Need inspiration for a galactic menace

[Lysander]

I like the "Omega Clouds" found in Jack McDevitt's novels. Sweeping in waves from the center of the galaxy along the galactic arm every 8,000 years or so and devasting any objects that contain right angles (hence wiping out whole civilizations as they move outward). In McDevitt's universe humanity is the only known interstellar intelligence but there are remnants of interstellar civilizations (now dead) found up and down the Orion arm.

They are enigmatic, implacable and, frankly, omnipotent. They act as a force of nature. I always thought it would be a great campaign to first discover that they exist, then calculate that they come in waves, then finally try to find out just what (and why) they are.

Not a great foe you love to hate but rather a great dangerous mystery to resolve (or avoid).

 

[Stofsk]

K'kree Jihad.

Are the Hivers behind it? Trying to stop it? Looking for an advantage? Will the Solomani stand by, or help on the Rimward flank? What about the Vargr? Might the Imperium promise the Aslan all the worlds they could conquer from the Two Thousand Worlds, if they'll send their fleets to resist the Herd? What will the Zhodani do?

It wouldn't be an immediate threat to the Imperium, as the Jihad would have to chew through the border states, but that wouldn't take too long.

This depends on YTU of course, but the reason a jihad never occured prior to the Rebellion/Fall in the OTU is because, frankly, the Imperium is too powerful to be opposed.

Then as I understand it, Virus came along and brutally, mercilessly, levelled the playing field.

A war of survival against an alien and genocidal enemy set amidst the ruins of Humaniti's former glory... would be epic.

 

[Paladin]

What about an energy based lifeform that functions like a computer virus and slowly spreads/disrupts communication/ships/planets. Launch my some relic the PCs stumble upon. Or perhaps on a derelict ship with no readings. Manifests slowly with periodic mechanical problems/misreads and grows worse.

 

[nvdoyle]

K'kree Jihad.

Are the Hivers behind it? Trying to stop it? Looking for an advantage? Will the Solomani stand by, or help on the Rimward flank? What about the Vargr? Might the Imperium promise the Aslan all the worlds they could conquer from the Two Thousand Worlds, if they'll send their fleets to resist the Herd? What will the Zhodani do?

It wouldn't be an immediate threat to the Imperium, as the Jihad would have to chew through the border states, but that wouldn't take too long.

This depends on YTU of course, but the reason a jihad never occured prior to the Rebellion/Fall in the OTU is because, frankly, the Imperium is too powerful to be opposed.

Then as I understand it, Virus came along and brutally, mercilessly, levelled the playing field.

A war of survival against an alien and genocidal enemy set amidst the ruins of Humaniti's former glory... would be epic.

Oh, agreed - I liked Rebellion and Fall, and having the K'Kree come calling then is much more threatening (let alone the borged-out K'Kree from behind the Black Curtain...).

Thinking more about a standard K'Kree Jihad, it's true, the Imperium would be too powerful. I'm thinking here of some sort of World War 2 Pacific Theatre analogue, really. The Smelly Horsies Who Love Each Other Very Much want/need land and resources, and have determined, for good or ill, now is the time to go get them. Flush with their success at gobbling up border states, they take a swing at the Imperium. It's a nasty, brutal war, and even though there's no way they could actually defeat the Imperium, they may be looking for a negotiated peace, or they may have misjudged Imperial morale. Or, who knows what the Hivers have cooked up?

 

[walkir]

"We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Can you imagine anything more hairy to deal with? Eventually, a race hell-bent on destroying/enslaving/consuming everything in their path would unite all of the sentient races who can more or less get along against them, and be promptly exterminated.

But these guys... These guys would be just and rightly scary to deal with.

The problem with that one is that is basically an "interstellar wars 2.0" setting...

 

[Baeron Gredlocke]

Not sure if I'm going to get flamed for this...

How about Virus from TNE? You can scale the aggressiveness/impact of the virus to whichever level of mayhem you're looking for in the campaign, to whichever your destination effect happens to be.

It's not like there's plenty of source material from GDW for it.

We're still playing the TNE setting, I find the idea personally fascinating.

 

[kafka]

I don't know. I have made my peace with TNE. However, the question would be how to contain the Virus...in TNE, it is pretty unstoppable. So, I could see a proto-Virus that might wreak havoc just within a subsector before dying out completely. With Imperial Officials spilt between: "WTF just happened..." and "It must be mine...the weapons division would pay a me a small fortune for a sample..." Thus acting as a template for what is to come.

 

[alex_greene]

Virus seemed pretty damned unstoppable by the imaginations of the old game back then. Everything depended upon tech which was based on silicon. Even when Virus came across alien tech that was not based on silicon, somehow it makaged to evolve into a form which could infect that type of computers, and so on.

TNS painted itself into a corner, offering no way out for anyone, because real world tech hadn't been invented which could take on something like Virus. I mean, nobody'd ever heard of firewalls back then, did they?

 

[Baeron Gredlocke]

I agree. As presented, Virus was pretty much an unstoppable force. You should be able to scale it back with some GM hand waving, though.

One of the reasons Virus was so, well, virulent was it's infection of the xboat network- find a reason to remove that component of it and it becomes much more manageable, but no less frightening.

 

[alex_greene]

You see, Virus started as a result of the major McGuffin plot point in the CT adventure Signal GK.

Signal GK introduced the concept of the Cymbeline chip: on a world called Cymbeline, in the Solomani Rim, the prevailing atmospheric conditions had allowed the "evolution" of a form of life based on silicon chips; silicon biology, rather than technology.

When a Scout ship crashed on Cymbeline, exposing its innards to the environment, some of the chips bonded with and fused with the native living chips, becoming sentient entities that were capable of writing their code on blank silicon, thus reproducing itself and forming a kind of "civilisation."

The Imperium developed this further, creating a kind of data stream which, like the chips themselve,s could imprint itself onto silicon technology. When Dulinor discovered the Imperial base and transmitted the signal to his ships, what he thought was data concerning the weapon actually turned out to be the weapon; and thus an empire ended.

TNE made Virus Apocalyptic. Mongoose doesn't have to.

 

[GypsyComet]

What did eventually stop Virus was its adaptability. The evolution required to overcome certain barriers, as well as the limitations caused by certain host devices, eventually removed or reduced the Killer Instinct installed by Lucan's lab. The things that made Virus apocalyptic were the broadly homogenous systems in starships and orbital installations that allowed it to spread across much of known space *without* evolving.

That said, Virus was intended to be a transformative technology for the setting, bringing AI down from the lofty and unreachable TL heights it had been consigned to. The TNE timeframe was just starting to see the beginning of this, and the wars of the early 1200s set the stage for further development. Cyms were just starting to become social in 1248.

 

[alex_greene]

Yup.

Had the licence been allowed to develop, the Fourth Imperium woudl have seen AIs, robots with Intellect programs and Cym characters, all with motivations of their own.

Traveller would have caught up with cyberpunk.

 

[kristof65]

What did eventually stop Virus was its adaptability. The evolution required to overcome certain barriers, as well as the limitations caused by certain host devices, eventually removed or reduced the Killer Instinct installed by Lucan's lab. The things that made Virus apocalyptic were the broadly homogenous systems in starships and orbital installations that allowed it to spread across much of known space *without* evolving.

You can still actually use the premise of the Virus evolving and spreading WITHOUT using the killer instinct aspect of it. Basically, something that can imprint itself on top of another technology as it evolves and spreads is going to cause havoc and mayhem even without malicious intent. Computers crash, possibly causing hazards, and then only slowly start responding again to outside influence, but under something else's control. The result is that starshps crash, comm and infrastructure networks go down and people die, even if that's not the Virus' intent.

This actually makes Virus much more interesting, as it spreads itself, and each "individual" comes to terms with it's growth pains and starts to realize the damage it's doing. Some of these newborn AI's won't care, and will continue to cause havoc; others will care, and alliances can form, wars be fought, etc.

And the damage caused can be contained as desired - if most of the newborn AIs have (or can be taught) a set of moral values that make them feel bad for hurting other sentient lifeforms, damage can be fairly minimal. However, if too many don't care, or worse - feel threatened with extinction from those other lifeforms, then the damage they wreak merely by trying to survive can be really widespread. It can also ebb and flow - most of the newboard AI's agree to "peace" when some organization decides they're all dangerous and the "war" flares back up again.

The more I think about, the more I'd like to see Virus re-emerge in the OTU, only in a more interesting fashion like I mention above, so that the universe changing aspects can be more gradual.

 

[alex_greene]

I love the sentient chip / Virus discussion, but to divert the attention back to the topic of galactic threats, and in keeping with the theme as presented ...

Replicators. You know, the Stargate SG-1 kind. Last night I figured out a way of making these things happen in Traveller.

You get a bugdroid, something assassins on some high tech world developed (perhaps the forthcoming Book 5 might have something to say about this, or if not, think of that SF story from the Eighties featuring Tom Selleck as a robot-hunting cop and Gene Simmons as some bad guy who builds assassin droids), and it gets infected with Virus. And it reproduces.

Worse, it learns how to replicate itself physically.

So you soon end up with a swarm of self-replicating bug droids, say no bigger than a flash drive, crawling around consuming every surface going. And they - or rather, their controlling intelligence - evolves, becomes swarm-based, with a Queen replicator acting as a nanofactory, being fed scraps of raw materials and producing yet more of these damned things ...

Well, you can go back to the Virus topic now if you wish.

 

[AndrewW]

You get a bugdroid, something assassins on some high tech world developed (perhaps the forthcoming Book 5 might have something to say about this, or if not, think of that SF story from the Eighties featuring Tom Selleck as a robot-hunting cop and Gene Simmons as some bad guy who builds assassin droids), and it gets infected with Virus. And it reproduces.

Afraid there aren't any bugdroids in Agent. Though Central Supply Catalogue does have some bugs.

 

[alex_greene]

I'm still buying both books though. Just not for this specific reason.

 

[GJD]

AKA an Aggressive Hegemonising Swarm Object (to quote from The Cuture). Self replicating devices that convert all useable matter into more copies of themselves. Also seen in Lexx, where they converted all matter in the Light zone apart from the Lexx into copies of themselves, and thereby altered the fabric of spacetime to form a portal to another dimension.

G.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

Also seen in 2010 as these devices were used to increase Jupiter's density so that it would ignite into a star.

The IDEA of self-replicating robots/nanites has been around for a long time. If some of them got out of control, you don't even need intent or intelligence. They just keep eating and adding to their number and eating and...

 

[StephenT]

This actually makes Virus much more interesting, as it spreads itself, and each "individual" comes to terms with it's growth pains and starts to realize the damage it's doing.

That's pretty much the way TNE did handle it, actually. The whole "killer AI plague wiping out humanity" was part of the setting's backstory, not its central concept. By the time PC parties started heading out again to rebuild civilisation, Virus had already evolved into multiple different systems which could be treated as individuals with their own motivations. Sure, there were still a few homicidal killer programs wandering about controlling warbots or starships or killer toasters, but every setting needs a few mooks and black hats and supervillains, doesn't it?

 

[EDG]

AKA an Aggressive Hegemonising Swarm Object (to quote from The Cuture). Self replicating devices that convert all useable matter into more copies of themselves.

Alastair Reynolds has a similar concept - Greenfly. IIRC it's a self-replicating terraforming robot that ran amok - it shatters planets and turns them into disks of asteroids, then covers the asteroids in a sealed biosphere. It also has the effect of turning stars "green" from a distance, because they're surrounded by zillions of green asteroids that mask the true colour of the star (stars cannot themselves actually be green).

They're pretty much unstoppable in the setting, they spread from system to system and consume a pretty huge part of the galaxy by the time the narrative stops. Humans resort to hiding around pulsars (the Greenfly passes by those, thinking they don't have planets, but then realises that they do and doubles back), and then escape out of the galactic plane. (as described in "Galactic North").