SPI's Universe

[james_davis_nicoll]

This pre-doomed vintage RPG borrowed many of its background details from previous SPI boardgames like StarForce: Alpha Centauri and Outreach. However, a detail that got dropped had to do with the psions who were a necessary component of the stardrives:

In the game, starships or "TeleShips" are jumped or "shifted" instantaneously from one location to another several light-years away by teams of women with psionic powers. Shifting cannot be done by a machine, it has to be done by a person. The supply of psionic or "telesthetic" women is limited. There is no way to genetically engineer them, they naturally occur at the rate of one First Order Telesthetic per million females (why? because Redmond Simonsen is trying to force a specific situation). Energy is cheap, any ore or element can be synthesized, any material good can be manufactured.

I can see this requirement playing out in a number of ways, many unpleasant.

Comments

[estrevan]

It’s been maybe 30 years since I last read Star Force/ Star Soldier/Outreach but I think another part of the picture was that a team of starship-equipped psions could put a whole planet of unprotected non-psions to sleep? Which shifts the balance of power a bit.

(And while Universe may have borrowed from Star Force, I don’t think it borrowed much. Space combat was very different, and so was what little I remember of the setting.)

[james_davis_nicoll]

Universe dialed back the power level of the psions but they were still incredibly disruptive in play. It's the game that gave me my prejudice against telepaths and mind controllers.

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, yeah - it’s in the writeup you link to, I see now:

“ Against planetary populations, teams of telesthetics can create the so-called Heissen Effect. This sedates the inhabitants, sending them to sleep. The ships then land squads of StarSoldiers in gravity sleds to take control. The inhabitants later wake up with migraine headaches and a newly installed government.”

But also:

“Since the population of telesthetics is so limited, they sort of know each other. They are also all members of the same Telesthetics Guild. Therefore, in ship-to-ship combat, weapons are not designed to kill.”

So when the writeup describes telesthetic women as “the only valuable commodity”, I think that’s just patriarchal expectations getting confused by a setting that was written as a kind of mashup of Star Trek and second wave feminism

[jbwoodford]

OTOH, even if you can't engineer telesthetics, you can do other unpleasant things to maximize your population of them: selectively abort male fetuses in a subject population, kill girls who test out, and the like. It gets worse if you can test for telesthetic ability in utero.

[connactic]

There might be a ceiling on how crapsacky the governments get, though. If a system government starts going down the route of brainwashing/oppressing the population to get more telesthetic women, the existing guild members might cut that system off from interstellar trade and/or help another state invade them.

[kgbooklog]

What if it's the telepath guild that decides it needs more members?

[(Anonymous)]

Every guild I can think of, past and present, prefers its membership roll restricted, to increase the benefits to the existing members. I don't see why a guild of telepaths would have a different set of incentives.

--
Nathan H.

[(Anonymous)]

If there is no genetic basis for telesthetic ability, then all you'd accomplish by going all Herod on your populace is shrinking the pool for the ability to pop up in (with a free side order of wrecking your economy). If there is a genetic basis, you can just pull a Darkover.