peaceful relations. Or would Solomani space become a hodgepodge of small empires?

Any thoughts?

 

[steelbrok]

You would still have K'kree too and their big war with the Hivers wouldn't change much.
In fact, you might have Humans being absorbed as a client race of the Hive Federation
The Droyne would could still exist as a bucolic species on some far away planet (or you might posit a more "normal" development for them with a Droyne Empire in the Spinward Marches).

 

[steelbrok]

Another way to play it would to be use the 2300 background and have your PCs make first contact with the Aslan and/or Hivers

 

[Jakovian]

In ideal conditions, the population after 1000 years would be 520 billion people. Technological development would be slower; there would be no rapid unification. The lack of enemies would cause slow development of armaments. Aslans or Hivers would have won, as they themselves would not have limitations in the form of other, human races.

 

[paltrysum]

No jump drive. There is a great deal of evidence that suggests jump drive was a chance discovery by Grandfather, and that without him, all the sophont species of Charted Space would have been forced to use sublight tech to get from star system to star system. That would change things quite significantly, I think.

Of course, you are entitled to make it otherwise in your campaign.

 

[Nelphine]

How did he subtly give it to all the major races? Didn't they all did over it on their own?

 

[Sigtrygg]

No jump drive. There is a great deal of evidence that suggests jump drive was a chance discovery by Grandfather, and that without him, all the sophont species of Charted Space would have been forced to use sublight tech to get from star system to star system. That would change things quite significantly, I think.

Of course, you are entitled to make it otherwise in your campaign.

Could you cite the evidence you have for this please. Everything I have read agrees that he was a genius level intellect and invented it. I don't recall the "chance discovery" being mentioned anywhere so would greatly appreciate learning about it.

 

[Sigtrygg]

How did he subtly give it to all the major races? Didn't they all did over it on their own?

Only a few races have independently invented jump drive
Ancients, Vilani, Terrans, Vargr, Zhodani, Hivers, K'kree all the others reverse engineered them from captured or relic tech.

 

[Sigtrygg]

A question for Shadowblayde99.

Are you dialing this all the way forward to the fifty seventh century?
Terrans discover jump drive towards the end of the twenty first century.
Industrialisation of the Solar System and the exploration and establishment of colonies near the Solar System.
The diaspora of humanity.
Encountering the Vegans.
The formation of new human polities.
Conflict between these?
An attempt to unify under one authority
A collapse and a thousand year long night (plenty of time for splinter states and small multi-world pocket empires to form)

With no Vilani to steal higher TL data from Terrans could take thousands of years to discover jump 2 (it took the Vilani over three thousand).

​

 

[Shadowblayde99]

My idea was to take it to the 57th century. I didn't know that some races got jump tech from ancient artifacts.

I expect there would be conflict with some alien species.

Humans would likely join together if there were a large war else they would probably end up all dead or slaves or something.

I suspect that, at some point, the designers of the game set the size of other species regions of space to be comparable to that of the Imperium so that no one had a clear advantage. Changing one part has significant effects on the rest so you have to start at the beginning and build the universe up from there.

 

[Sigtrygg]

When the Vilani began exploring space they discovered some alien races much more advanced than the TL9 Vilani, but they lacked the secret of the jump drive. The same could be true if it were the Terrans heading out into the spiral arm at lowly TL9.
The Vilani explored, traded, colonised, but kept their distance from the worlds with more advanced tech. The Terrans could do likewise.

 

[paltrysum]

Could you cite the evidence you have for this please. Everything I have read agrees that he was a genius level intellect and invented it. I don't recall the "chance discovery" being mentioned anywhere so would greatly appreciate learning about it.

It comes from a reputable source. Most of the advanced civilizations (Hydrogens, Abyssals, etc.) in the Milky Way galaxy did not invent jump drive. They built their interstellar civilizations using STL tech.

Did all of the Major Species in Charted Space independently develop jump drive? That's the official story, with only the Aslan possibly excepted. But it is a mite strange that all of the other major powers in far-off realms had to put-put around the galaxy while everyone in our area managed to "independently" develop jump drive.

I will continue to toe the party line on the Major Species doing it themselves, but hey, if we're making suppositions like no Grandfather, then why not make some more interesting suppositions, such as only Grandfather did it... and let it slip into the hands of other species.

 

[Seffix]

For another alternative take, I'm considering disassociating the Ancients from the Droyne in my new campaign. Why? Because some of my players might already know that story, and I think they would enjoy a curveball or two.

In this version, the Droyne were more like humaniti in that the Ancients plucked them from their homeworld and plopped them down here and there for a variety of enigmatic reasons.

Will it actually make any difference? No idea. Has anyone tried doing something like this?

 

[Sigtrygg]

One thing is for certain - there is no Secret anymore. What is needed is to take a look at Grandfather and his offspring as a tale Droyne tell, the truth is very different and still a mystery.

 

[alex_greene]

There'd have been no Dzaqtlas. Without the Final War, nobody would have developed the bioweapons. There would have been no Zhodani or Chirpers in the Zhdant system.

 

[alex_greene]

And the Terrans would have slaughtered the Hivers and K'Kree.

 

[GypsyComet]

There'd have been no Dzaqtlas. Without the Final War, nobody would have developed the bioweapons. There would have been no Zhodani or Chirpers in the Zhdant system.

Or other offshoots of Humaniti on 50+ other worlds.

The Terran's first contact is likely the Vegans, but even that will be locked up behind either deep space jumps or J2, because Terra is in the center of a J2 neighborhood surrounded by a J3 moat with one way out.

 

[Seffix]

My version is as Sigtrygg says: The Grandfather/Droyne hypothesis is just that, a good working hypothesis. Only it's wrong. Most of the modern effects of the Ancients and the Final War are the same, but it wasn't the Droyne, or maybe it wasn't just the Droyne.

I admit, there's a perverse part of me that is looking at the Geonee, because no one suspects the Geonee.