Mining Dumarest for Traveller Games

I have been reading the first few novels in the 33-volume “Dumarest Saga” by the British science fiction writer Edwin Charles (E.C.) Tubb. At the outset I was not very familiar with either the man or his works, really knowing only that the Dumarest books had purportedly been influential on the Traveller RPG.

The Dumarest saga takes place in a human-dominated interstellar community that is ancient and spans thousands of worlds. There seems to be no single, multi-system government like the Third Imperium and apparently nothing like megacorporations, though the community does seem to share a common interstellar culture.

The overall tech level seems to be low interstellar, TL10 or maybe TL11, though it is hard to say: in these early books the protagonist, Earl Dumarest, is travelling through mostly backwater worlds and perhaps much higher tech could be found elsewhere. It’s not clear to me if this is a post-apocalyptic setting but there are hints that some of humanity’s capabilities are on the wane or have been lost altogether. Earl was born on Terra, the fabled homeworld of all humanity, but all knowledge of the world including its location appears to have been forgotten.

Each Dumarest book is largely self-contained and episodic. M. Harold Page has an insightful blog post on Series Architecture: The Same But Different in EC Tubb’s Dumarest that analyzes how Tubb effectively recycles a few key elements over and over again in new combinations to keep the books surprisingly fresh. It really shouldn’t work, but it does. I had planned to just sample a few entries because I was interested in the origins of Traveller, but I keep reading because the books are both entertaining and full of useful ideas for my game. I’ve only made it through the first five or six entries but so far if anything I think the influence of Dumarest on the game is understated.

Everyone notes Tubb’s distinctive use of the term “Traveller,” and can point out obvious elements such as Low, Middle, and High Passage (along with the Low Lottery) that were borrowed for the game. Other ideas appropriated by Traveller include slow drug, fast drug, and anagathics, after a fashion. I had always assumed Traveller psionics were directly descended from the Lensman series but the Dumarest books have characters with psionic talents that to my mind more closely resemble Traveller abilities.

But I think I see many other, subtler influences from Dumarest on the Charted Space setting.

The interstellar society described in the Dumarest books is highly stratified, with wealth and other resources unequally distributed across the population. M. Harold Page aptly describes it as a “Grapes of Wrath galaxy.” Most worlds have an aristocratic class of inherited nobility, a striving middle class of traders and managers and artisans, a struggling working class, and an even lower class of indigents and outcasts. As a game mechanic, Traveller’s Social Standing characteristic makes much more sense in this milieu than in, say, Star Trek, Ringworld, or even Dune.

Technology in Dumarest is similarly stratified, much like in Traveller. Although laser guns are available, slug-throwers, knives, and swords seem much more common weapons on many worlds. While there are anti-grav “rafts,” on-planet travel might also be via helicopters, planes, boats, or beasts of burden. Starships are fairly rare and expensive, and owning one is an indicator of extreme wealth.

A planetary Law Level is also an important characteristic that varies greatly from world to world. While some worlds appear to have fairly oppressive governments with correspondingly high Law Levels, others such as Scar have very low or no Law Levels at all.

Like Charted Space, the worlds of the Dumarest saga teem with native, alien life that seems (mostly) compatible with Terran biochemistry. No intelligent alien life has yet been introduced, but there are many books to come.

Just the first five or six books have given me the following random ideas for spicing up starports in my own Traveller game.

Travellers

Earl Dumarest is a Traveller, which is a slippery term to define as it’s not quite a title, profession, or status. Travellers are, strictly speaking, vagrants, drifting through the Dumarest universe from world to world without a home or regular employment or income. They are, by necessity, survivors, resourceful and clever.

Travellers generally conform to the standard sci-fi Space Bum archetype, “a spacer who wanders aimlessly; a vagrant in space; (also) a spacer who is regarded as contemptible.” As Jesse Sheidlower points out in Meet the Space Bum, ambiguous stock character of generations of science fiction, the term space bum reflects “all the nuances of the base word [bum]: idleness, aimlessness, vagrancy, worthlessness.” The Midjourney illustration attached to Sheidlower’s post really nails the romantic appeal of being a Traveller. Think Jack Kerouac, but instead of being blissed out at a Denver bus stop he’s hanging at a starport in Deneb sector, looking to score working passage to the Marches.

Earl Dumarest is a Traveller because he is on a quest to find his lost homeworld. While many Travellers are forced into the life by terrible conflict or bitter politics on their homeworld, some noncomformists might embrace the Traveller life as a way to escape the grinding tedium and control of early interstellar society.

The Space Bum archetype certainly fits with the Traveller RPG aesthetic. In Agent of the Imperium Marc Miller suggests that “Most people (indeed, whole species) never leave their homeworld: they never venture out of their gravity well, content to work, play, and even thrive on their home planet. Some postulate that there is a genetic basis for the drive of some (and the lack of drive in others) to reach beyond the bounds of a single world into the greater universe: a traveller gene.”

As most inhabitants rarely leave their homeworld, Travellers are considered inherently interesting, if maybe a little dangerous, to most people they meet. People want to hear stories of the Traveller lifestyle and the exotic worlds they’ve seen. People might seek out a Traveller for advice or aid regarding an unusual or difficult problem. In this sense they are natural magnets for patron encounters.

Travellers seem to be perpetually broke, always looking to put together enough scratch for passage offworld—and generally, that passage is going to be Low. Because they are inherently strangers, Travellers often attract suspicion from locals when dirtside, much like hobos, tramps, or bums. (Of these three categories, Wikipedia’s description of a Tramp probably comes the closest to Tubb’s depiction of a Traveller.) Their outsider status likely makes them suseptible to scrutiny and harassment from authorities, particularly on worlds with high Law Levels.

Interestingly, maybe the single best game mechanic to model a Dumarest-style Traveller is the Drifter career from Mongoose Traveller. (Note that the Wanderer assignment explicitly reads “You are a space bum [emphasis added], living hand-to-mouth in slums and spaceports across the galaxy.”) Drifter is the default career you land in when you’ve been bumped out of your desired career and can’t qualify for anything else.

Because of this I’ve always been a little disappointed when one of my characters has had to take a term of Drifter. But after reading a few of the Dumarest books I’m beginning to appreciate the “career” much more and can see the potential. And maybe the career could be spiced up with interesting events or benefits drawn from these books. The Skills and Training tables look mostly right, though I’d like to have some way to pick up ranks in Art, Gambler, and Persuade in addition to the core skills of Recon, Streetwise, and Survival.

Tourists

In the Dumarest books, Travellers are to be distinguished from Tourists. Both Travellers and Tourists are wanderers visiting new and different worlds, but from there everything else is starkly different. Fundamentally, a Tourist has a home to return to, and visiting other worlds is merely a temporary diversion from a “real life,” not a permanent condition. Many Tourists probably like to play at being real Travellers, but very few ever actually adopt the lifestyle.

Another important difference is that Tourists have money. They seem to be primarily drawn from the Nobility and travel High, dosed with Quicktime. They stay at the best resort facilities, frequent the best casinos, eat the best food and drink the best wines they can find. While Travellers are forced to engage with the worlds they visit, the Tourists stay always apart, protected by thoughtfully curated itineraries, armed guards, and secure fences.

Tourists are first and foremost consumers of goods, experiences, and people. Unfortunately, our own 21st century regularly provides all-too-many examples of clueless, exploitative, and self-indulgent Tourists. #SpaceVanLife. In the MgT system, Tourists can be modeled using the Dilettante assignment in the Noble career.

As seen in the Dumarest books, there is more than a touch of the decadent in the Tourists. The entertainments and amusements Tourists seek out are more often than not bought at the expense of the local population. Blood sports of all sorts—animal, human, and other—seem to be common.

I’m thinking the worlds of my Traveller game ought to include many more encounters with sybaritic Tourists on holiday.

Local Attractions

All of these Tourists have made a long journey to see and experience something. And so far Tubb does a good job of creating worlds that have some unique hook to draw Tourists, such as watching the fungus blooms of Scar, enjoying the arenas of Toy, or hunting Thren on Solis. One of the most gruesome attractions so far is the Bloodtime on Logis, a single day in each year when all laws are suspended to allow the citizens to run wild and settle scores. It’s very much like the Purge, but on a planetary level.

These Attractions might involve the world’s native life: a particularly strange or valuable alien species, a mass migration, or a spectacular bloom. Other attractions are cultural: a religious rite, a unique architectural style, tournament, or festival. Imagine “Burning Man on Delta IX.” Other attractions might be technological, like the Computer on Toy or the wish-fulfillment tech of Folgone. Other attractions might be natural features such as waterfalls, whirlpools, volcanos, gorges, or mountain peaks. But in any case Tubb is able to produce some unique draw that doesn’t reduce an entire world to the tired old Planet of Hats trope. 

A series of Attractions could form entire Tourist circuits that wind through a subsector; a good portion of the High passengers seeking a ship could be traveling to the next stop on the tour. “We want to catch the hadj on Umat, then hit the big harvest festival on New Epping, and by that time that’s over the resort beaches on Kaula IV should be open for the summer.”

In Classic Traveller, the typical activities checklist for starships visiting a mainworld includes “Patron encounters,” “Planetary exploration,” and “Local areas of interest.” It occurs to me that the Traveller game could really use a nice random procedure to generate interesting local attractions for worlds, something to entice Travellers beyond the safe confines of the starport extrality line and out into the world proper.

While we have nice tables for generating patrons, we don’t have anything comperable for Attractions. Just as patrons offer a pull for the PCs to undertake a job, Attractions can pull PCs to explore their surroundings. Maybe an Attraction mechanic would incorporate trade classifications, or perhaps Population, Government, and Law Level codes.

In any case, starports should be crowded with guides, drivers, barkers, and hucksters all extolling the amazing local sights and sounds of their native world. Some will be legit wonders worth the visit, others lousy Tourist traps, and some might be outright scams.

The Stranded

The opening passages of the very first book in the series find Earl Dumarest emerging from his Low Berth only to discover that while in cryosleep his starship had been diverted to Gath, an inhospitable world that was not his intended destination. After a thief steals his money Earl soon finds himself Stranded with no immediate means to leave this planet.

To become Stranded on some crap backwater like Gath is one of a Traveller’s greatest fears in the Dumarest universe. Stranded Travellers are dead broke, or at least too destitute to afford even Low Passage offworld. The stranded are often hungry, hurt, sick, and lack adequate or reliable shelter, and thus are extraordinarily vulnerable to both natural and human predators.

This fear creates a real tension through many of the Dumarest books. Earl reports having been Stranded several times, a condition so miserable that he undertakes many dangerous jobs just to avoid being caught in such a predicament again. Stranded Travellers are often forced to take dangerous or demeaning jobs for minimal wages, enter into indentured servitude or military service, or worst of all, pressed into slavery. It might take months or even years to build up enough money to buy passage, and it seems likely many Stranded are forced to turn to crime in order to survive.

Just how bad must it be, to be Stranded in the Dumarest universe? It’s so bad that it creates a viable market for Low Passage, which is literally being frozen alive and shipped like cattle with an attendant 15% mortality rate. Your cumulative odds of surviving just four Low Passages is only a little over 52%, and eight Low Passages is 32%. That indicates true desperation! While the odds are likely better in Charted Space, they still aren’t great if the Low Lottery is still a thing. As The Traveller Book notes, “Since low passengers are typically without funds (who would travel low if there were any other choice?), the low lottery provides some chance for the individual to have funds upon arrival at the destination.”

Although part of a good Referee’s job is to find new and innovative ways to separate PCs from their hard-won funds, I’m not sure it would make for a very fun or engaging game to have the PCs just living out lives of quiet desperation on a string of crummy backwater planets. “Next session: Bluron sells his kidneys for a Low Passage to Planet Jerkwater, while Brenta takes a third-shift job in the planetary waste processing center.”

But that said, many class D or E starports ought to have throngs of Stranded desperate for offworld passage—along with recruiters looking to lure these poor souls into terrible contracts for rotten pay. Such scenes could provide lots of roleplaying opportunities, but also serve as a dire warning to the PCs: this is what happens when the credits run out.

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