Quote:
Originally Posted by Sindri
So duelling is cool and an integral part of SF societies that steal from historical periods. That said how does an ultra-tech setting influence duelling? What kind of plausible variations from historical codes duello can there be? How does duelling work in your settings ultra-tech or otherwise?
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The Orion Space Horde was a high tech society in several of my games where the descendants of afluent nerds and geeks had colonized a distant system and set up a society based on a society-wide LARP where they all pretended to be Klingon-like Space Barbarians more or less 24/7.
<shrug> Makes more sense than sitting in front of your nano-hookah all day while cyber-jazz gets beamed directly to your frontal lobes.
So, while the populace is carefully genetically engineered for physcial and mental health with attempts at enhanced creativity they are also all large muscular people who at least _pretend_ to be short-tempered, violent and obsessively concerned with Honor with a capitol "H".
All adult members of the Horde normally carry an Honor Dagger which is symbolic of their personal Honor. Deeply personal disputes should in theory be settled with an Honor Duel using these. Knife Art, Knife Sport or even in very rare cases just Knife could be used in these by the mutual but unspoken choice of the participants.
Hordesmen also usually carry a Blade of Position whose length reflects their rank in society. No one in the horde carries a longer sword than Vercingetorix Patton, Lord of all the Clans and Chairman of the Horde.
Yeah, it's Freudian. They're in on the joke.
So the Chairman has a very large Greatsword and Junior Apprentices of Fire and Steel (your basic techie) get a Long Knife with appropriate scaling between them. Most disputes in Horde life will e settled by Art or Sport matches with the appropriate Blades of Position.
Fatality should be extremely rare and a great deal of this is just for show, hence the Art or Sport versions of the Weapon Skills. Since the Horde is TL10^+ and has nanotech Reattachers (Bio-tech p.133), "disarming" is a not-infrequent way of ending a duel.
If you wonder, the Horde also favors Extreme Sports in general. The play Battletech with real 'Mechs and are working on the real dragons for their D&D games.
Positions involved in politics and the equivalent of law enforcement in the Horde tend to actually be held by professional duellists with bio-tech enhancements whose mundane work is carried out by more techncially qualified assistants.
Since the Horde has few things that are illegal except financial crimes (and no _actual_ psychotics) the equivalrnt of their Chief Law Enforcement Officer is actually Tamarlaine Barbarosa whose exults in the title of Uitimate Defender of the Accounts Recievable and Primary Warlord of Clan Snarling Warthog.
He's not actually a bad accountant. The Horde favors Math and Business Talents but his primary Skill set involves use of melee weapons and other forms of combat. A would-be embezzler can dispute his arrest with Trial By Combat but the system tries to make sure he's not going to win.
A conviction (but still a suirvival) on serious charges usually leads to The Death of Honor where it's actually the person's _persona_ that dies and the offender gets a new name in a distant place with a crap job for what amounts to a very long and heavily supervised probation.
Leaving the Horde is normally an alternative but the person leaving will normally be given (involuntary) cosmetic surgery so that they no longer _look_ like a Hordesman,.