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Showing posts from February, 2018

Tech Sense

I always had a love hate relationship with Traveller's Tech Level System. I loved the simplicity of the system, hated the way it seemed to stagnate and not allow the really wild stuff to be reachable by any known cultures. I also felt that it far too broadband for every world. Some smart ass somewhere was going to get off world tech and figure out how to copy it with local means. I drew inspiration from all those Third World metalsmiths dutifully making machine pistols and more by hand. In my own products I introduced Zaonia where they found a way to generate antigravity fields with vacuum tube technology . But anyway, I am always looking for alternate ways to portray technology levels. One of the more interesting variations was on The Unwanted Blog  (thanks to William Black for pointing this out to me.) Instead of listing levels by number they characterize technology by when it will be available (roughly). You have five categories: Now, Real Soon, On the Horizon, Beyond the Ho

You Can Run But You Can't Hyde

Nothing would have come of the doctor's formula. Nothing should have come of it except a friend, another man of science, felt it had to have some use. Perhaps he was right. The doctor's notebooks were brought to the Ministry of Defense in the darkest of hours. The Frankenstein Monster was spreading havoc and fear across Europe. The Japanese had seized the work of the other great doctor and were creating man-animal hybrids. Success in the Allied Electric Trooper Program and the Unseen Agent Project continued to elude discovery. Avatine was described in the lab book as unlocking a person's inner self, of providing clarity of purpose and resolve. Unfortunately the doctor used it on himself and he was a repressed and bitter basket case. The inner self he unlocked was a violent sociopath who committed murder, robbery and possibly forced the fate worse than death on some poor women. Therapists and psychoanalysts were set to find people without inner demons, or at least onl