Still, basically, aside from Psionics, which the core CT rules didn't really seem like they were exactly inviting players to shoot for their PCs to get, Traveller doesn't really incorporate this stuff into the game in any deep way. There's no OTU anything basically where, say, bionics or cybernetics are foregrounded. I would think, for instance, that a Merc character that goes into special forces might well expect to get some sort of enhancement, but no such thing is present anywhere in the rules. Equally, there's no "Oh, hey, you're a Vargr but you're part of the Imperial Marines" or something like that.
Some cyberpunk/transhumanist elements are already coming to pass...
I would call most of those things simply straightforward technology and not particularly 'transhumanist' in nature, though I understand that you can imagine some of them going in that direction.
Mmmm, there are likely to be implications of all this that are so unanticipated today as to make much of it irrelevant or simply unneeded or unwanted in the actual future. Its not to say that there is any given element of 'transhumanist futurism' that might not come to pass, but if the past of the future is any guide, the sort of vision of tomorrow that something like 'Eclipse Phase' imagines is probably not even going to be slightly like the real one. And the real one will likely be rather more familiar. Just like cars and aircraft and telecom would astound medieval people, but they'd be perfectly at home understand our politics and such, and many of the nations of today would be entirely recognizable to them.
Are they? I think they may become technically feasible, there are a lot of technically feasible things that are not on battlefields today, and never will be.
I don't necessarily agree. Many technical things are POSSIBLE and many of them do not exist, and never will exist, save as perhaps an experiment or a prototype. You take the inevitable advance of technology, seen through the optimistic engineer's lens, and mistake it for some kind of law of nature. It is not.
Well, core CT predates cyberpunk as a style, though not by much. There was of course transhumanist stuff. I think Arsen Darnay wrote some fairly interesting stuff back in the late 60's for instance. Heck, a good bit of classic SF is really transhumanist. I mean, the granddaddy of all that stuff is Stapleton's Odd John, and that's going back to prewar. Even Ralph 124C41+ contains transhumanist elements.
Right, but you see my point. Traveller is released in 1977, and it doesn't address aliens at all until 1984. The AM series of modules also, IME was not exactly the most widely available stuff. I don't recall seeing them in our local game shop at all, though perhaps there were a pile of them in some of the back racks. None of us seem to have paid much attention and they seemed rather forgettable over all. I wouldn't call AM4, AM6, and AM8 aliens personally, simply being human cultures. That leaves 4 alien races, of which 2 are "so alien you can't play them or even mix them with humans." Basically, in terms of races that would matter to players in practice there are two, the Aslan (cat men, basically Niven K'zinti) and Vargr (dog men). There's nothing wrong with either, technically you can play them, though neither has a prominent place in the setting. Obviously you could extrapolate, and the alternate career tables were interesting. Its just rather little and rather late, and neither race honestly has a lot to recommend it in OTU terms.
Probably already happening for the very rich. Will probably soon trickle down to the rich, and ultimately the upper middle class.
The real trick is to not try to run the OTU at first.
Books | Supplements | Adventures |
| Book 0: Introduction to Traveller ² | Adventure 0: The Imperial Fringe ²'⁴ | |
| Book 1: Characters & Combat ¹'² | Supplement 1: 1001 Characters | Adventure 1: Kinunir ³ |
| Book 2: Starships ¹'² | Supplement 2: Animal Encounters | Adventure 2: Research Station Gamma ³'⁵ |
| Book 3: Worlds & Adventures ¹'² | Supplement 3: The Spinward Marches ³ | Adventure 3: Twilight's Peak ³'⁵ |
| Book 4: Mercenary | Supplement 4: Citizens of the Imperium | Adventure 4: Leviathan ³ |
I would consider the 'core' to be more like all the CT books, 1-7 IIRC, plus Striker, Snapshot, and Mayday for more involved combat systems and more interesting vehicle design rules to go along with the High Guard ship design ones. You don't have to buy into the concept of giant starships though, just basically top things off at 10k tons and assume your 'empires' are at most sector sized. That seems like it is rather straightforward. The alien supplements and some of the other supplements work with that, more-or-less, though Supplement 3, TCS itself, and a few others aren't going to be used, though you can certainly mine them for some useful bits.
