[Traveller] Alien Invasion!

Take that alien scum!

There is a small lost world with human inhabitants. It is interdicted and uncontacted, it is xenophobic, and heavily balkanized (sounds familiar?). Also it is so far advanced it can front up a few nuclear warheads for any threat that comes it’s way (which is why it is interdicted). Normally not many threats do come it’s way, a regular Navy-patrol is making sure of that, for the sake of both visitors and inhabitants of the planet. There where a few incidents in the past when merchants and scouts were killed by the inhabitants of this world. For the inhabitants these occasions seemed to be harbingers of alien invasions that were barely averted.

But the world also has the sector’s most highly priced

1) Whiskey (that special kind of moonshine from the Fragxan Mountains)
2) Foie Gras
3) Snark (a kind of lizard that tastes like chicken)
4) Vomitsnails (completely disgusting, but a highly priced fad on some worlds)

and the patron will pay a lot to get it from there. Normally the only contact possible is through a small merchant company working together with a few agents planetside. They bribed the Navy to look away at the right moment and land at some place in the back of the woods where nobody will notice them. But nowthe patron wants to undercut their prices and get all the goods for far less money. Why not send a few freelancers there to get the stuff? It can’t be that hard, can it?
Naturally this will not be that easy. For example the characters might not get told about the xenophobic, non-contacted part of this planet…

Directions to take this:
1. The characters are seen when entering the atmosphere and cause a major alarm. Fears of alien invasions, fueled by sightings of earlier spacecraft and some cold war paranoia make the characters an easy target on the bomb screens…
2. The characters are actually welcomed by one of the nations. Unfortunately this nation hopes for better weapon technology from them. Characters without the willingness to part from that will have to face all the force of that nation.
3. as 2. but some other nation actually notices that something is afoot and threatens to turn the planet into ashes if the characters should give a few too many (read:any) secrets to nation A
4. The characters are not noticed when entering the planet, but getting the local goods nevertheless proves difficult: cold war paranoia makes it nearly impossible to buy the goods
5. As 4. but the local secret service is after them because they believe them to be alien invaders
6. as 5. but another agency from another country is also after them, to get on their side for the coming invasion.

I was thinking of running this like a reverse 50s scifi movie, with all the trappings of the Atomic Age and Cold War paranoia on the other side. The idea of course was that in all those movies, for some reason nobody quite seemed to ever grasp (except budget restrictions) aliens were suspisciously humanlike.