Traveller is a classic science fiction system first released in 1977...

>I must hear more about his stupid (in a good way, like green lantern, lensmen, or the xeelee) ATU!

I hope he's still fiddling with those great maps and stops by to share a few. That way we might be able to coax a few more details out of him!

What exactly did he say he used to make those maps?

and have an obligatory link to strike legion, since I brought it up

No clue where he is.
Although setting small scale stuff against a big backdrop is kind of fun. The ATU I'm working on can be described as "Post-Lensmen" or, put more poetically, "In the Wreckage of Warring Giants".
For example, the only megastructures that exist are in the hands of the remaining Singularities mega intelligences, which consider them to be "legacy equipment".
Except for the ones that contain really dangerous artifacts from truly ancient singularities that have moves on entirely from this universe - nobody controls those, and several of them breaking is what caused the most recent long night (which physically rearranged the galaxy in addition to its other effects).

I think he mentioned an Android app...

Ignore that, I was wrong. He's using a Mac app called Zeus Draw.

hnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng!

Please tell me more, I love these big, stupid, kinda childish, sci-fi concepts (we need something to power the engines, oh no problem, just USE THAT GALAXY OVER THERE, isn't that too much power? No.)

That sounds a little bit like Brin's Uplift setting, especially the rearranging galaxies bit.

There are reality quakes(?) which cut off previously accessible galaxies from the rest. IIRC, the oldest records in the Library mention 7 galaxies while only 4 can be reached currently.

It's a fun series to read, especially for the "deep time" angle.

Oh, the Ancients committed massive temporal shenanigans, but I put a twist on them.
Imagine three documents - Past, Present, and Future. You can edit Present, which is then committed to Past. You can't edit Past, but you can look at it. And Future is actually a few billion documents, each one being constantly updated as it predicts the most probable writing you're going to do.
Now, you can't change past, everything you do changes future, but if you could copy paste....
You could drag the bits you like from either (including the future you like) into the present, assigning them new spatial coordinates.
They did this for entire systems, just to get servant species/slaves/prey. Or a nice place to live. Or to prove an archeologist wrong. Or to solve a problem by reaching into a future where a solution just happened to exist.
It was weird, and kind of killed scientific research for a while.
Thankfully, none of the human singularities have engaged in that bullshit.
In this reality.

I like that.
Now I'll have to use it somehow.

From another related campaign, a map of one of the major Trade Empires. Their main (trading) worlds are connected by ancient stargates. They had gate connections to other empires (including the 'small' Imperium of the previous maps).

Some day I need to rescue my campaign notes and maps from my poor old dead desktop computer.

What do you mean by demigod PC's? what constitutes demigod to your setting?

Thanks for the nickname.

Now I'll have to read the book. < can we use smileys here? >

Well... a few more details, I suppose.

I really liked the Dahak series, but never used battle moons much myself.

They're too vulnerable to covert Lensman boarding parties while traveling through hyperspace. Amazing what you can do with a Silver Surfer (analogue) hyperspace surfboard and a pair of small implosion warheads.

Oh... that ATU sounds very interesting.

Yeah. I need to see if it will run on my newer laptop. I feel like making maps again.

:) closest you can get

Oh, no demigod PCs. Everybody is a normal human (or normal for their species).
Basically, the entire population of the galaxy is descended from people who weren't, for some reason, not compatible with the various singularities that happened - 99% of which either die or leave this universe within 5-10 years for various reasons.
They pop up every now and then.

Hmm.
Probably powerful enough to make Lensmen nervous in a physical or psionic fight.
Able to access the reality shaping mechanisms of the most Ancient of Ancients without fear of going insane.

What's the difference between Lensmen and Green Lanterns?

Because that ring is prrrrrrrreeeeeeeetty bullshit

That would work as an explanation.

But there were some REALLY freaky races in the very deep past who went further than the (technology) singularity. And what THEY did still gives the post-singularity cultures the willies.

>And what THEY did still gives the post-singularity cultures the willies.

Now I NEED to know...

I always thought the Green Lanterns were obviously more powerful (individually) than Lensmen, but that the Guardians of Oa were less powerful than the Arisians because they still exist on this material plane.

Or maybe the Arisians were just sneaky enough to use less powerful agents?

And the wreckage of their wars still litter the universe.
Partially because they kept pulling their best potential equipment and personnel from futures where they won (it actually doesn't matter if the future they were from couldn't exist after they were brought to the present, what mattered was they could exist at the time of being brought back), copying brand new ships a near infinite number of times after they were constructed, starting work on new and more terrible super weapons then pulling their finished forms into the present... Then they all hit full ascension at the same time and are now, according the ascended singularities that still maintain a presence in our universe, "the biggest possible fish in an infinite series of infinite oceans".
They stopped wrecking this universe though.

>Now I NEED to know...

roll for SAN loss, Padawan...

or more cynically, I needed something that would keep the ascended from getting too dangerously manipulative with all the 'lower' pre-singularity races. and having a bunch of eldritch horrors that can shape reality in ways that the hive Minds simply can't comprehend - served the purpose.

Oh, looks like I accidentally copied you with Oh, and that doesn't count the less terrifying, but still planet destroying, wreckage left behind by warring singularities and immensely powerful human empires from the Antiquity era.

On the upside, we get a LOT of funky blackbox tech. Dozens of types of stargate (in hundreds of separate networks) crossing the multiverse.

True, some of those stargates have 'difficult' personalities that make navigating through them challenging.

All of this stuff is great! Please keep it coming!

I have rare stargates (only a few AU across... And a range measured in thousands of parsecs when created), with free passage - the singularity controlling it doesn't want your shit.
Besides, they've hit the point of being beyond needing such primitive equipment.
(Aka, you want to use this old hunk of junk? Sure, but its still ours. Yes, we know you think you're getting the better deal. Whatever.)

>(Aka, you want to use this old hunk of junk? Sure, but its still ours. Yes, we know you think you're getting the better deal. Whatever.)

Can you ask for a specific destination or do the gates always link A to B?

A to B. Making more was easier than making ones that could dial new destinations (and allows constant comms traffic through, unlike the dialable ones. Fleshies need food, singularities need bandwidth)

but what about biological singularities?

They're sort of intertwined. Still working on the entire thing, but I'm thinking that limited forms of biotech are available outside the singulatarians. Limited mostly because the mutations causes by releasing them outside of a lab can be very unpredictable - unless you're a singularity.
It turns mostly into the background - health and lifespan upgrades, new food crops, terraforming packages, sometimes used to produce a drug...
I don't want to preach the stuff though, I just want to make a note that enables a Referee to justify some stuff in universe.

my bias is showing here, but please, PREACH THIS ODDLY UTOPIAN POST-APOCALYPTIC IDEAL, HELL, PUT IT ALL INTO A PDF AND THE ASSEMBLED MASS UP IN THE ARCHIVES FOR ALL TO ENJOY!

...I'm sorry, this just sounds really, really cool, and a bit higher power than normal for traveller games

Oh, its relatively normal powered, and there really isn't a Utopia either.
PCs are normal people - longer lived maybe, but still people. Diseases have the same relative strength in regard to immune systems and drugs. Food must still be grown, even if it can be grown in more areas. Super intelligences disappear or commit suicide after a bit, and societies still need people to maintain and run them.
97.85% of all sentient creatures (like humans) cannot undergo digital uploading or massive genetic intelligence increases without being driven insane (or being born insane).
And that neighborhood Singularity? Its one of three, maybe five, maybe two, still in contact with our universe. And they don't really care what we do.
Yes, the galaxy is open to us, one parsec every week - but its a goddamn minefield and we're just the mice living in it.
Or are the mice the singularities? Are we just the fleas?

But hey, don't focus on that - that gives you Cosmic Anxiety Disorder and an Existential Crisis.
Let's get these ores to Fi Schaffa, alrigfht?

still, post-singularity traveller is rare

I write my stuff as if I was going to publish. This means finding the awkward questions, and then asking "why?". Most people would say "well it never happened". I went "what if it didn't happen for everybody? What greater details can I create?".
And then I decided that the ancient past went full lensmen, and that's just a bundle of crazy.
This is all deep background anyway, most of the actual focus is on a trade union based on directed emergent behavior: people will try to create trade unions (especially if they get told about a certain one), and that scout left his bosses rulebook here, with the address of the nearest consulate...
Oh sweet it comes with the paperwork too. We have a jump ship, right? Cool, we'll fill it out on the way there.

I cannot begin to explain how much I LOVE THIS.

Especially the "mice" angle. Mice in the wainscotting and we better hope our antics don't bring us to the attention of Things Best Left Undisturbed.

Oh, its not mice in the wainscotting. Its mice in the minefield that was abandoned a few hundred thousand years ago, and is now sitting in the middle of a useless wasteland - do you even remember that minefield?
They don't have active malignance towards normal people. Hell, they're at the level where they require special tools just to notice our general existence.
They just left a lot of really deadly trash lying around.
A few of them tried to clean up before they left, but its like the trash heap your great grandfather left in his childhood bedroom - you really don't give a fuck.
Notice a trend?

A view from the outside.

One of the candidate images for the "galaxy of broken toys" visited by explorers of the (seven galaxy) ATU Imperium.

This cluster would probably qualify as a post-singularity minefield. Strangely enough, the Local stargates are considered almost friendly.

Another candidate image of "The Greater Consilium" galactic supercluster.

TGC was roughly similar (in a dramatic sense) as The First Federation in Trek.

Not as distantly remote and arcane as the post-singularity remnants, but still having scary amounts of ultra-tech available.

>jump gate maps
Tried a method of generating them - start with a single system, roll 1d for the number of gates/points (I like huge points that can't guarded. You try covering half a cubic AU with mines and patrols), roll 1d for each one's position (reroll duplicates), then roll 1d for distance. Place all the lines, place a system marker at the end of one, rolled for gates (this roll includes all the ones that attach), etc, then I kept going (sometimes fudging numbers into something that I liked) until I was happy (-ish) with the map, with all lines capped.
I then added dots (empty/uninhabitable systems) to each intersection that didn't have a planet. So far, I think that every dot marks one leg of the transit, which would be a week (or one week per hex and each dot is a system you have to deal with). Then you have to maneuver insystem to your next point, and hit the drives.
I'm thinking each one is 2d AU from the central star (or local center of gravity if a rogue planet or asteroid belt), which offers plenty of chances for piracy.
Personally, I think this creates a very busy map. I haven't even tried to place secondaries (if I even want them) yet.

Here's an attempt at secondaries.

Eh, jump points are 1d+3 AU from system center.
So a maximum trip is, assuming Thrust 1, and jump points on the opposite sides of the system, (and adding 1AU for going around the sun), is 12 days, 8 hours, and 35 minutes.

>I parked the ship somewhere in this planetoid...

jump

...

...

isn't that a space station?

Properly speaking, it's a salvage ship at a battlefield, but I like to imagine that people just started parking old ships inside a hollowed out planetoid and turned them into homes.

>Properly speaking, it's a salvage ship at a battlefield,

Now that triggers my inner sperg.

There's going to be no "battlefield" in space. Spaceships, when either damaged or destroyed, just don't stop moving like a tank or APC. A ship which explodes or is otherwise damaged is just going to the "origin point" of an expanding sphere of debris and not a stationary wreck surrounded by equally stationary or slowly tumbling pieces.

I get it. It makes things easier for the referee and players. I also understand that some groups don't want or need that amount of reality in their games. It still rubs me the wrong way, especially seeing as I've run several great adventures in which the players have had to track down silent & cold wrecks from the long ago battle they were lost in.

That's why I imagined it as a junkyard in a planetoid, probably inhabited. It makes more sense than what the artist was trying to draw.

Don't get me wrong. I like the picture and I really like your explanation of it. I just hate the idea of junk-littered battlefields in open space.

In fact, I once ran a campaign which featured a location just like your junkyard inside a planetoid. The players had to search the remains of a hidden base in the Foreven sector. The Zhos and Vargr had been using a hollowed out planetoid as a repair and resupply base for raiders until the IN finally gathered enough sensor data to determine the what & where they needed. An IN CRURON was making what seemed to be a usual transit of the system while the Zhos & Vargr had powered everything down to wait just like they'd done dozens of times before. The CRURON then suddenly fired their meson gun spinals into planetoid wrecking everyone's shit. A quick visit by the Marines and some backpack nukes rearranged what bigger piece were left.

Years later, my players were after a macguffin and, naturally, the clues led them to the wrecked base. It was a real horror show. The planetoids natural tumble had been effected by the various explosions so the debris had been "churned" for a while - got that from Jack McDevitt. They couldn't last long wearing suits and used belter buggies they armored in various ways instead.

Their search lasted parts of two sessions. They found what they were looking for, sort of, and a few nice things they hadn't been looking for too. What made it real nice was that they later talked about searching the base both in an out of character. It had been a hard job and possibly deadly too, but they didn't see it as me trying to kill them - which I wasn't. They saw it as a great trap they could defeat by THINKING.

That sounds really fun, user

My players enjoyed it, but that's the kind of stuff they enjoyed.

Other groups like other things and they have fun too.

Would SWN's setting be easily adaptable to the OTU?

Even as, some far off empire in another galaxy?

>Would SWN's setting be easily adaptable to the OTU?

To the OTU? Sort of. 20 years on and we don't have too clear an understanding of what the Empress Wave is or does. MWM posted some details at COTI a year or so ago along the lines of it does X to Y for Z period but the stuff raised more questions than it answered.

While SWN's Scream could be analogous to the Empress Wave, the psi-tech and post-tech stuff in SWN has no equivalent in Traveller or the OTU. The pre-Scream SWN setting had huge psionically operated jump gates shuttling million ton freighters between the core worlds and that's just one example of SWN's reality-bending tech. SWN

>Even as, some far off empire in another galaxy?

That far away and it's not the OTU, so why worry? I'd steal everything I wanted from SWN and ignore the OTU. Make your game your own game.

A pre-scream SWN campaign setting sounds interesting. Though it would obviously be further from OTU technology assumptions.

>the psi-tech and post-tech stuff in SWN has no equivalent in Traveller or the OTU

Ancient (and ancient) artifacts?

Could be. That's one way to handle SWN's pre-Scream tech.

Of course there's a LOT more of it about and a LOT more of it not only working but also comprehensible to normal humans because it was the tech they were using not too long ago.

So it's not going to be 250-300K year old stuff built for non-human hands, eyes, and whatnot and labeled in a language completely unknown and undecipherable. It's going to stuff a few centuries old, built for and by humans, labeled with human languages(s), and either unworkable or partially working because the psionic skills and/or knowledge needed to operate it died in the Scream.

SWN talks about psionics being used in the manufacturing of pre-Scream tech to allow reactions and whatnot that couldn't otherwise occur given the physical laws of the universe. We're talking about some serious "spoon bending" stuff being needed right on the assembly line. Pre-Scream facilities exist and people generally know what they do but, because no one can perform whatever psionic tricks were needed, no one can make anything work.

Then have it be Ancient uplifted humans, specifically to see how far the Ancients could push psionics?

That could work too.

Please remember, I'm only acting as a "script doctor" of sorts here. I'm trying to find holes your players might find. Nothing more.

The how and why of it working only really depends on the needs of you referee and your group. It if works for you, then go with it and the hell with anything or anyone else.

Make the game your game. Okay?

>specifically to see how far the Ancients could push psionics?

That's an excellent goal. IMHO, GDW was far too conservative regarding psionics and especially the powers Yaskodray and his children SHOULD have been able to employ.

I can understand them "nerfing" PC psionics in order to maintain game balance. The game isn't just about after all psionics so those abilities had to "fit" in with all the other stuff and not over shadow anything.

When it came to Ancient psionics, other than Yaskodray being immortal, GDW played it very cautious. On one hand, they didn't get too specific regarding what the Ancients could or couldn't do. OTOH, they could have hinted at some really wild shit while still keeping things vague.

SWN's pre-Scream psions were able to TWIST REALITY for "mundane" things like industrial processes. GDW could have hinted about Yaskodray & Co. doing the similar things.

For example, in his book "The Gods Themselves", one of Asimov's characters uses the presence of Plutonium-186, an isotope which CANNOT occur in our universe, to prove the existence of a parallel universe. Having your players find traces of the same at a suspected Ancient site or having such traces be the definitive "fingerprint" of the Ancients would add a nice bit of "Holy Shit!" to any Traveller setting.

I've always held that Yaskodray/The Children/Grandchildren were like World of Darkness Vampires or the 40k Emperor/Primarchs/Astartes in terms of 'general power scaling' I.E. here's the absolute pinnacle of the ability, now here's one who's slightly less impressive, but no less formidable, and so on all the way down to the modern day Droyne

I think that's a good way to grasp it.

>I just hate the idea of junk-littered battlefields in open space.

Open space is one thing, but a battle near a jovian's trojan points might end up being swept up and hanging together with some rocks mixed in.

>Open space is one thing, but a battle near a jovian's trojan points might end up being swept up and hanging together with some rocks mixed in.

That could be if the vectors involved are small enough, "aimed" the right direction, or both.

The Jupiter-Saturn resonance routinely sweeps objects in and out of Jupiter's Trojan points while Jupiter "herds" the Asteroid Belt into clumps separated by Kirkwood Gaps.

The "sweet spot" for wrecks and debris staying in the Trojans or being swept into them for a period is going to be rather small. The larger the vector when the ship was wrecked and the more energetic the event which created the debris, the less of a chance of anything being caught.

Please note, I wrote LESS of a chance and not NO chance.

Classic's Beltstrike campaign features a...

... relic Darrian starship "parked" for centuries in a planetoid hangar within a particularly dense Trojan point cluster.

I'm wanting to run Traveller, but find it daunting. Any advice for a noob?

There's document discussing just that in the Archives but I'll upload it instead to save you some searching.

Thanks man, this helps out a lot. Should i just jump right into it and make a one shot to get my feet wet?

>Should i just jump right into it and make a one shot to get my feet wet?

That's one way. Kind of like ripping a band-aid off quickly to get the sting over faster, right?

Let me suggest what I do for casuals and others new to Traveller game nights at my FLGS. I run a good old fashioned shoot-em-up with pre-generated PCs. Getting used to deadly combat is perhaps the toughest part of learning Traveller, especially for people who've played other RPGs.

I use Classic's "Chamax Plague". It's in the CT folder in the Archive under the Double Adventures. The "meat" of that adventure is clearing nasty bugs out of a grounded ship so you can search it for clues to where the crew is. I ignore all the preliminary stuff and start the adventure with the players stepping out of their ship to approach towards the "infested" one.

I use pre-gens so we don't waste time in chargen and so the players aren't attached to their PCs. I have a stack of 3x5 cards with PC on them they can thumb through to make their choice. I also have 3x5 "cheat cards" explaining a PC's UPP and how rolls are made. Finally, I have another card for whatever weapon(s) they're carrying. A player will have a PC card, a cheat card, and maybe two weapon cards in front of them. I use a big hex map with counters at first and, when the players gets in or around the ship, a nice big deckplan. (continued)

(continued)

The new players don't need to remember anything, it's all on their cards. I also throw in a few non-combat tasks like "hot wiring" airlocks or 'searching" computer files too, but the players whose PCs can do that stuff are given a big nudge by me. The players pretty much decide where to move, what/when to shoot, where to search, and so forth. Because I control the number of bugs on the map, I can make things easier or more challenging for them depending on how their doing. If a PC dies or is badly hurt, I've got plenty of NPCs the player can immediately take over so everyone plays through the whole session no matter what.

This sort of session is good for a new referee too. All you really need to know are the combat rules for whatever version you choose to use. Everything else, and I mean everything else, can go hang during this "getting to know Traveller" session.

How do I learn Mongoose 2e?

Read the book.

too long.... I just wanna fight other ships and steal their stuff.

>too long

too bad

Back to your Xbox then kiddo

What do you think's a fair price for the Cepheus Engine core book? Trying to figure out what to put in, since it's PWYW.

is it possible to run a single planet/starsystem campaign

was interested on doing something post-apocalyptic with varying technology levels and traveller appealed to me

planning on using mongoose traveller

I'd pay $25 if I could actually get it in three little black books.

Yes. There's even a whole setting book dedicated to hugely detailing one specific planet.

Single system campaigns are gr8 though.

Very possible. Orbital 2100 is a traveller setting that uses only reaction drives and is in our solar system.
My suggestion? Grab GURPS Traveller: First In for the system generation, or DGP's World Builder's Guidebook for MegaTraveller - you want the system generation so you can have an entire system to play in, if one of the tech levels can do spaceflight.

>There's even a whole setting book dedicated to hugely detailing one specific planet.

Which one?

A whole bunch. Tarsus in CT, and the Planetary Surveys from GURPS come to mind.

Also, while less detailed, plenty of adventures have information relating to the planet the adventure takes place on, e.g. Research Station Gamma or Mission on Mithril.

>Which one?

As correctly note, there are bunches of them, both official published and "fanon" work.

For CT, there is Tarsus (in the boxed set of the same name), the Bowmen Belt (in Beltstrike), Faldor by the Keith Bros., several systems in various Adventures & Doubles, several systems in The Traveller Adventure, several systems in DGP's Traveller Digest, and others I don't as easily remember.

GT had several excellent Plantary Surveys, DGP continued detailing systems during the MT run of Traveller Digest, Flaming Eye and Knighfall each detail dozens of worlds including maps, and TNE's "Path of Tears" details dozens of worlds including maps. Again, there's a lot I'm forgetting too.

Finally, there is a HUGE amount of "fanon" detailing systems scattered about the 'net. For several years, the old TML ran what was a called the "Landgrab" in which members would post material and links to other material about systems they had 'claimed".

How do you guys deal with players wanting to play psionics?

I was thinking of having different populations (same species) with varying tech levels, with more primitive, spiritually oriented populations having a higher psionics percentage.

Players, having chosen between coming from a more dominant less spiritual group or a less dominant more spiritual group may then roll a percentile die (rolling under the psionic percentage of course) to determine if they are a psionic are not and then following the rules as written for generating psionics.

Look at the list of probabilities, and assign a 2d roll based on how probable Psionics are in that culture (I had space romani where woman got Psionics on 8+, with auto-clairvoyance for the precog, and men had psi on 10+, but they rolled 2d+2 for their PSI score. Auto-talent Telekinesis)
AS you can see from my example, you can do a lot of variance just with that, or changing what the automatic talent (the one they can be assumed to get at 0 if they take it as their first talent check).
By the way, except for powers, ignore the MgT Psionics book - especially the Psionics TL. That part is pure trash, and reads like a pop-history of paganism in Europe followed by pseudo-science.

I actually have a PSI Index - the level of control and knowledge a culture allows itself to have in regards to psionics. Control is a "skill" all psions have, allowing them to "control" spontaneous manifestations of their powers, and also becomes the minimum number needed to activate a power. Roll 1d-1, allowing PI0 through PI5. PI6 and 7 should be placed only by the referee.
Psi Index
0 – No training possible, no techniques to control usage (12+)
1 – No training possible, crude techniques to control usage (11+)
2 – Training up to Skill 0, Control 10+. Discovery of natural enhancers
3 – Training to Skill 1, Control 9+. Refinement of natural enhancers
4 – Skill 2, Control 8+. First artificial enhancers.
5 – Skill 3. Second generation artificial enhancers. First artificially induced instances of psionics (unreliable)
6 – Skill 4, Control 7+. First artificial power multipliers, reliable inducement of psionics in a small segment of population.
7 – Control 6+. Stable power multipliers, large scale inducement of psionic powers.

>How do you guys deal with players wanting to play psionics?

I let them. I also don't bend or fiddle with the rules too much to oblige them. Psionics is just another skill. There are no Jedis in my games.

>with more primitive, spiritually oriented populations having a higher psionics percentage.

That's nice, if cliched is what you were going for.

Why not flip that boring old cliche on it's head? People from hi-tech societies have a better chance of being identified as psions because those societies have the tools and science needed to better understand the mind and how it works?

>to determine if they are a psionic are not and then following the rules as written for generating psionics.

In CT, everyone is psionic. There's no "Are you?" or "Aren't you?" die rolls. All that matters is your 2D6 psionic strength rating and when you began training. Your strength decays quickly as you age unless you've received some training.

I supposed you could add a +1 DM to the strength roll for your "predisposed" populations, but I see little reason to do any of this. Psionics already works RAW and you should be more interested in the play situations you place on the tabletop than fiddling with rules you can unwittingly break.

Is there an archive of the TML? Is it in the archives?

>Is there an archive of the TML?

There is an archive, although where I don't know. The TML is also still active to a certain degree.

You'll have to do a LOT of digging and many links may require you to use the wayback machine. On top of that, just like "fanon" across all media, most of the Landgrab entries are poorly done.

Thanks user

yeah it's fairly tropey, but my players wanted something tropey
you raise a good point with regards to the balanced rules and the higher chance of discovery

using automatic talents past certain thresholds is interesting

Is having something like a +1 to psionic strength for the 'modern societies' with their better diagnostics and giving the primitive societies automatic talents past certain psionic strength thresholds, reflecting a more you're born with it attitude towards psionics a reasonable setup?

While I'm at it, can I ask you how you'd work with a disease immunity system, could I use the percentile shenanigans in my first post? Or is that too unfun for players to role a non immune character in a post-apocalyptic world?

No problem, user, but I don't know how much help I actually gave you!

>Is having something like a +1 to psionic strength for the 'modern societies' with their better diagnostics and giving the primitive societies automatic talents past certain psionic strength thresholds, reflecting a more you're born with it attitude towards psionics a reasonable setup?

Check the archive for the Zhodani books. They're a pretty good guideline for Psionic societies.