Virus/Vampire is one of those things that worked a lot of ways.
On the one hand, there was the original event that flattened the
fragmented debris of the 3I and surrounding areas. We know that "worked,"
but how exactly it worked locally we didn't try to work out in too much
detail, because logically it could be different everywhere, and we wanted
to leave room for local GMs to tell their local stories.
Obviously if you were a hi-pop inhospitable world, you could be taken out
pretty easily by early strain suiciders and suicide inducers. Just as
obviously, if you were far away from the release point, the stuff that was
coming after you would be almost exclusively higher strains like empire
builders and puppeteers, simply because only they would have lasted that
long, the suiciders would have killed themselves off.
But for me, something that a GM would want to do for his own pocket empire
would be to tell the detailed story of how it happened, because this would
be seared into the local memory. Like in the Banners example, the guy who
came from Lucan's space with the warning, his name would be like Paul
Revere's or Laura Secord's with all kinds of songs and ballads and poems
and stamps and elementary schools and breakfast cereals named after him
staying breathlessly one step ahead of the vampires, or the way Kishkii's
name is remembered in the Regency (even if maybe I just misremembered it).
All of the details of that, with last-ditch miracles or disasters, would
be left to the GM's creativity, so we just wanted to provide tools to help
with that.
And finally, I try to maintain the somewhat fuzzy distinction between
virus and vampire, where virus is the "raw" code spreading around before
it quite settles into stable strain and personality types. Once the virus
gets fixed into one or more OSs as a stable strain, it is properly a
Vampire. It is no longer something that only spreads, it is now a thing
that can come and get you and shoot at you. And if it can kill your crew
and take your ship or factory or starport or whatever, it CAN jolly well
overwrite all of your chips and code at its leisure. "Virus defense"
becomes very quickly just normal defense against ships, enslaved ground
troops (and I'm not talking about anything as sophisticated as the K'kree,
but simple hostage-taking and coercion to keep them in line).
Dave
> As to the first, the Traveller wiki has this Virus page:
> http://traveller.wikia.com/wiki/Virus/TNE
>
> For the Puppeteer virus, it looks like the progress was roughly
>
> Strain 1 (Suicider) -> Strain 1A (Suicide Inducer) -> Strain 2A
> (Destroyer) -> Strain 2B (Reproducer) -> Empire Builder (many platforms,
> one mind) -> Alliance Builder (works with other Virus) -> Puppeteer
> (infects other Virus with their own code)
>
> Oh, for specialist strains, I'm scared to imagine what a Virus that grew
> up in a massive government bureaucracy mainframe would be like. The DMV
> from Hell would probably be R&R compared to what it does.
>
> Todd Kes