Anagathics

M

MasterGwydion

Emperor Mongoose
CSC vs RH discrepancy.

CSC pg 92 under anagathics withdrawal,
"Anagathics are always expensive, often illegal and are based on a variety of methods. These include synthetic molecules, exotic biology and nanomachinery. All of these pause the aging process but once a Traveller begins an anagathics regimen they must remain on the same treatment. Failure to continue the treatment can have side effects beyond the resumption of aging"

RH pg 84
"Unlike anagathics, ceasing nanorobot treatment will not cause an adverse reaction but after 20 years of use, medical nanorobots begin to lose effectiveness, becoming one TL less effective at reducing aging.

CSC describes nanomachinery as an anagathic which is subject to withdrawal symptoms.
RH specifically says that medical nanomachinery does not stop aging completely or cause withdrawal symptoms.

Why are nanomeds considered an anagathics in CSC, but not in RH?
 
To cause you grief in particular /s

CRB spoke in the general. RH spoke to the specific. RH has nanobot treatment that works like that. There are other treatments which may use nanobots, but dont work like that.
Also Anagathic dont stop aging completely, they only prevent additional -DM to the aging roll. Its possible to be on anagathic and still age.
 
Keep in mind that neither RH or CSC are like a Sears catalogue (or for the younger set: a set of Amazon search results), they are toolkits for things that can be included in a Traveller campaign and have some sort of consistency. Just because it's in there, doesn't mean you can necessarily go out and order it.

And anagathics can be a bit of a hot mess. They are a bunch of different things that share the property of slowing or pausing aging. In T4 there's an aside about some space bum (err, former Merchant) who ate some stuff on a planet once and got to 400 years old before he aged away like a vampire at dawn (okay, not that fast, but I liked the simile, so let's roll with it). Was it TNE that had the 'you jump and anagathics kill you' thing? Anyway, consistency assumes it all works the same way, and it doesn't.

A lot of what's in the nanorobots chapter might only be available on certain worlds in Charted Space, like Neumann, and even then, under controlled distribution. Charted Space is pretty 'strict' on aging. Other settings (Clement come to mind, and yes, I know that's Cepheus) have different approaches to aging. In a thread back a few years, I said the way I'd prefer to run it is with a character's SOC and TL DMs applied to aging rolls, but that's just me...
 
I'm seriously surprised that some enterprising corporate executive has not researched the Sword Worlder diet and supplements to spread its semi-anagathic benefits to the Imperium in the form of pre-packaged gourmet (and over-priced regular) meal kits.

Perhaps one drawback is that it would have to come with warning labels to restrict the customer base to only those with a high enough fortitude (END) to stomach the cuisine... Since if you don't have a +DM to END, it either does nothing or could kill you. (MgT 1e Sword Worlds book)

I warned my players about that during Character Generation when they said, "We wanna be Sword Worlders."
 
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