Traveller Campaign Update: The Prime Directive Can Kiss My Gallifreyan Ass

In today's adventure, the PCs are still reliving the ancient past; or I should say the "Ancient's Past" as they learn about the gradual rise (and, we presume shortly, the fall) of the Ancient civilization through a temporal-psychic projection created by Grandfather Paradox.

Their past-life selves were sent to supervise a world they had colonized 5000 years earlier, which was carefully terraformed and its primitive human migrants genetically-engineered, apparently all so the Empire could create more artists.  Yes, they're that stupidly powerful and secure, that they can fuck with an entire species and terraform an entire planet so they can meet their quota of painters in about ten millennia.

The PCs decided to handle their mission by infiltrating and manipulating the various primitive (medieval) societies of this planet.

So one of them basically invented these guys:

(Ironically, his 'art project' was probably the most successful of the bunch)


Another semi-accidentally created these guys:

(he ended up accidentally destroying the kingdom he had been assigned)

Another was apparently trying to invent this guy:

(but failed miserably)


Another guy just said "screw it" and decided to cut out the middleman by literally becoming this guy:

(he ended up doing quite well in terms of inventing the Renaissance, but got 14 dagger wounds in the back for his trouble, at the hands of jealous rival artists)

Finally, the last guy got his whole project interrupted by an ancient Droyne Cyborg that was controlling the weirdo culture of Shaolin monks.

After about a decade of trying to manipulate an entire planet's societies with variable results, the PCs suddenly found themselves under attack, by what would turn out to be a fleet of the Traveller equivalent of these guys:

They did the obvious choice, abandoning their assignment and the world they'd been nurturing for a decade.  They did manage to get some semi-valuable intel to the high council, at least.

The high council, in turn, decided to send them this guy to take command of the fleet and be in charge of destroying this new alien menace:

(they were sort of expecting to be saved by the other guy, but that's not how this Traveller campaign rolls!)

As it turns out they would have been able to pull it off even without the help of the "Master", as they got some spectacular strategy rolls in the epic space battle that ensued.    So they saved Art-world and all was well... for now.

RPGPundit

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