Traveller's penchant for sending characters on extra-legal adventures led me to presuppose a "Dark Imperium", an empire that was corrupt and tyrannical. After all, playing the part of a smuggler or a pirate is inherently fraught with moral issues, but these seem mostly alleviated when the overall system is overtly immoral. Of course, I started playing Traveller around the time of "The Empire Strikes Back," so I was probably influenced more by Star Wars than by any of the "golden age" science fiction upon which Traveller is based. Nonetheless, the adventures I ran mostly involved corporations and multi-system polities along the periphery trying to break away from Imperial control. The moral, if there was one, was simply that the powerful always seek to control others for the sake of obtaining more power, and given the ability of high-technology to wreck large-scale destruction combined with the zero-sum nature of the conflict, my presupposition was that wars would be utterly ruthless, nukes would be essentially impossible to control, and that the damage inflicted would be quite pronounced. I even supposed that there would be corporations tasked with re-terraforming nuclear cinders after said conflicts had transpired.

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