Psion Communities

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In modern times, this viewpoint originated in American superhero comics, where in the Thirties it was Jewish aspirationalism, and in the Seventies, Civil Rights, and lacking a historical descriptive, gay expressionalism.

I don't think that psionics in Traveller and these are connected; the fear that espers would take over the game may have more to do with pulp science fiction stories where they did, rather than the zeitgeist.
 
The OTU Third Imperium is authoritarian, racist, corrupt, and bigoted. MWM has done an interview or two mentioning that the players have agency, characters can be any race, any gender.

Changing the nature of the OTU because of "modern feelings" would be a huge mistake and would alienate a lot more than it would attract.

If you don't like them, change them, but do not insist they change for me.

There are several topics I would never bring up
my own personal sexuality
my own biases with regards to gender ideology
my own religious or moral beliefs
 
Condottiere said:
In modern times, this viewpoint originated in American superhero comics, where in the Thirties it was Jewish aspirationalism, and in the Seventies, Civil Rights, and lacking a historical descriptive, gay expressionalism.

I don't think that psionics in Traveller and these are connected; the fear that espers would take over the game may have more to do with pulp science fiction stories where they did, rather than the zeitgeist.
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Nonetheless, psion communities would persist, often right under the noses of the authorities.

I can't help but imagine how ridiculous and dangerous people would sound if the Third Imperium had been set up to exclude left-handed people.
 
There's one world (I don't remember which offhand) in The Traveller Adventure where the local authority in charge of suppressing psionics was taken over by the very psions that it was supposed to be suppressing, making it easy to avoid or clean up problems when they happen. I doubt that that's a unique case in the default time period.
 
In terms of sexual discrimination and repression in the Imperium, that would be a local jurisdiction issue, much like law levels are pretty much anchored locally as well.

Psionic repression is the futuristic equivalent of witch hunts, which arguably are more ageist and misogynistic.
 
alex_greene said:
This is the funny thing about Traveller's undercurrent of psion persecution.
Swap out telepathy for being left-handed, or having red hair.
Now you can begin to understand that the root of persecution of any minority in a roleplaying game is actually bigotry.
The target of this bigotry is fictional, sure, but the stink of the bigot is all too real.
I think it's something the publishers need to look into, not because the next generation will be all telepaths, but because the next generation will be able to smell the bovine excrement and maybe look for another game, where it's not so prevalent in the core rules.
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Well, the center of any story [especially in the Western storytelling tradition] is conflict. Without conflict Traveller would be just another set of trade rules. And bias, in all its forms, is a major source of conflict.
I should also point out that in earlier editions of Traveller's OTU, the Psionic Suppressions were the result of a failed experiment in psychohistory. Psychohistory, in a Traveller sense, is the idea that one can predict major social reactions on a large scale... essentially the 'science of spin doctoring'. In the mid-700s Imperial social scientists got Imperial approval to manipulate society's opinion of psionics on an Imperium-wide scale. The idea was to get hundreds of trillions of sophonts to accept the idea that psionics were like any other talent... some were gifted in it in the same way some people have an ability to learn languages and others easily understood financial markets. Instead of more acceptence, there was a massive backlash resulting in widespread dislike and fear of psionics.
 
I was signposted to Core Adventure 3: Errant Lightning, which has a psion enclave living in the Core Subsector, under the noses of the Imperial Family. The antagonists are karens from Research Station Gamma.

I just read through the adventure. This was a good thing: an adventure which painted psions in a good light, and the anti-psions as misguided, evil, and wrong.

There's a plot twist -
they're also hypocrites, since one of the antagonists is a psion hmself, a psi-blocker. I swapped that one up, made him a psi-vampire instead, draining people of their END and PSI to fuel his long life.

Errant Lightning really needed some suggestions to referees on how to resolve the conflict from the colonialising antagonists with their "we've got to kill you for your own good" attitudes, such as discovering their hypocrisy and showing them up as the liars that they are, and even The Community to fight back against the merc hirelings (or even bringing them around to fight for The Community).

The key to the adventure's resolution is the Travellers. Which means that at least one canon adventure exists with the message that anti-psion hatred is wrong, and the Travellers are wrong to hold on to that.
 
Psionically powerful people are *everywhere* in the Imperium, some are trained and use their powers and some are not and the 'unusual instances' in their life fade away as time goes on [as represented by -1 PSI per term of untrained psions].
It would not surprise me if the OTU decided that there was a Psionic Institute on Capital buried somewhere in the Imperial bureaucracy. Nor would it surprise me if there wasn't an attending physician in the Imperial Household whose job was keep the Household tamper free. For that matter, since all three members of the Imperial Family have cybernetic INT implants it's not at all unreasonable that a PSI Shield wasn't included in the package.
Something else to consider is that many anti-psi activists are people of good conscience who are not comfortable having to rely on another person's ethics and morality to maintain that most basic of human privileges, the right to their own thoughts. These people don't hate psionics or psions - they don't don't trust psions for what to them are good and justifiable reasons. Their reservations about the issue are not 'evil' per se, they're just opposed to your feelings on the matter.
This is where the 'psions as LGBTQ' allegory falls short. The LGBTQ community can conduct their lives without invading the privacy or lives of those around them. They are just as likely to have good and bad relationships as their hetero family and friends.
A telepath or clairvoyant is an entirely different ball of wax. People rightly fear the psionic criminal as one of the 'bump in the night' type fears that all us 'Neandro-sapiens' ;) have. Down in the bedrock of our collective DNA we have those ancestral memories of Tanganyika where something is stalking us in the night. The idea that some unseen bad actor is scanning our thoughts is deeply disturbing to all of us. These are not unreasonable fears, and it takes a disciplined mind and actual training to overcome these fears.
Now, the politicians who use these fears to incite mobs, THOSE are the evil guys. One thing that a government by hereditary nobility does do for you is reduce the reach of populist demagogues. It's fairly easy for an Imperial Legate to tell the Alex Jones' of the Imperium to go bugger themselves.
 
ottarrus said:
Something else to consider is that many anti-psi activists are people of good conscience who are not comfortable having to rely on another person's ethics and morality to maintain that most basic of human privileges, the right to their own thoughts
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And they're still wrong for trying to intrude on other people's lives, urged to hate by the non-existent fear that the Stranger might scan them.
Or hex them.
That's where propaganda is insidious - the fear of the psion intruder far outweighing the reality, and the flood of the self-righteous who see no problem in them trying to stop psions, with not a sound from their warped conscience to stop them committing the deeply unethical acts they are accusing psions of.
That's the whole thing about being a psion in the 3I - the fact that they are an oppressed minority, living in enclaves, harming nobody, yet subjected to persecution from rancid karens who are dead wrong.
And maybe there'll be more adventures and modules coming out to hold up a mirror to the Travellers and to show them that they are dead wrong, in a growing movement whose voice begins to be heard more and more loudly from the early 1100s.

There needs to be something in the next iteration of the Core Rulebook, a disclaimer along the lines of "Psionics in this Core Rulebook are presented as an acceptable option. The rules were originally written to make psionics difficult to obtain, in order to focus the game on solving problems with mundane skills rather than turn the game into Psionic Knights In Space. This policy was a mistake, because it allowed an outlet for bigotry to creep in and pollute Traveller.
"The Third Imperium setting specifically paints psionics as a negative, thanks to a historical campaign of negative propaganda tying in with the Frontier Wars and racial hatred of the Zhodani, but this is where the Travellers can come in, driven by the need to correct an imbalance and right a grotesque injustice."
Something like that.
 
CordwainerFish said:
I would really love to see "Zhodani through Zhodani eyes" sometime. Done right it could be like Julian May tried to portray the Galactic Milieu as.

(Done wrong it could be Darkover...)
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Take a look at AoCP 1 and the Zhodani article. It presents Zhodani culture in a factual and 'neutral' way.
Then take a look at John Ford's *excellent* article 'Zhodani Philosophies' that was originally in JTAS 22 and reprinted in MgJTAS #2
 
alex_greene said:
There needs to be something in the next iteration of the Core Rulebook, a disclaimer along the lines of "Psionics in this Core Rulebook are presented as an acceptable option. The rules were originally written to make psionics difficult to obtain, in order to focus the game on solving problems with mundane skills rather than turn the game into Psionic Knights In Space. This policy was a mistake, because it allowed an outlet for bigotry to creep in and pollute Traveller.
"The Third Imperium setting specifically paints psionics as a negative, thanks to a historical campaign of negative propaganda tying in with the Frontier Wars and racial hatred of the Zhodani, but this is where the Travellers can come in, driven by the need to correct an imbalance and right a grotesque injustice."
Something like that.
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I completely disagree.

It is for referees to make the call about their setting.
 
Sigtrygg said:
I completely disagree.

It is for referees to make the call about their setting.
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I agree - ultimately it is down to the Referee - and to an extent the Travellers. I know of two players so far that have requested not having certain topics appear in-game for their personal reasons and that is perfectly reasonable. Having villains use nefarious means to get at their opponents is integral to some adventures. Adventures, to me, are driven by conflict and drama which, strangely, conflicts with my Utopian ideals...
 
Sigtrygg said:
I completely disagree.

It is for referees to make the call about their setting.
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Not if the RAW make it canon to make it criminal to choose that option.
What is wrong with having a setting where psions lead? You are happy to run Aslan-centered and Vargr-centered stories, and there are homebrew settings.
Traveller should cater for non-3I settings, where psionics are accepted and characters have a lot more options for becoming psions, as much as they would be allowed to play Starlight Opera's Taodhan characters, or Castrobancla's Kubotaur.
And even in the 3I, psion enclaves and communities still exist, and fight back, and destroy the darkness which would exterminate them, and player characters who want to run psions in the 3I should not be faced with referees making their game rubbish by following a RAW that mandates that they should never be given a break, or a moment to enjoy playing in the setting.
There is a word for "Hey, everybody has fun at this table except Franklin. We get to treat Franklin like a pariah because he chooses to play a character that the core rulebook tells us that we can legally harass." And referees have read the RAW as mandating discrimination since day 1.
 
I have never encountered any form of discrimination at the gaming table.
Plenty in real life.

This is what the original CT rules had to say:
A NOTE ON GENDER AND RACE
Nowhere in these rules is a specific requirement established that any character (player or non-player) be of a specific gender or race. Any character is potentially of any race or of either sex.
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The Third Imperium is a complex setting filled with nuance. There is overt racism in the minor race/major race discrimination. Just look at the casual racism directed towards Vargr - something that MWM actually deals with in his short story Names:

Then, I started to talk out our current situation. “Out here in dogspace…”24
She interrupted. “Wait a minute. They call us Humans,25 not apes. We owe them the
same respect. Vargr, not dogs.”
Who was she, the new hire to tell me how to talk? We all called them dogs.
Sometimes they called themselves dogs. And they certainly called us apes. Or, some
equivalent word in their growling language.

Captain was lamenting how the
dogs conspired to underpay for trade goods and overcharge for starport services.
“Dogs is inappropriate. They are Vargr.” Captain certainly registered surprise.
Beecie continued, “These people are our customers, our clients, our suppliers. We get
money from them for the goods we sell. We pay them to refuel us and service our ship.
We expect them to do it right. Our lives are in their hands, in more ways than one.
“They must be hearing you calling them dogs. You are ignoring their own cultural
value for small group hierarchies. They deserve your respect until they prove unworthy.
Our ship’s Imperial registry commands some deference, but when you talk like that it
triggers micro-aggressions. They aren’t conspiring across parsecs to defraud you. They
just don’t like you. If you ever come back to the same port, they will remember.”26
No one ever talked like that to Captain. We awaited his outburst response. Except
First interceded. “Beecie is right.”

On the other hand, my perception changed. If I refocused my eyes, I saw the Vargr as
people. Granted, they had long snouts, fangs, wet (or dry) noses, but inside they were
people just like us.
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In my Culture game characters can change sex, gender, race, species, just about anything goes. They remain the same person though.
 
If you or i want to run a game where a psionic community fights for their acceptance in Imperial society I would happily contribute and or play in such a game. i would certainly buy any adventures or supplements with those themes.

I do not need someone telling me how I should change the Third imperium setting as it is written, the whole point is it is corrupt, racist, casually criminal - such is human nature, this is not the United Federation of Planets. The players can make things better or they can go with the flow, or even make things worse.

Oddly enough the games I ran where the players really tried to make a difference for the better was the Hard Times era. They had plenty of opportunity to get rich quick off the suffereing of others, but they chose time and again to put their lives on the line for the sake of others.

This is the setting I would like to see grow out of TNE, When the dust has settled and the threats dealt with there is a great opportunity for an enlightened future.

Then they can encounter the Abyssals...
 
I think that there are valid reasons to have a disclaimer for many pieces of fiction/music/art/RPG/many pieces of IP because we live in a different time.

Not a different time from "then" but because we now are in a new era where things can be compared against each other in real time with sometimes very confusing results. Hearing a song for the first time and thinking how great it is. And then discovering that it is a remake of a remake of a.... Who deserves the credit?

So having something that acknowledges the presumed (or explicit) intent of a published piece is good.

"a disclaimer along the lines of "Psionics in this Core Rulebook are presented as an acceptable option. The rules were originally written to make psionics difficult to obtain, in order to focus the game on solving problems with mundane skills" works for me because it makes it clear that the original rules are there for a reason but does not make any value judgement on the reasoning.

Also including some of the fiction tidbits as Sig showed can go a long way to helping understand how to handle discrimination. It might help guide someone who otherwise would not understand how the things that were written 50 years ago sitting next to something from last year can both be useful but not equal.
 
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