Colonising from space
 

In a campaign I'm hopefully running soon there's a prospect that the players may be involved in the colonising of another planet and I was hoping to get some ideas about how such a thing would play out. The party, and the colonisers are TL9 (8 in quite a few areas) humans, the planet is mostly earth like, with creatures and plants evolved from earth life. There are also indigionous humans, humans who consider TL1 advanced but they cover the best bits of habital land. What kind of issues could be occure with colonisation, both with contact with foriegn lifeforms and within the colonising power? how could they be played?

Re: Colonising from space
 

If both are humans,question arises how did TL1 humans got there?
Maybe world is already fully terraformed and adapted for humans.

Maybe it is : Looks like paradise but is hell

Maybe TL1 humans are actually only humanoid in appereance and whole biology of planet is toxic to newcommers.

Anyhow,1st few months(unless Space Opera setting) the would range all across planet in scafanders gathering and anlysing samples...even if they figure that there is no danger..some bacteria,microbe would slip by their tests and can make mess later on.

If world is fully habitable:
If they bring any pets,that could ruin whole ecological niche(Australia syndrome) since they wouldnt have natural predators or could be just dominant.

Also depends how equipped TL9 humans are for Fullblown colonisation effort,from equipment to colonist numbers.

But nothing is stopping them to claim best land for themselves in some moderate climate area.Primitives could be induced to worship them as Gods(von Daniken as inspiration) or could be used as slaves(Conquistadors for inspiration)...coulkd just genocide them...or they could start guerilla warfare(being xenophobic and warlike society)

Re: Colonising from space
 

It looks a lot like the colonization of the Americas: high-tech settlers, low-tech indigenous peoples, and far from home. It would probably play out similarly, although you could have people thinking about what they think should not have been done that time and intentionally doing otherwise, but that would tend to lead to not colonizing the planet in the first place at one extreme, and force-teaching the indigenous peoples TL-8/9 science on the other, with abducting the indigenous peoples onto reservations in between.

Re: Colonising from space
 

....as one wise man said.

Re: Colonising from space
 

IRL, when an advanced race of colonists bumps up against a neolithic culture, the neolithic culture ceases to exist within a couple of generations. Even Ben Franklin noticed this, observing once that native tribes he had known in his youth had gone extinct by the time his children were grown - not because of persecution, but from poverty and drunkenness. Similar phenomena have been noticed in Australia and Brazil, where indigenous people only have a culture because they had a wilderness to fall back into for safety.

You land a colonizing group on a primitive world, the ones who interact the most will die of despair or become assimilated. The native cultures will survive only in the hearts of those who run away. And as the high-tech colony expands, the native cultures will have to run further and further, and in the process they will become more and more hostile. First Contact upon Landing will be friendly, but the Colonists' grandkids will be fighting off guerrilla insurgents. And their grandkids will be feeling guilty over the plight of Indigenous Peoples on reservations.

Re: Colonising from space
 

Be neat if the indiginous peoples were actually a higher tech but didn't show it. Having very advanced bio-tech and able to turn the tables on the colonists. Hook them on a debilitating drug for instance.

Re: Colonising from space
 

If the setting is realistic, they also wouldn't have any natural food sources. They will be competing with native species primarily for space, since those native species will probably be inedible.

Re: Colonising from space
 

That didn't seem to happen in Africa. On the whole contact with foriegn dieseases is what killed a great many natives, not that I'm impuning a malice of colonial powers, simply noting that a great many more people died where immunity to colonial disease wasn't present. It might be interesting for the purposes of a campaign to have the roles reversed, with the native huamsn having unecountered dieases that the colonisers had not encountered before. Though that does raise questions of how the colonisers would respond, or the diversity of responces. One of the things I was hoping to play up should colonisation occure is the political conflicts that would occure if a nation of essencially modern sensibilities were involved in colonising a planet.

Re: Colonising from space
 

Odd. European diseases ravaged the Americas, while in Africa, Europeans died like flies from malaria (and other stuff) while for the most part the African natives simply ignored anything the Euro's imported in (disease-wise).

Hell, the African coasts were notorious for killing off about 90% of Europeans up until the invention of the malaria vaccine, IIRC.

Re: Colonising from space
 

There was at least limited and indirect contact between sub-Saharan Africa and Europe for a very long time. Disease propagation was largely one way in a lot of cases, as tropical diseases find it harder to survive a European winter than the other way around.

What I'm trying to figure out is why American diseases weren't killing Conquistadors as quick as European diseases were killing the Aztecs. Perhaps the lower populations had never created an environment for a runaway arms race.