New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

[Flyndaran]

What we psychologically need is not exactly what ancient people did or future people will. Our species seem able to adapt to quite bizarre cultural requirements.

[PTTG]

As a future history seed? Potentially interesting. As a realistic view of human nature... I'm quite skeptical. Not everything is a monkey's paw. Providing plenty and equality to all mankind sounds like it's just good.

[AlexanderHowl]

Yes, our ancestors seemed to have survived quiet well during the Paleolithic without working that hard. People would make their own work through their creativity and their hobbies (look at stuff like Twitch, where people stream themselves playing video games for 20-40 hours a week). I can imagine worse fates than a life devoted to pleasing the people you love and doing the things that you like.

[Flyndaran]

It's also really unpredictable how what's good, bad, or indifferent on an individual psychological scale is when expanded to group sociological cultural level.

[PTTG]

Would really like some feedback on the gameability of this one:

A distant future society, home to digital and chemical intelligences living in harmony, established many colonies, one on an earth-like world (or cool artificial habitat, pick your favorite shape). Their technology was TL 11+, although mind uploading proved to be impossible.

The AIs -- and nearly all technology -- relied on a substrate of ambient nanomachines that were computer, network, and power distribution system all at once. They were just as critical for most organic life, powering and controlling cybernetics and medical systems. Naturally, the security of this "Lace" was the utmost priority.

Many AI felt that their presence in organic society would ultimately doom human and near-human life (mainly gene-spliced variants and a few uplifted animals) to political irrelevance; they wanted to transition to a society of self-rule. The organics, for their part, generally saw little reason to disrupt the status quo, and moreover hoped to keep "good AIs" present and a part of society to protect against "bad AI." Though there were many more factions, these two broad viewpoints encompassed most of them.

Thus it was likely that it was, in fact, an AI or organization of them that finally managed to attack and break down the Lace, presumably with the goal of eliminating the threat of AI mastery over the organics. There are many other possibilities, of course. The virus or corruption -- its very nature is hard to define -- expanded throughout known space at the speed of light, and in time washed over the specific colony world of our interest. In a matter of moments, the wonders of the planet's advanced technology were erased, as were its most powerful members, its critical infrastructure, and the cybernetics of most of the planet's population.

The centuries that followed were difficult. The organic population crashed seven separate times, from over ten billion to under ten million. Each year was a little bit harsher than the last, as the planet's orbital terraforming network swung uselessly in space. In enclaves and camps, some equipment was jury-rigged or rebuilt from memory, but each generation lost a little more. They lost track of their history, and began to think of the time before as an age of miracles, and of the AIs and capricious gods.

However, all was not lost in the Lace. The nanites' slow error-correction software had been running the entire time, and gradually, gradually it arrested the decay, and began to repair the network and recover the lost data. In theory, the encrypted "cloud-based" backups were still available, stored on a deep level of the network, but it would take time and effort to unlock it.

Only a decade ago, some small pockets of the Lace returned to full functionality. Within some of these pockets, AIs long-dormant stretched their mental limbs and found the borders of their realms, and the people within them. Each AI is different, but they all know that in less than a century the decay of the climate systems will be irreversible, and everyone on the planet will perish... but also that hope is out there.

If an AI can amass control of a large enough area (by sending people carrying nanites into new regions), then it can enhance its computing power geometrically, and accelerate the decryption process. And when the decryption process is complete, the AI will have access to the wonders of the ancient world. The rapid restoration of the Lace, the re-activation of the terraforming network, advanced nanomedicine, and countless other advances. The downside, of course, is that only one AI can be the first, and the others will be reverted to their pre-catastrophe selves, which at this point is a kind of death for them. It is now a race -- a war -- to control as much of the planet as possible as swiftly as possible, while protecting the tribes and peoples of the colony world.

At their height, AIs had 20+ IQ and countless levels of Compartmentalized Mind, and could communicate with anyone directly by using the nanites in a given person's brain to provide the sensation of hearing the message spoken aloud. At present, few AIs are beyond IQ 15, and they have distinctly limited CM. Many have also gained disadvantages due to corruption and emotional distress. Their "telepathic" communication is now limited to specific people and only in specific places... though this is changing.

Players might be weird-tech Skirmishers with Jetpacks or Hovercycle Lancers. Or they might be nanite acolytes, who must perform some kind of strange ritual to re-activate a region's nanites for the AI. Also available are common semi-humans, such as Nu-Dolphins or Pongo Sapiens, with an appropriate tribal background. PCs might live in eroded cities as Terrace Farmers and prospectors -- though it's been so long that they might not even recognize the cities as something once made for humans. They will all have a mystical view of this history, seeing the fall as legend, perhaps not truly real. They argue if people created the gods, or if the gods created people (in fact, the ships that first arrived carried only bioprinters to manufacture and grow the first generations of colonists, so in a sense, both). Only a few hear the messages of these gods directly, but as they strengthen, that number grows.

Campaigns could be about everyday people solving the extraordinary problems they face (from shifting climate to banditry to rogue servitors awoken by the fitful Lace), or they could be about a campaign to bring a specific AI to power and restore the Age of Wonders. I love the idea of figuring out Mass Combat stats for these anachronistic armies...

[AlexanderHowl]

I always find it interesting that people seem to believe that AI will be better and smarter than the people who program them (the AI God meme). Anyway, the setting is very dystopian and could work very well for a fallen human society. You could have the Lace forming on a human world that decided to isolate itself from a human civilization that banned strong AI and the characters are scouts from the larger human civilization seeking lost colonies. Alternatively, the characters could come from a lost colony that banned AI and they are scouts from a human civilization that arose from the lost colony and is expanding into the former territory of the Lace. In any case, I think the setting is more interesting if the characters are outsiders looking in rather than natives dealing with insane AI Gods.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by PTTG

As a future history seed? Potentially interesting. As a realistic view of human nature... I'm quite skeptical. Not everything is a monkey's paw. Providing plenty and equality to all mankind sounds like it's just good.

Agreed. The point of cautionary tales is to think before you act, not to cease all action forever. If wealth brings new problems, I think I'd rather deal with the problems of wealth rather than poverty. To demonstrate, would you rather mope on a second hand broken down couch in a cold water flat, or would you prefer to mope beside your swiming pool waiting for dinner to be delivered from your favorite steakhouse?

I love the old line, "Money can't buy happiness, but you can sure rent a better class of misery."

[Flyndaran]

But wealth and power still give the ability to destroy. In the stone age, it was mostly just the power to kill individuals and fragile species over millennia. Now we're destroying entire ecosystems and causing the planet's sixth great extinction event over mere decades.
Wealth and power isn't always a good thing either is what I'm trying to say.

I see the future getting much darker on a global scale before it gets better. But I think there's a good chance that it will eventually get better.
Technology; the cause of, and solution to, most of the world's problems. ;)

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by PTTG

As a future history seed? Potentially interesting. As a realistic view of human nature... I'm quite skeptical. Not everything is a monkey's paw. Providing plenty and equality to all mankind sounds like it's just good.

Wouldn't whoever built the deus ex machina that can provide plenty and equality to all mankind end up using it to provide plenty for themselves and not one bit more equality then there was before?

[AlexanderHowl]

You could still have a ruling elite, the only question is how much do they own all together and how much do they own individually (related to their population). The ruling elite of the contemporary world earns 50% of the income and contains only 0.01% of the population (anyone making $10 million per year or more). A society where the same population earned only 10% of the income would potentially be much more egalitarian (as the average earnings of the ruling elites would be $2 million per year and as the average earnings of the rest of the population would rise 80%).