Traveller Vignette 012

I’d been here a hundred times before, though it had been called different things in different systems – generic hardscrabble mining colonies that sprang up to loot whatever mineral resources the world had, and died again once those were exhausted.

This one was unusual in that it hadn't quite died, mostly because the air was breathable if you didn't mind risking slow cumulative lung damage if you went outside without a mask, and the biosphere could support the few thousand stragglers optimistic, desperate or stupid enough to think they could make a go of subsistence farming.

The other unusual thing was that when I came to places like this, I was usually working for the companies who owned then. That's how it usually is, when your line of work is essentially as hired muscle. This time, I was working for – of all things – an uplifted Dolphin. I didn't know what he could want from a place like this, but I had a powerful urge to find out.

(Author's note - A poor world like this can be a setting for all sorts of adventures, as PCs work for or fight corporation exploiting the miners, act for environmental organisations etc.

Why the Dolphin patron? Well, why not? Uplifted Dolphins are established in canon, but rarely appear in scenarios and are pretty rare in Imperial or Solomani society except on a few water worlds. They can make interestingly memorable patrons, always offstage and communicating with their agents mostly by e-mail)