View Single Post
Old 02-04-2023, 05:18 AM   #2624
Astromancer
 
Astromancer's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
Default Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

Quote:
Originally Posted by Inky View Post
Seems like there'd be a more straightforward reason why other cultures might fear and hate them - they'd be in pole position to rule the world, should they want to.
The simple power imbalance is enough. Nations have gone to war simply because they thought a neighbor might become to powerful.

Quote:
It might be both, of course, in countries that are dictatorships (and/or just run drastically differently from the USA in any other way, good, bad or neutral, that their population might get it into their heads was to blame for them being poorer than the USA).
France, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries had a traditional anti American stance based on fear of cultural contamination from America. Even when we were allies. Having any nation, even a mainly friendly one, be overwhelmingly powerful breeds resentment. The illusion/delusion that a nation is a potential threat also disrupts.

Quote:
Especially since dictators that don't want their population siding with the USA might tell them that the USA wants to conquer their country, even if it actually doesn't. PCs might discover that the locals had some very weird and alarming ideas about them and what they were supposedly up to!
From what I've read about contemporary Islamic societies, this is pretty much what's going on. The Soviet Union followed a similar playbook.

Quote:
It seems more likely that, rather than being literally TL6 or whatever in terms of technical knowledge, the Tech Levels stated would just be the highest Tech Level of stuff that they have the infrastructure and resources to make. Information seems to be hard to get rid of (although it might depend how long after the disaster this is supposed to be, and if they fell low enough that printed matter was hard to come by that might make a big difference).
Economic reasons dominate that. The old infrastructure has deteriorated. The vital trade networks are gone. The educational systems are in chaos or collapse. And food and agriculture are messed up bad.
There are pockets of the old technology. Example: rulers do their best to maintain at least one good hospital for themselves and their close allies.

Quote:
On the other hand, it seems like sometimes societies just seem to lose sight of, or actively turn their backs on, a scientifically established fact for some reason - like how some sections of the American far right currently seem to be being about quite a lot of things. If that happened to one of these countries, it might happen that one generation don't believe a thing, and therefore don't teach it to their children, and the next generation don't even know it.
(For instance, they might think that some branch of technology was to blame for part of their current troubles, or that it had promised to solve them and had failed. Doesn't have to be true, so long as it's hard enough to falsify that they might plausibly think it was).
Some would think that way. For others, lacking the resources to restore technology, it might be "sour grapes."

Quote:
If a GM wanted a scientific fable, that could be magnified into a country that, for better or worse or some combination of those things, had lost the idea of computers, or the germ theory - or writing!
There's still the question of why they wouldn't have any written records of how to do this stuff. But one plausible excuse for that might be that by the time of the disaster it was mostly digital media, which had since been re-used and/or stopped working, rather than printed books. Another might be that during the disaster they'd been short of fuel, and since nobody liked those books anyway...
Having the records/information isn't the same as having the resources. The North American continent is uniquely rich in a balanced set of resources. The American people often get ahead simply because they are less hindered in their actions.

Quote:
The title seems oddly glum compared to the premise? It seems like the "reactionary societies" are being cast as the bad guys but also compared to the "darling buds of May". Or is it the USA's ideas of rebuilding the world that are going to be shaken, on contact with their neighbours? :-D
Thank you. I try to make all my titles ambiguous in that way. A touch of irony.

The Americans want a Renaissance for the world. They aren't thinking about how that would be defined or received elsewhere. Because the American nation is undergoing a Renaissance they are positive about themselves and their future.

Historically, change brought from outside, even the most beneficial and welcomed changes, come with consequences. Those are the top of a social structure of any kind, rarely see big changes as a good thing. And most of the world's cultures associate the Renaissance with the Age of Exploration and the Colonial Empires that followed it. Even if the USA in this world is a perfect rose of virtue, many others would have strong motivations to rip it apart.
__________________
Per Ardua Per Astra!


Ancora Imparo
Astromancer is offline   Reply With Quote