Sword and starship settings

[Frost]

I just found my old copy of Fading Suns and spent a few wondering about running a one shot game with it- then remembered why I don't run it any more.

My next thought was to run a home brewed sword and starship/ scizotech space opera setting. Now aside from FS, most of my experience with the style comes from Dune and the early (and marginally less werid) Deathstalker novels so I thought that I would reach out to the hive mind to get a somewhat wider opinion.

I am tempted to steal the basic setup from fading suns, using as set of known worlds representing the rump of an interstellar state that has undergone an extended technological decline tied together by a natural or artifactual jump point network.

The genre seems to demand that in addition to having patchy implementation of advanced technologies (if not actual regression) that society is highly stratified, highly decentralised and militarised with a low productivity economy and a reactionary culture. One of my problems with fading suns is esentialy how it does this, the way the social structure is set up particularly when you add in the white wolf style 'splat' based character generation tends to grate a bit.

Is there any way of organising a society that gives us these effects without either slavishly trying to recreate the middle ages or turning the Known Worlds (consider the name stolen as well) into a federation of de-facto nation states?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Frost

Is there any way of organising a society that gives us these effects without either slavishly trying to recreate the middle ages or turning the Known Worlds (consider the name stolen as well) into a federation of de-facto nation states?

I would not necessarily call Warhammer40K and "organized" society but my Dark Heresy character definitely carried a sword and a laser pistol and I think maybe something like an AK-47 and all the grenades we could bully the Army into forking over. The PCs were an expendable demon-hunting team working for the Inquisition so we could get away with a _lot_.

I would not point to W40K as an example setting necessarily but it has a Not-Quite-As-Evil-As-Its'-Enemies Empire that's just barely managing to keep the lights on and lets anything that isn't an absolute right this minute crisis go to pot.

Or at least that's the impression I got from playing the game. I never actually read any of the game books.

[tshiggins]

GURPS has a Sword & Planet setting. G: Planet Krishna. In that setting, the interstellar polity forbids the introduction of advanced technology into worlds that have not yet developed it, on their own, but does allow visits to those worlds.

That means humans who arrive on Krishna must restrict themselves to the use of only local technology, and try to avoid disrupting the already-rollicking, swashbuckling planet more than it already is.

http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/Krishna/

The second way to have swords and spaceships is to do it as Dune did it. Have shields that limit the energy-levels that can penetrate them, guns don't work (and energy weapons trigger catastrophic explosions).

In the first case, technological limitations are locally-imposed by an overwhelmingly powerful government. In the second, the author included a tech that allowed him to create the world he wished.

The notion that a technological degeneration results in the loss of modern weaponry, but somehow allows starships to continue to exist, is rather absurd. A starship would, almost by definition, comprise the most complex technology in the universe. Should a "long night" begin, interstellar transportation would be the first thing to go.

You might be able to make an exception if interstellar transportation included technology so robust that it continued to work even though the rest of society collapsed.

Maybe magical star gates allow people to jump between worlds, without the need for expensive, high-tech launch technology or life-support? Perhaps you could draw an idea from C.J. Cherryh's "Mogaine" stories, in which the gates used allowed people to create wormholes to the past, and a change made previously created reality-quakes that devastated the interstellar civilization.

That might allow you to send characters to worlds where they have to learn to use only technology they can easily sustain with local resources, while trying to either shut down the gate system (so as to avoid any more reality quakes), or just find a way to survive in whatever world they find themselves.

Sword and Starship is tough to pull off, convincingly, because just about any technology that allows for interstellar travel pretty much automatically renders swords as utterly obsolete.

So, you must either impose the limitation on personal weapons through artificial political means or the introduction of a background tech that exists solely to allow for the setting (just accept it and move on); or, you have to have interstellar travel that doesn't require complex tech.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

The notion that a technological degeneration results in the loss of modern weaponry, but somehow allows starships to continue to exist, is rather absurd. A starship would, almost by definition, comprise the most complex technology in the universe. Should a "long night" begin, interstellar transportation would be the first thing to go.

And on a pragmatic level, the amount of energy output required for spaceflight means that a starship is modern weaponry, unless you constrain what ships can do extremely closely.

Now, you might well have a high-tech alien race that uses humans as mercenary fighters but doesn't let them play with the good toys (see the Janissaries series, or Their Master's War), but that's not quite the same sword-and-starship feel.

[Frost]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I would not necessarily call Warhammer40K and "organized" society but my Dark Heresy character definitely carried a sword and a laser pistol and I think maybe something like an AK-47 and all the grenades we could bully the Army into forking over.

40k wasn't something that it occurred to look at, although it probably should I know someone who calls fading suns 40k light.

One idea that I have had is to pilfer from other genres, the quasi-feudal social systems from Fitzpatrick's War or Julian Comstock both sort of post apocalypse might be a useful basis.

Using Comstock as a baseline would give us a vestigial central government, a small class of 'aristocrats', a middle class of petty officials skilled tradesmen and small farmers and everybody else at the bottom probably working as farm or factory hands on a semi-free basis or sharecropping.

Of course that all looks pretty medieval, am I missing another alternative? Or should I roll with it and try and mix things up more with a few extra details?

Originally Posted by T S Higgins

The notion that a technological degeneration results in the loss of modern weaponry, but somehow allows starships to continue to exist, is rather absurd. A starship would, almost by definition, comprise the most complex technology in the universe. Should a "long night" begin, interstellar transportation would be the first thing to go.

True but not as important as it might be, as you say this is not a realistic genre, I know it, my players know it and that generates a fairly high level of willing suspension of disbelief from the outset. Add a plausible hand wave and you are good to go.

Again playing raid the bookshelf, I might have my most of my chosen hand wave. Basicly the technology hasn't gone anywhere, the infrastructure is the problem, most things can still be produced (at least in small quantities and at great expense) but practical and social limitations place it outside the reach of the bulk of the population and complicate the operation and maintinence of what tech that gets out. Lower tech substitutes creep in as a quick fix or even as one of several layers of backups.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

And on a pragmatic level, the amount of energy output required for spaceflight means that a starship is modern weaponry, unless you constrain what ships can do extremely closely.

Although again, a good answer there is that the setting does not work like ours. Star Wars does this for both its spaceships and its hand-to-hand-combat: firearms are just plain less effective than in our world (especially against characters with the local kind of special powers, and less the way that they either disable someone or inflict minor wounds without much in between), and while starships routinely throw kilotons through gigatons at each other, we never get the impression that a crashed spaceship is a continent-wide catastrophe (although the threat of using space-based weapons against a ground target can be serious).

So presumably the Kzintzi lesson does not work in that setting, there are no near-C rocks, and anyone who wants to use a spaceship as a weapon in Star Wars should be smacked on the head and told "dude, its a cinematic setting, right? Newton has no business here, but we get blasters and lightsabres and stuff."

[exalted]

Originally Posted by Frost

40k wasn't something that it occurred to look at, although it probably should I know someone who calls fading suns 40k light.

Most 40k systems just make most common ranged weapons arbitrarily bad to accomplish this, something that usually annoy me to no end. At the same time you end up with a setting where powered armored giants can wade into combat with legions of machine gun waving fodder, killing them all with swords and hammers and even a normal person with okeyish armor is likely to get into melee combat due to rediculously poor long range performance of weapons.

[Frost]

Originally Posted by exalted

Most 40k systems just make most common ranged weapons arbitrarily bad to accomplish this, something that usually annoy me to no end. At the same time you end up with a setting where powered armored giants can wade into combat with legions of machine gun waving fodder, killing them all with swords and hammers and even a normal person with okeyish armor is likely to get into melee combat due to rediculously poor long range performance of weapons.

Fading suns never went quite that far which was a point in its favour.

From my experience guns worked well enough even against shielded targets (well shotguns and SMG's did). Everybody with half a brain carried a blade even when energy shields were deemphasized or absent, partly for cultural reasons* and partly because ammunition was a serious expense and more sophisticated guns could be cranky. I think that I only ever saw one character with a rifle though the ammo bills tended to push the short range vibe.

*Dueling was a fairly big feature of a number of our campaigns and the setting as written pushed the notion that duel= fencing.

[Anthony]

In general, a setting that lets machines hit the velocities required to even get into orbit, let alone interplanetary or interstellar, will have mechanical weapons that vastly outperform muscle. One option is that ships don't do that -- for example, in Space 1889 ships fly with liftwood until they reach a minimum altitude, and then directly apply their aether drives, without ever reaching orbital velocity let alone interplanetary.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Frost

I just found my old copy of Fading Suns and spent a few wondering about running a one shot game with it- then remembered why I don't run it any more.

My next thought was to run a home brewed sword and starship/ scizotech space opera setting. Now aside from FS, most of my experience with the style comes from Dune and the early (and marginally less werid) Deathstalker novels so I thought that I would reach out to the hive mind to get a somewhat wider opinion.

I am tempted to steal the basic setup from fading suns, using as set of known worlds representing the rump of an interstellar state that has undergone an extended technological decline tied together by a natural or artifactual jump point network.

The genre seems to demand that in addition to having patchy implementation of advanced technologies (if not actual regression) that society is highly stratified, highly decentralised and militarised with a low productivity economy and a reactionary culture. One of my problems with fading suns is esentialy how it does this, the way the social structure is set up particularly when you add in the white wolf style 'splat' based character generation tends to grate a bit.

Is there any way of organising a society that gives us these effects without either slavishly trying to recreate the middle ages or turning the Known Worlds (consider the name stolen as well) into a federation of de-facto nation states?

Option One: Make super-martial arts a widespread part of the society but largely inapplicable to ranged weapons. Super martial artists can dodge or parry ranged attacks but are good at hitting each other with hands or blades.

Option Two: Provide the society with a technological equivalent, a defense that works very well against ranged attacks but not well against opponents standing within arms reach.

Option Three: Have the bulk of humanity live under the supervision of a far more advanced force that has imposed weapons restriction law, can detect the use of weapons in violation of their law and respond with overwhelming force. I've done this on a planetary scale with a world where martial arts have become a big thing because the authorities largely ignore assault but can remotely detect weapons discharges and don't tolerate them. It doesn't work so well on an interstellar scale.

Option Four: Have a setting where they just never discovered gunpowder. Energy weapons exist, but are really bulky squad-level things.

Option Five: Have an interstellar travel technology that doesn't require maintenance and infrastructure. Such as for example, stargates actually on the planet or automated self repairing starships with AIs that will cheerfully take passengers anywhere they want to go. That way you can have the people using them be primitive as you can get.