Through A Mirror Darkly: Fading Suns and OTU

OddjobXL

Mongoose
The more I reacquaint myself with the Imperium and the Marches the more I think to myself, well, Fading Suns deliberately riffed off Traveller. Not ripped, but riffed. I've always noticed some surface similarities but now I'm dipping into Zhodani and Sword Worlds settings it all clicked.

Zhodani = Kurgan Caliphate (near eastern caste system (though organized very differently), more friendly to psionics than the Empire)
Sword Worlds = The Vuldrok (space vikings/barbarians)

Then there are the prominent anthropomorphic alien races:
Aslan = Cats
Vargar = Dogs/Wolves

While in Fading Suns you've got

Ascorbites = Mosquitos (Mosquito Men as re-envisioned in a SyFy horror movie of the week.
Eytri = Birds
Gannock = Chimps
Hironem = Reptiles
Shantor = Horses

Alien races with mysterious ties to the Ancients
Droyne in Traveller
Obun and Ur Obun as well as, possibly, the amphibian Oro'ym.

Both settings, as much classic sci-fi does, play up the mysterious vanished Ancient race which left behind mysterious artifacts.

Both settings feature persecuted psionics as both potential villains and heroes.

Both settings center on a human dominated Empire though they are quite different in political composition and vastly different in scale (The Fading Suns setting feels more like an incredibly detailed subsector, down to individual planetary maps, than an actual Empire).

The political situation in the Fading Suns empire is far more tense, with better defined factions, and ripe for big changes. There are even factions within factions as well as minor and schismatic forces pushing and pulling here and there. The Third Imperium, by contrast, feels almost stodgy and stolid with only a handful of individuals defined and no detailed descriptions of political ideologies, even mainstream points of view (unless you count the view of the Navy/Nobility as detailed in Sector Fleet), much less religious and economic factionalism.

Still they're both Empires with room for nobles, scouts, merchants, professional militaries and so on.

The big career divergence would seem to be that Fading Suns allows for something like magic (though many view it either as divine miracles or divergent psionic disciplines or, as something of a compromise, channeling the abilities of other dimensional psionic aliens/demons) and technology is in completely decline, anything new is something a scavenger digs up or a cultish engineer manages to repair, as civilization isn't what it used to be.

The Third Imperium, meanwhile, still has scientists and technicians developing new technologies all the time.

It's also worth noting, perhaps, that all the old Fading Suns ship blueprints (big enough to run Snapshot style battles in) were approved for use with Marc Miller's Traveller. Most of them are pretty good as they express things about the cultures that made them in the inherent designs. For example, a House Hazat cruiser will have room for physical martial arts practice where as a House Li Halan vessel is sure to have a shrine or two.

In some ways Fading Suns feels like a midway fit between Warhammer 40k and Traveller OTU but with much more room for heroics and derring do in a Space Opera sense.

Man, I wish we had a Traveller Fading Suns book out. Not interested in a 3rd edition, my 2nd edition does just fine for the fluff I need, but a book to be a bridge between Mongoose Traveller and my beloved old Holistic books would be fantastic.
 
How much work would conversion be, really? New careers, a little race conversion, some new equipment, and a few extra ship bits. Traveller already has sufficient baseline.

Aslan = Cats

Not really, but there are parallels.

In some ways Fading Suns feels like a midway fit between Warhammer 40k and Traveller OTU but with much more room for heroics and derring do in a Space Opera sense.

It struck me more as what Traveller would look like if White Wolf re-wrote it while channeling Dune. Polarized and ideosyncratic factions, the threat of a big endgame, and a sense of doom and gloom even in everyday life.
 
Back
Top