Traveller: Rethe and the perils of random world generation

This is my third post on some of Traveller’s illogicalities. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Traveller background (the Third Imperium) – it was my first RPG, as I’ve said before. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect.

Earlier posts covered low berths and starship fuel tanks.

World creation

Traveller has a procedure for creating worlds. Roll dice, work through the steps and out pops a world at the end of the process.

This can produce weird results – but if you’re doing this yourself, you can either tweak the results so they make more sense or justify those results.

However, the Traveller canon has several books full of systems, most famously the Spinward Marches (Supplement 3), where most of the original Traveller adventures were set. I imagine a computer was used to create the hundreds of systems in the Spinward Marches – and as a result, some worlds are a little crazy.

Such as Rethe, in the Regina subsector.

Rethe

Rethe on the wonderful Traveller Map

According to page 150 of The Traveller Book, Rethe has a population of 26 billion, the highest in the Regina subsector.

According to the Traveller wiki, that’s now either 30 billion (if you hover over the UWP) or is “over one billion” and “in the last 25 years has grown by well over six billion” (according to the text, at time of writing). I’ll stick with The Traveller Book for the rest of this post.

Reth’s UWP (Universal World Profile) is E230AA8 8 Poor. Non-agricultural. Desert World.

Let’s break that down:

• Starport E (Frontier installation – a patch of bedrock with no facilities.)
• Size 2 (3,200 km in diameter, roughly – about the size of the moon. But see below.)
• Atmosphere 3 (Very thin, needing a respirator.)
• Hydrographics 0 (No freestanding water – like the moon. Maybe some ice.)
• Population A (Tens of billions – 26 billion, according to The Traveller Book.)
• Government A (A charismatic dictator.)
• Law level 8 (Guns and long-bladed weapons are controlled – a bit like the UK.)
• Tech level 8 (Laser carbines and air rafts – according to The Traveller Book, this equates to 1980-1989 on Earth!)
• Poor: Any world with an atmosphere of 2-5 and hydrographics 3- is automatically poor. I’m not sure this makes sense.
• Non-agricultural: Worlds with an atmosphere 3-, hydrographics 3- and population 6+ are non-agricultural.
• Desert world: Hydrographics 0 and atmosphere 2+. (Mongoose's Core Rulebook describes Desert worlds as "barely habitable".)

How big?

According to the Traveller map and the wiki, Rethe is size 4 or 6,400km in diameter. That makes it slightly smaller than Mars – according to the wiki, Mars and Rethe have the same physical characteristics (430).

I’m not sure why it changed, and it doesn’t change my argument about Rethe’s inhospitality, but I’m sticking with The Traveller Book for the rest of this post.

But what does all this mean?

So, let’s talk about the obvious outlier – a population of 26 billion people. On the moon (or Mars). At tech level 8 and with no starport to speak of.

Really?

Imagine 26 billion people living on the moon. Thanks to the very thin atmosphere, they must live indoors – in massive cities/archologies or orbital settlements. (The wiki mentions orbital habitats.)

But what’s it like? Is Rethe futuristic and grand, like Coruscant in Star Wars? Or is it shabby, overcrowded and awful, like Ceres in The Expanse?

Why Rethe?

Why are there 26 billion people on Rethe? What makes it so attractive?

According to the Regina subsector page on the Traveller wiki, Rethe’s population is mostly human. (It doesn’t explicitly say that, but you can work it out from the numbers in the sophont population table.) And humans didn’t evolve on Rethe – they went there.

(And it’s more plausible to say that there are 26 billion people in the Rethe system, but Rethe itself is the most important world, and most people are there.)

It seems likely that Rethe is rich in lanthanum, Zuchai crystals, unobtanium, anti-matter, dark matter, or other exotic minerals. (Being rich in heavy metals would help it retain its thin atmosphere rather than being airless like our moon.) Something that has drawn billions of people to Rethe to seek their fortune (either by mining or servicing the mining industry, or by servicing those servicing the mining industry).

Rethe needs to export something valuable – because it must import food and other essential resources. (I imagine it can find ice, and therefore water, in the system somewhere.)

If it doesn’t import anything, it starves. And if it doesn’t export anything, it can’t pay for its imports, so it starves. So, assuming that the population of Rethe isn’t starving, it must be doing brisk trade with nearby worlds.

The Traveller wiki notes that “Since it was colonized, the world has been a backwater, with the population producing just enough to support the cost of life support.” That doesn’t sound like a rich, prosperous world – but “just enough to support the cost of life support” for 26 billion people means that Rethe is producing an awful lot of something.

E class starport?

But how can Rethe trade when it only has a class E starport?

Maybe if Rethe was in a lightly populated part of space, then you justify not having a starport. There could be a garden world somewhere in the system and lots of in-system trade, but no actual starport. (Although why Rethe is the main world and not this lovely garden world then needs further justification.)

But Rethe isn’t remote – it’s on a branch of the Spinward Main, a long chain of systems just one parsec from each other.

Giving Rethe a Class E starport is like imagining New York without ports, stations, airports or roads – and only a single-track highway to get there. It’s hard to imagine – it doesn’t make sense.

So Rethe needs an enormous starport (or starports) filled with bulk carriers. They bring in supplies and take out whatever it is that Rethe exports. It must be Class B at least – and probably Class A.

(The Traveller Wiki suggests that Rethe originally had a Class B starport, but for unspecified reasons, it was downgraded.)

And tech level 8?

How can Rethe be only tech level 8? The Traveller Book hasn’t dated well (it tells us that TL8 is the technology of the 1980s), but Mongoose Traveller says that at TL 8, “permanent space habitats become possible”. Possible.

Rethe needs better than “possible,” given it has 26 billion people living in what are effectively permanent space habitats. (It might have an atmosphere, but it’s not breathable. And there’s no water - and that means no food.) At TL10, “orbital habitats and factories become commonplace”, which suggests that Rethe needs to be TL10 at least.

But perhaps there has been a war. That would explain the Class E starport and the (relatively) low tech level. But a war also suggests a huge humanitarian crisis that the subsector (if not the sector) should be mobilising to fix. But such a war or crisis isn't mentioned anywhere (The Traveller Book's library data for Rethe just mentions an annual festival.)

Canonically, I think the date of The Traveller Book is 1105. The Traveller wiki entry for Rethe says that it is Milieu 1116, which covers the period from 1100 to 1117. Seventeen years is a long time for 26 billion people on a desert world not to have a decent starport, and according to the wiki, Rethe is still  TL 8 Class E (although rebuilding back to Class B).

But that’s one of the challenges of canon – having the background (particularly one as vast as the Third Imperium) evolve. Peculiarities such as Rethe are almost inevitable.

How likely is Rethe anyway?

I recreated the rolls that made Rethe from The Traveller Book. The rolls were:

• Starport (2D): 10 or 11, for an E class starport
• Size (2D-2): 4, for size 2
• Atmosphere (2D-7+size): 8, for atmosphere 3
• Hydrographics (2D-7+atmosphere): 2, 3 or 4 for hydrographics 0
• Population (2D-2): 12 for A
• Government (2D-7+population): 7 for government A
• Law level (2D-7+government): 6 for law level 9
• Tech level (1D +1 (for size 2) +1 (for atmosphere 3) +4 (for population A)): 2 to get tech level 8.

With only a few extreme rolls, it’s not surprising that a world like Rethe appears somewhere – probably more than once.

Rethe is a little less likely with Mongoose’s core rules because the starport roll comes after the law level roll and is modified by population (+2 for a population of 10+). An E-class starport is still possible, but you’d have to roll 2. But a roll of 10 or 11 (as per the original roll for a starport) would have given Rethe an A-class starport.

And an A-class starport gives Rethe an extra +6 modifier on the tech level roll (and +1 for 0% hydrographics, which isn’t in The Traveller Book). So that’s a total DM of +13, which gives us TL 15 if we take the original result of 2.

So, a Class A starport and TL 15. It’s more like Coruscant, and the only question is why Regina is the sector capital rather than Rethe.

What I’d change

I’m not doing this to poke fun at Traveller – I’m just pointing out some illogicalities that can arise when you randomly create systems using a formula. Rethe isn’t particularly unusual – some of the rolls were at the extreme ends of the bell curve (but even then, only one 12), but if you roll up a lot of worlds, it will happen sooner or later.

So if I were to change anything, I would ensure high populations on worlds that can’t support themselves were at least TL 10 with a good starport. Or maybe a common-sense check before committing the system to the canon.

Next time

Next time, I look at how to feed Rethe.