Kishnar

We are back to a full group for this session of Traveller, and after last weeks virtual space battle, the crew of the Big S have arrived at the world of Kishnar. The week in jump was spent doing some training, though a couple of the crew used the time to relax and recover Luck.

Kishnar is a smallish world with a class E starport, a tech level of 0, and a population of 100. The population is located at a hill fort in the temperate region, and is little more than a hippy commune. They are quite happy to receive some medical supplies, which KGG Corp wanted delivering.

The rest of the world is empty of civilisation. Other than lots of millennia old ruins of large cities from the time of the Second Imperium, roving herds of animals and anything up to a million pre-sophont humanoids who aren’t considered people. This session was going to be heavily focused on finding out about the history of the world, and was going to involve a lot of biological PSB (Pseudo-Scientific Bullshit). I tried to get things vaguely believable, but I’m not a biologist.

This is actually where Gemini was quite useful. I knew what I wanted, I didn’t know what particular chemicals could possibly give those effects. So being able to ask questions about “what could cause this symptom…” was a quick way of getting something that was close enough for a game.

Arriving down at the Hill Fort, the Travellers are welcomed. They don’t get many visitors, and are more than happy to be sociable. Nashu notices a woman who isn’t so sociable – apparently she had a miscarriage a few days before, and is still recovering. Dr Argardur investigates, and finds out that the baby was still born with most of its head missing. He diagnoses this as Anencephaly, which can be caused by lack of folic acid. Possibly the local hippies didn’t have enough meat in their diet.

The Traveller’s missions here were to deliver the medical supplies, and also find Professor Jennifer Irga and get her to turn in her notes. She was being funded to investigate the local pre-sophonts, who were thought to be a primitive human (or human-like) minor race.

The hippies ignored the ‘animals’ as they referred to them as. It was clear that the education levels at the fort weren’t great. In fact, some of the children did seem to have development disorders, and further asking around uncovered that miscarriages were quite common.

The leader of the colony was adamant that the colony wasn’t going to give up or die out though. There were a group of earlier settlers from a couple of hundred years ago who had died out. The ruins of their camp wasn’t far away, but the hippies didn’t want to say what had happened to them. “Just leave everything as it was” was all they would say.

The Travellers took some samples of the local foods, and some samples of the woman, and took them back up to their Lab ship for examination. Gan and Dmitry stayed on the planet overnight partying. There was the offer of food and drink, though quite a bit of the food was off-world prepared food rather than local food. Apparently the local food had a definite ‘acquired taste’, which even the colonists hadn’t fully acquired.

The next day, the checked their sample results. The local animals had suitable levels of vitamin B12 (lack of which can cause neurological damage), but the woman’s sample was severely lacking in it. She did seem to have good levels of folic acid.

As I said, I’m not a biologist, but some of the players did start putting things together and asking the right sort of questions. The Doctor also made his Medic check, so got the layman’s description of what all this meant. The people seemed to be lacking a vital vitamin, even though it was in the environment.

Was something else blocking it?

The Travellers had the option to visit some of the city ruins, the old camp, or to go and try find the Professor. They chose the latter, and found her in a small tent some thousand kilometres away. There were some small tribes of the locals nearby.

She was happy to have visitors, especially when she discovered that Dr Agardur was a doctor of medicine. Irian pointed out that she was educated, but was quickly dismissed since she was a lawyer. She’d also done Economics, which also wasn’t a real science.

I had planned for the players to have done a bit more poking around by this point, but they were asking the right questions, and were pretty much on the right track as to what was going on.

Professor Irga showed some data from the local plant life, which seemed to contain Vitamin B12. Except it wasn’t. It was like B12, but didn’t do anything useful. Eating the local plant life would take up the fake-B12 into the body, where it would slot into the ‘receptors’ (I’m not a biologist) that B12 normally slots into, and there it would do nothing except block real B12 being able to be taken up and be used for protecting neurological pathways and helping child nervous system development.

The pre-sophonts also weren’t another human sub-race. They were Vilani – or at least, they were descended from them. They were also stupid.

The Professor’s hypothesis was that when then world was first settled during the First Imperium, the colonists had decided they didn’t like the taste of the local food, so quickly switched to importing a large fraction of their food supplies rather than eating anything home grown. Possibly they noticed the issue with local food, but they didn’t need to eat it so it wasn’t important.

After the Second Imperium collapsed, trade stopped. Access to off-world food became limited, so the billion or so locals were forced to rapidly shift to a local diet or starve. This quickly meant that they began to consume the fake B12, which started causing neurological damage. Over generations, this led to civilisation collapse as each succeeding generation became less intelligent.

For the new settlers, they are a mix of Vilani and Solomani. The Professor thinks that the effects are subtly different for Solomani. A different human species, and their bodies are reacting slightly differently.

This all lead, surprisingly, into a discussion about law. The university at Sylea had been offering a bounty for anyone who could bring back some pre-sophonts from this world for study. However, these were post-sophont Vilani. They were humans, so presumably had all the rights of humans. Would catching some and bringing them back count as slavery? Or at the very least, would it be human trafficking? It probably depended on what the University would do with them.

It could be argued that they were being brought back for medical intervention, and that they had diminished responsibilities due to their necrological disorders. But the Travellers would need to be careful if they did this, even if their intentions were to find a cure for the locals.

And that was where we left things for the evening.

Though it didn’t quite go as planned, I think things went well. The players picked up on things pretty quickly, so it wasn’t so much an info-dump by the Professor, but more a discussion and confirmation on the lines that they were already thinking. And nobody seemed to mind it. They also didn’t seem to mind going down the legal rabbit hole that Irian started.

I had planned to finish this world in a single session, but we’re not quite there yet. So things should continue next week.