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Old 11-26-2022, 04:14 PM   #2571
seasalt
 
Join Date: May 2022
Default Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer View Post
Closed Gates

Why are you crying.

They changed the rules.

Which rules?

They can send people back to wait in their own lands. The Europeans say the working classes feel dispossessed in their own lands. And they're saying the new American immigration rules are as bad as the 1920s.

The rich made the poor pay for immigration in order to make the poor hate immigrants.

But we can't stay here, the famine is worse and the drought won't go away.

I don't know where to go.


This is a cyberpunk game set in a realistic (or at least nonspectacular) version of 2050. The advanced countries (technologically and possessing democracies) aren't doing badly. However, non-democratic nations are in chaos. The Indian Ocean monsoon system has stopped. This means multi century droughts in some areas. (No this is highly realistic).

Social cohesion in the democracies is at an all time low. The kind of sacrifice needed to save billions requires moral authority. As no one is allowed moral authority, nothing will be done.

Basically, this is a hell world, but a very realistic one. Mercenaries, smugglers of people or goods, are solid choices. Aid workers would be adventures in this setting.

(Some people said my settings were too optimistic)
I think I know how to make it darker, and to look ahead to the world we seem to be on the path towards!

Consider the advances in micro-manufacturing and user-friendliness. All of a sudden, a single cargo ship full of equipment, a few trained experts and advisors, and some scavenged raw materials can turn a desperate rabble into an armed military force within a few months. It may very well be that the confluence of technologies at this point will make it easier to arm people en-masse, than to feed or provide for them en-masse.

I think it's equally likely that these starving, uneducated, dispossessed masses facing extinction from climate change and the collapse of their corrupt, ineffectual governments will be armed, and looking for quick, violent solutions to their problem, especially with the seductive narrative that all their problems are the fault of the rich nations.

Of course, all these disparate dispossessed groups somehow welding themselves into a coalition capable of taking on the global superpowers is unlikely, but not impossible - which means that those great powers will be devoting their efforts to playing the armies of angry young third-world revolutionaries, springing up throughout Africa and Southeast Asia like the mythologicald dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus, off against one another.

Basically, a WW3 that would (will?) make the previous world wars look small in comparison. At the risk of exaggerating, some might look at the state of the world today and say that the opening shots of this conflict have already been fired.
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