Bamboopunk

[patchwork]

Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl" might be worth a look. It's a world where the fossil fuels are all gone (and the environment as screwed up as you'd imagine), so knowledge of how to do things remains, but getting the energy to actually do them is never an easy task.

[mr beer]

Originally Posted by patchwork

Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl" might be worth a look. It's a world where the fossil fuels are all gone (and the environment as screwed up as you'd imagine), so knowledge of how to do things remains, but getting the energy to actually do them is never an easy task.

Plus it's a good book, so there's that.

[mhd]

Originally Posted by Stone Dog

Where does the punk part fit in here? Is there a "The Man" trying to keep new technology down?

Punk's dead, man, at least since the "steam" prefix. It now only serves as a convenient shorthand for divergent TLs.

(Actually, in my campaign there's the "Holy Order of St. Ayana", who tries to keep things on the DL, but let's not digress)

[Stone Dog]

Originally Posted by mhd

Punk's dead, man, at least since the "steam" prefix. It now only serves as a convenient shorthand for divergent TLs.

And I will continue to fight against this linguistic oppression. Call it... Grammar-punk. ;)

[thrash]

There's a certain amount of begging the question in these settings: it may not even be possible to have a shirt-sleeve habitable planet without a magnetic field. This, in turn, implies a ferromagnetic core and probably some degree of active volcanism that would deposit metal-bearing minerals on the surface.

To answer your question, though, I just finished reading C. C. MacApp's Prisoners of the Sky, which is set on such a metal-poor world. The inhabitants use flint knives and bows alongside helium blimps and rubber band powered harpoon guns. (The helium comes from a native plant that concentrates it from a ~2% atmospheric fraction by essentially metabolizing everything else, and then using the natural gas bags for propagation.)

The book is obscure, however, so it may be easier to find the Traveller adaptation (as the planet Victoria) in the print Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society, issue #2. The oh-so-convenient plants in that version produce hydrogen gas, which is perhaps a bit more plausible.

[Flyndaran]

Helium comes from natural gas deposits, so that would give access to fossil fuels.
One could always posit ancient aliens mining the heck of out the planet. With really advanced tech, it wouldn't necessarily leave a demolished ecosystem unable to have recovered by setting start time.

[a humble lich]

There quite a bit of discussion of uplifting from a metal poor, stone age environment in the 3e GUPRS Riverworld. The Riverworld setting has some specific issues about what sort of materials and tools are available, but the basic concept is relatively high-tech humans finding themselves naked on a strange world with limited resources.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Stone Dog

Where does the punk part fit in here? Is there a "The Man" trying to keep new technology down?

Silly divergence . . .

As someone who lived through punk the first time, I'll point out that the defining principle wasn't anarchy and telling society to go to hell, but the do-it-yourself (DIY) aesthetic: Play music your way, not because you took lessons; dress your way, not the way some shop or trend tells you to; live your way, not according to the marriage-car-house-kid-retirement script you're fed by the media. When literary genres came along using "punk," many of us read that as "DIY." So really, a setting where people are doing the best they can with what they got is "punk" in the purest sense.

[Say, it isn't that bad!]

Check the Primitive Technology channel on Youtube.

Also, turn on the captions for extra subtle humour.

[mhd]

Originally Posted by Stone Dog

And I will continue to fight against this linguistic oppression. Call it... Grammar-punk. ;)

So Grammarpunk is full of Grammar-N....? This is weirder than that suspenders thing...

Originally Posted by thrash

There's a certain amount of begging the question in these settings: it may not even be possible to have a shirt-sleeve habitable planet without a magnetic field.

On the macro level, sure. But that doesn't really matter for smaller groups of people dropped into a Cretacean jungle or remote island, never mind more artificial setups. There might be iron out there, but that doesn't mean you have to make do with sticks and stones for a while.

Originally Posted by thrash

The oh-so-convenient plants in that version produce hydrogen gas, which is perhaps a bit more plausible.

As blimps are always a good thing, I might want to investigate that. As this is basically mixed-era-timey-wimey earth, I'm reluctant to introduce mysterious ex machina plants.

Anybody knows what the easiest way to produce helium or probably hydrogen is? Electrolysis seems quite an investment in tech, but I doubt that you can just grow hydrogenisation algae in your back yard either.

Originally Posted by a humble lich

There quite a bit of discussion of uplifting from a metal poor, stone age environment in the 3e GUPRS Riverworld.

Half a page about what skill levels PC need to do to bring up aspects of society by a few rungs, but not a lot of technological details, sadly. You get a bit more from the books, but that's going from stone axes to steamboats faster than you can say Hermann Göring.

Let me try to get some finer-grained topics out, about individual pieces of tech:

Hygiene - Just knowing about the germ theory of disease is awesome, and even with wood, bamboo and clay you can do a lot of good when it comes to planning a small community. No special tools required.

Weapons - Killing tech was always rather pragmatic and state of the art, so I doubt that there's some really good "in hindsight" improvement advanced knowledge could bring to the table, leaving out silly things like bamboo compound bows.
But there's always gunpowder. As you can't just put it into a tree stump and fire random diamonds with it, I guess simple rockets would be a decent enough application. Good for scaring away huge beasts and less developed human marauders.

Transportation - Not my field of expertise, but I wouldn't be surprised that you could do better than historically appropriate hulls and rigging even with TL0 carpentry.
Better suspension for carts and carriages?
The aforementioned blimps are definitely on the upper end of the "punk" scale.

Information - Printing press, semaphores, dewey decimal system, modern schooling. If stuck on a low TL long enough and with a decent community size you should be able to retain knowledge long enough.

Construction - Can you do better than "primitive" housing?

Medicine - Let's treat the local flora as a bit more hostile, i.e. no willow bark for everyone or accidental specialists ("I did my PhD in Amazonian medicine plants"). Physiology is advanced, but without modern tools and pharmaceuticals the RAW suggestion of having a maximum efficiency of TL 5 seems about right. And it's quite hard to improve upon that, unless you've got a few years and enough patients for "try this berry" double blind studies and getting from coconuts to machines going "bing".