GURPS Fifth Millennium

[combatmedic]

GURPS Fifth Millennium

Time and place: Earth, a few centuries after 4000 AD

TL 12 w/ conservative hard SF tech path (see page 9 of UT for guidelines)

Thinking beings:
• Baseline humans
• Eugenic upgrades
• Parahumans
• Uplifted animals (low sapient)
• AIs (hardware based only)

Man and his creations
The terrible wars of a millennium past killed more than half the population of the planet. Some men thought that their species would soon become extinct, and set to work designing inheritor races; new thinking machines, uplifted animals, variant humans resistant to radiation and to the geneered plague-weapons. Humanity recovered from the wars and now shares the planet with these other intelligences.

Space, the forgotten frontier
If you look up into the night sky, you might be lucky enough to spot one of the derelict habitats or research stations burning as it drops through the upper atmosphere, old dreams falling to Earth. Make a wish.

Only the AIs live in space now.

Electronic angels orbit the globe, lasers still set to destroy ICBMs in the event of another genocidal war on the planet below.



The Powers of the Earth
No state of the early 21st century has survived in anything like its old form, and many have dissolved or been replaced by new polities. Xin has divided and reunited and divided again since the time of Emperor Mao. The proxy wars of the long-since defunct North American and Soviet Empires are studied as the ancients once studied the Punic Wars. Three pontifices claim to be the rightful successors of the ancient bishops of the Eternal City of Ruhm.

[combatmedic]

This is a campaign setting concept I'm kicking about.

It assumes the medium tech progression from UT, placing the advent of TL 12 around the dawn of the Fifth millennium AD. Bump the timeline a few hundred years further out than that.

Major technological and scientific progress doesn't really happen anymore. It's not impossible, but it's not likely.

If one encounters a technical problem, one requests an AI researcher to look up the proper solution from old archives. Science may be changing into a branch of History.

I could have gone with the Slow or even Retarded tech progression, making this GURPS Ninth or Twenty-First Millennium.
But it seems to me that two millennia is plenty of time for every major power in the world to fall or evolve into something markedly different.

[Seneschal]

Wow. Sounds like a hard-sci-fi W40K. In terms of tone and atmosphere, your description sounds pretty grim. Is humanity being held prisoner on Earth? Do they willingly refuse to have a space program (and made orbital death-machines as an incentive)? Sounds like mankind as a whole has Low Self-Image and Guilt Complex.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Seneschal

Wow. Sounds like a hard-sci-fi W40K. In terms of tone and atmosphere, your description sounds pretty grim. Is humanity being held prisoner on Earth? Do they willingly refuse to have a space program (and made orbital death-machines as an incentive)? Sounds like mankind as a whole has Low Self-Image and Guilt Complex.

It could be spun that way, sure. That's not quite what I had in mind, though. It's not a Crapsack World. It's just not a techno-utopian world. The big human die-off occurred centuries past, you'll note. Human numbers have grown again since that time. Civilization took a blow, but not a knockout punch.

The average starting wealth is 100K GURPS $. Healthcare is way better, and most people can expect to live longer, healthier lives than most people in our world.

I'm thinking the space programs were all but abandoned because they had reached the point of diminishing returns. Anything worth doing in space could be done by AIs, and there really wasn't much worth doing besides possibly some mining and long, slow sling shot transport back to Earth orbit. There are no other planets capable of sustaining life, at least not in our Solar System. Mars is a dead and hostile world, although it could be terraformed if Earth powers were willing to invest in a project that would take many thousands of years to complete (the tech path means that they have no fast Mars-type terraforming, which is a TL 10 thing). In other words, the dream of extraterrestrial colonization ran into the reality of space being inhospitable and expensive for human inhabitation.


The orbital AIs don't need to crush attempts at spaceflight. Not many people attempt it these days. But if you want to get in your rocket ship and fly out there, you can do that. Make sure you don't get mistaken for an ICBM.

There might be AI civilization developing among the abandoned lunar bases, or something along those lines.

[combatmedic]

Humans are not more (or less) virtuous in the Fifth Millennium than in past ages. The sort of ethnic, religious, an class based hatreds that we see in our world will still exist, although the particulars have changed

There will be some nasty leftovers from the old wars fought with bioweapons.

The parahuman 'killer kiddos' I designed may feature...

[Keiko]

Reminds me of Warhammer 40K but more hard sci-fi, seems pretty bleak.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Keiko

Reminds me of Warhammer 40K but more hard sci-fi, seems pretty bleak.

That's the second W040K comment.

I really like WH40K, but I'm not seeing the connection.

What about this world is so bleak?
What makes it bleaker than our world?

Is it the human modification and non-human intelligence stuff that is so disturbing?

[Keiko]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

There might be AI civilization developing among the abandoned lunar bases, or something along those lines.

I'm probably misreading your tone or its application hear but this came across as someone contemptuous of the idea of space travel and I read that as reflecting the general attitude in the setting: its something only an idiot would do. That contributed to the cynical vibe I got from the setting outline.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Keiko

I'm probably misreading your tone or its application hear but this came across as someone contemptuous of the idea of space travel and I read that as reflecting the general attitude in the setting: its something only an idiot would do. That contributed to the cynical vibe I got from the setting outline.

In fact, I'm not contemptuous of space exploration IRL. I support sending more probes and collecting more information. I would be happy to see mining of extraterrestrial resources if it could ever be made practical.

You need to distinguish between exploring space and living in space or on other planets. A lot of exploration has been done with probes. AI might increase that trend. If an AI can do the job just as well, why send a human with all that expensive life support?

What I don't think is likely with conservative projections based on current technology (5M is a CHSF tech path setting) and related social and economic factors is human colonization of the Solar System. Not impossible, but implausible.

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

It assumes the medium tech progression from UT, placing the advent of TL 12 around the dawn of the Fifth millennium AD. Bump the timeline a few hundred years further out than that.

TL          Medium 
  9           2030
  10          2120
  11          2500
  12          4000

So they've had mature TL9 for around 2,000 years? Why are there any baseline humans left? Off the top of my head I'd expect the average human to look something like:

New Human [102]
IQ +1 [20]; HT +1 [10]
Per +1 [5]; Fatigue +6 [18]

Advantages: Acute Senses (all) +3 [24]; Eidetic Memory [5]; Fit [5]; Less Sleep 1 [2]; Longevity [2]; Rapid Healing [5]; Resistant to Disease +8 [5].
Perks: Deep Sleeper [1].