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Old 07-23-2012, 08:27 PM   #11
Figleaf23
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Default Re: Post-Apocalypse: Back to the Stone Age

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I think we are also underestimating the resources it takes to teach someone to read. It doesn't happen by itself. Though there will be a few enclaves of those who have a line of people who can do such things.
It takes hardly anything to teach someone to read. A few texts and someone who know what the letters sound like can teach someone to read pretty easily.
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Old 07-23-2012, 08:44 PM   #12
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Default Re: Post-Apocalypse: Back to the Stone Age

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It takes hardly anything to teach someone to read. A few texts and someone who know what the letters sound like can teach someone to read pretty easily.
Every tried teaching someone? It takes time, and there is a lot more to reading than sounding out the words.

Which could be an entertaining plot point: the locals think 'reading' means understanding mere paragraphs of meaning, while the PC's can actually read.
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Old 07-23-2012, 08:44 PM   #13
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Allright, thanks for all the fascinating replies so far. This is very valuable to me.

I’m left with the impression that a natural disaster alone would not suffice to put mankind under in quite the way I want – it wouldn’t kill enough people and the retention and recovery of “lost” knowledg, esp. scientific concepts would be too swift for civilization to truly perish and an agrarian society to take shape. And I don’t want a weird coincidence of two events, or cascading failure, I think society is too resilient to not deal with it. No, I guess the only way we can plausibly do ourselves in is we do ourselves in. So consider this:

What if today’s global financial elite, that network of the super-wealthy and its bought henchmen, figured out that the worst predictions about Global Warming were actually coming true and that the only way left to halfway stop it was to drastically reduce the human population by 99%, right now. A managed collapse instead of impending global extinction, but managed of course according to the interests of those in power, The Rich. Yes, it’s pulpy and crass, but is it feasible?

Assume the Rich take preparations and unleash a genetically engineered swine-flu variant and actively attempts to drive the world into chaos and self-destruction. And once the dust settles, they round up the survivors and introduce a neo-primitivist tribal lifestyle, the people once again controlled through religion, working the land (organically) for their lords.

Reading is forbidden, books are to be burnt for fuel. Using old technology is forbidden, but there are few items left to be found anyway, and energy sources to work machines would be forbidden for fear of Global Warming and soon most people wouldn't even know what to do with those things anyway.

It’s back-to-the-roots fascism, like Ancient Rome, except run by evil capitalist holdouts from the present.

Would that work?
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Old 07-23-2012, 09:07 PM   #14
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Which could be an entertaining plot point: the locals think 'reading' means understanding mere paragraphs of meaning, while the PC's can actually read.
Uh. What's the difference?
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Assume the Rich take preparations and unleash a genetically engineered swine-flu variant and actively attempts to drive the world into chaos and self-destruction. And once the dust settles, they round up the survivors and introduce a neo-primitivist tribal lifestyle, the people once again controlled through religion, working the land (organically) for their lords.

Reading is forbidden, books are to be burnt for fuel. Using old technology is forbidden, but there are few items left to be found anyway, and energy sources to work machines would be forbidden for fear of Global Warming and soon most people wouldn't even know what to do with those things anyway.

It’s back-to-the-roots fascism, like Ancient Rome, except run by evil capitalist holdouts from the present.

Would that work?
Who is providing the muscle, and are these would-be neo-Roman nobles really willing to knock themselves down to the same level as everyone else?

So, first off there's the ludicrous plot. That's of course vanishingly unlikely to come together, let alone succeed, like all absurd super-villain plots. But suppose we handwave past that, and have the world fall.

Then there's the step where the 1% and their minions are trying to take control of the world and lock down the survivors for de-education, and secure the more obvious caches of old technology. This is pretty much hopeless, again. Even if they're using old-tech, they can't possibly have the numbers to round everyone up, worldwide. You'd have free enclaves recovering to higher technology levels, then likely coming back for blood. Maybe if you make the plague not 99% fatal, but 100% fatal unless the 1% give you antiserum, you could get everyone under their thumbs.

Then there's the part where you've got three groups in your society. There are the new-minted peasants. They know too much, but you're oppressing them and you've taken all their materials away so maybe they're controllable until generational time makes them ignorant. There are the new oligarchs, who know too much and are almost certainly not going to keep to the prohibitions, so don't count on them to forget...but they're on top of the world, so maybe they'll refrain from breaking it. And then there's the people who actually made it happen. The muscle, if nothing else, but also anyone else who managed to be deemed too valuable to turn into peasants. (The gunmen get that automatically, on account that they'll certainly shoot their bosses before they'll enslave themselves.) How do you control them, and their descendants?
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Old 07-23-2012, 09:12 PM   #15
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Uh. What's the difference?
Comprehension. Find a small child or a fairly uneducated person, and tell them to read a difficult passage. They can literally sound out the words, but good luck when you ask them what it means.

In addition, without the level of communication we have today, language will degenerate and you will get "old english" type comprehension problems.
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Old 07-23-2012, 09:35 PM   #16
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It takes hardly anything to teach someone to read. A few texts and someone who know what the letters sound like can teach someone to read pretty easily.
Particularly in a language with less complex and poorly adapated to its alphabet than English.

I'd also point out that the primary reason a lot of people learn to read is religious. If you are going to make reading at all rare, you absolutely must completely stamp out the religions of the book. Given that people cling to religions particularly hard in the wake of catastrophy, I don't see any plausible way you can do that and retain any pre-apocalypse knowledge at all.
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Old 07-23-2012, 10:00 PM   #17
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Kromm amongst others, argued that society would be unlikely to still be so far in regress such a long time after the extinction event. I’m hoping we could come up with conditions that would make this plausible.
It might be sufficient, for purposes of your campaign, for the near-total collapse you're looking for to be local. Perhaps knowledge of higher TL was retained better elsewhere, and is being exploited there, but local conditions are such that the fall was nigh absolute, and the recovery hasn't reached here yet.
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Old 07-23-2012, 10:48 PM   #18
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Comprehension. Find a small child or a fairly uneducated person, and tell them to read a difficult passage. They can literally sound out the words, but good luck when you ask them what it means.
You said mere paragraphs, not words.

Also, reading comprehension as distinct from just understanding the words...sure, but unlike literacy, I don't think that's really a thing that needs to be handed down.
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In addition, without the level of communication we have today, language will degenerate and you will get "old english" type comprehension problems.
Do you mean development of mutually non-intelligible dialects? That'll happen eventually if there's little enough contact, but probably not fast.
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Old 07-24-2012, 07:16 AM   #19
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...However, I think you'd be pretty likely to exterminate the species there. 70 milion 4-year-olds worldwide have to survive to adulthood on their own and then manage to form breeding populations?
4 years old are not totally uncapable. I think that, in an ambient with little natural hazards (like our western world), food supplied for years and years in the form of conserves (these children know what is a supermarket), building to shelter them from cold... A minor part of them can survive enough to become adult, learning to look after themselves.

This story is "luckily, somebody managed to survive". Even if there was the possibility (among every other) that they all died, this just didn't happened ;)
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Old 07-24-2012, 08:48 AM   #20
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This story is "luckily, somebody managed to survive". Even if there was the possibility (among every other) that they all died, this just didn't happened ;)
Along the same lines, a point I always make in these discussions is that if nobody in the setting knows exactly how it got that way, you as the setting designer don't have to put much thought into it either. The story is about this setting, not the fine details of its past. If you are going with this background "everybody old enough to read dropped dead, a few children luckily managed to survive to grow up" is all the work you need to do on it. Don't waste effort thinking about mechanisms for doing that or exact numbers or what the odds any particular child survives are, they don't matter you the story anyway.
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