High TL 9 vs TL2+RPM

[dfinlay]

I'm brainstorming for a campaign where a high TL9 (the tech level is similar to what the alliance had in Firefly or to BSG minus FTL) fleet of generation ships invades a solar system with inhabitants at TL2 with RPM that had colonized the solar system centuries earlier with the use of magic, but interplanetary travel/communication would be difficult and rare for them. I'm curious for people with more RPM experience that I have to tell me their opinions as to how the war would be fought and who would win. Ideally, I would like the war to have been hard fought but for the TL9 people to have triumphed. What assumptions, for example, on proportions of skill levels would be needed to make this result plausible? Assume that the TL2 civilization outnumbered the TL9 around five to one (or more, if neccessary), a relatively even distribution of RPM paths and that some (maybe 5-10%) of the RPM mages would have Ritual Adept.

[Nereidalbel]

As soon as the mages find out how much damage lightning does to vehicles, bad things happen. Even worse things happen when they figure out how to use Greater Destroy Matter to foul fuel supplies and guns. They'll still lose when somebody decides to nuke the site from orbit, though.

[Wavefunction]

Originally Posted by Nereidalbel

As soon as the mages find out how much damage lightning does to vehicles, bad things happen. Even worse things happen when they figure out how to use Greater Destroy Matter to foul fuel supplies and guns. They'll still lose when somebody decides to nuke the site from orbit, though.

Hmm...

They'd obviously use scrying to determine what their enemy is capable of in a way that they can't block. If they can therefore realise the threat of nuking they may be able to set up defensive circles of mages who can cast Greater Destroy Matter to get rid of radioactive compounds in the missiles either before they hit, or while they're in the ships, they may even be able to start fission. That obviously depends on how long range they can work their magic.

[Andreas]

The possibility of getting energy from sacrifices means that very powerful spells would be available to them regardless of skill level. Something would be needed to prevent the mages from just using this to overwhelm the TL 9 force.

Perhaps the mages don't understand the enemy and the structure of their society is such that they can't effectively make use of the information they get from scrying (perhaps they don't trust each other for example).

Another possibility would be that they got a critical failure from one of their powerful spells, which caused massive damage to their own side. Or perhaps they are unwilling to use powerful spells due to the danger of critical failures even if it means defeat in the war.

[Wavefunction]

Originally Posted by Andreas

The possibility of getting energy from sacrifices means that very powerful spells would be available to them regardless of skill level. Something would be needed to prevent the mages from just using this to overwhelm the TL 9 force.

Perhaps the mages don't understand the enemy and the structure of their society is such that they can't effectively make use of the information they get from scrying (perhaps they don't trust each other for example).

Another possibility would be that they got a critical failure from one of their powerful spells, which caused massive damage to their own side. Or perhaps they are unwilling to use powerful spells due to the danger of critical failures even if it means defeat in the war.

Of course there's a pretty major risk involved with getting together a huge number of people for a sacrifice, that becomes a pretty major target for exploding.

[evileeyore]

In order for Greater Destroy to work the mages need either to understand how the machines work (not likely) or get a sample of what they to destroy (more likely for bullets/energy cells).


What I'd do is have it be be a quick blitz for the invaders, shock and awe all around (magic will be a big surprise to the invaders) followed by a terrible occupation. Even with magic I don't think they'd be able to match the edge high tech has... unless every other lowtechie was a Mage with time to prepare and the knowledge of what they were preparing for.

Now following the invasion there would be a strong nigh successful revolt (insurgent Mages now know what they are fighting) as magic could make for some extremely effective guerrilla action. The revolt is only ended when the invaders show they are willing to nuke cities. Probably at least one per planet.

[Andreas]

Originally Posted by Wavefunction

Of course there's a pretty major risk involved with getting together a huge number of people for a sacrifice, that becomes a pretty major target for exploding.

Sure, assuming that the invaders manage to set up enough presence in each planetary orbit to detect and destroy any large group of people before the mages know about them.

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Even with magic I don't think they'd be able to match the edge high tech has... unless every other lowtechie was a Mage with time to prepare and the knowledge of what they were preparing for.

Even a single mage with a large group of sacrifices could cause a lot of damage to the invaders. Some spell effect scale very well with the amount of invested energy.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Wavefunction

Of course there's a pretty major risk involved with getting together a huge number of people for a sacrifice, that becomes a pretty major target for exploding.

Design that expected attack into the sacrificial ritual; then the high-tech attackers become your helpers.

Is it possible for the high-tech civilization to detect magic? Or to learn it?

[starslayer]

Originally Posted by dfinlay

I'm brainstorming for a campaign where a high TL9 (the tech level is similar to what the alliance had in Firefly or to BSG minus FTL) fleet of generation ships invades a solar system with inhabitants at TL2 with RPM that had colonized the solar system centuries earlier with the use of magic, but interplanetary travel/communication would be difficult and rare for them. I'm curious for people with more RPM experience that I have to tell me their opinions as to how the war would be fought and who would win. Ideally, I would like the war to have been hard fought but for the TL9 people to have triumphed. What assumptions, for example, on proportions of skill levels would be needed to make this result plausible? Assume that the TL2 civilization outnumbered the TL9 around five to one (or more, if neccessary), a relatively even distribution of RPM paths and that some (maybe 5-10%) of the RPM mages would have Ritual Adept.

There are so many questions I have-
Why is an interstellar group bothering with conquest; with no FTL and no FTL coms they would have known that the place there were going was inhabited LONG before they got there, and should have steered away (doubly so when they could not identify any signatures of how those people travel interstellar distances, assumption should have been: They have technology way in excess of us, run).

Why is interplanetary communication difficult, or even travel for that matter: Once you have enough energy to open a doorway to another world making that doorway stay open for years is cheap. Interplanetary comms is a multi-century spell to make one seashell talk to another seashell- with no FTL this would be a radical advantage that the mage-world has over the tech world.

With sub-FTL drives being SO SLOW, why aren't they TL10 by the time they arrive

Proposed scenario and time-line

In any case, I am going to fill in my own details, and propose a timeline scenario where I think you will have the effect you wish to achieve.
The invaders are a violent and xenophobic offshoot of a generally more peaceful society that has moved to slowly expanding through space colonizing asteroids, building space stations, and slowly changing from being gravity well inhabiting bipeds to 4 armed zero gravity space people.

The invaders stayed in their planetary gravity well, the concept of vat grown food abhorrent, the liked to see and interact with the animals and plants that they killed and ate.

Unfortunately for them, their wasteful (compared to vat grown food, high orbit skyscraper living, etc) lifestyles were coming to an end as the space traveling, genetically modified, vat-food eating majority were going to turn their home planet into a nature preserve and forbid anyone from living on its surface full time.

They took some pretty experimental tech (full gravitation rotation, long distance, generational ships) and left for the nearest sun with a roughly equal gravity and solar cycle.

On route they would notice that it was inhabited- but by that point its too late, their experimental ships are degrading, their space farms have been slowly loosing biomass the entire trip, they won't be able to go anywhere else without giving up their belief- they can't even turn around and go home, since there is no home to go to- so they spend the remainder of the trip preparing themselves for conquest.

Meanwhile in mage land- scrys reveal something horrible coming, invaders from the stars. The many chiefs meet and discuss, and they decide that a great truce must be called to deal with the invaders- all agree except the outermost world.

Many lives are sacrificed to scry and understand the invaders.

When the invaders arrive it is an absolute slaughter, they are not even in weapons range before their people are going mad, attacking one another, none of their weapons work, luck itself has been perverted to the point that murphys law seems absolute. Losses were over 80% in mere days as the full might of prepared mages came raining down on the invaders.

Then the remaining generation ships became scrywalled, and scrywalled nukes hit major population centres on all worlds, all worlds save the outermost. With the prepared spells spent, major population centres in shambles, and the generation ships protected from all but the most powerful scrys they were able to slowly turn the tides literally bombarding anywhere people gathered until the scattered remains had no choice but to surrender.

In truth the outermost world had established parley with the invaders, and they have come to an agreement, details to be determined during the course of the game (was the outermost world just greedy, have the invaders been completely co-opted, now just puppets of the outermost, are they allies for some strange unified purpose?)

[dfinlay]

Originally Posted by ericthered

There are a couple of things you can toggle that really effect the outcome:

I know. That's part of what I'm asking you guys for help on: figuring out where I should put those things in order for my desired outcome to be plausible. I don't have enough RPM experience to figure it out. That said, some answers:

Originally Posted by ericthered

How abundant are mages? If you have one per 10 people, that's very different than one per 10,000. And it makes a huge difference in the relative strengths of the two sides.

This is one that I'm not super fixed on. That said, they should be reasonably common. I could really go anywhere from "Everyone has some level of magic, but many will have very low skill (11 or 12 in one path, say)" to "one in two hundred", but wouldn't want mages to be rarer than that.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Where do you fall along the sliding scale of stat normalization? This makes a huge difference, because it decides how good your mages are. if your average mage only has a highest path skill of 12 or 13, you have a lot weaker mages than if your average mage has a skill of 14 or 15, and the curve for RPM power really gets going at about 17 -- so where you put the end of your curve is really important too. Do skill 20 people exist? more than one of them? which paths?

What I'm planning for stat normalization for this campaign, in general: For attributes, before genetic engineering, drugs or weird defects (low IQ due to brain damage, for example), I usually go with roughly a +1 being a standard deviation: roughly 68% of the population has between 9 and 11, 95% between 8 and 12, 99.7% between 7 and 13. A 14 is about 1 in 30 000 and a 15 about 1 in 3 million. A 15 (or on very rare occasion a 16) is what I consider absolute human maximum and I usually require an unusual background for PCs with an attribute greater than 14. That said, drugs and genetic engineering can probably squeeze out a +1 or +2. For skills, I'm a bit more generous: I usually go with competent professionals having 12+, people who's skill is really notable having 16+ and top (or near top) in the world at a skill being 19+. I usually require PCs to have an Unusual Background for skills over 18 and 22 or so is about the highest I'd allow.

That said, I'd be perfectly fine with having magic use a different scale than this. If I need to say Path skills over 15 require UB and are extremely rare or if I need to have several people with Path skills of 25 to get the results I want, I can do that. In terms of which paths, I'd say that the distribution of paths is pretty even.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Related to that is how common are grimoires and places of power? are +5 places hard to find, or is there one in every province? can I round up 10 +10 grimoires of 'armageddon fire' for a magically oriented set of nukes?

So, I'd say places of power in the +1 to +3 range are relatively common, but there are maybe a few dozen +5 or higher places of power in the setting, with the most powerful being around a +8 or +9.

As for grimoires, what I do know is that when I set the campaign (about 50-70 years after the war), I want good grimoires to be rarified: say similar rarity to equivalent places of power above. That said, a lot of grimoires would have been destroyed in the war or afterwards (magic has been illegalized since) and so there could have been many more during the war.

Originally Posted by ericthered

How united are the low tech folks? It'd be a rare world where a single empire has conquered the entire world. When a small high tech group takes on a small low tech group, its best for the small group to initiate and hijack an internal dispute. At which point its tech and magic vs just magic. Or they can use divide and conquer.

Even on a given planet, they wouldn't be very united: there would definitely be local nations, wars and divisions. Different planets in the solar system would be quite disassociated, with powerful magic needed to move back and forth or even communicate. The invaders would definitely use divide and conquer style tactics against them.

Originally Posted by ericthered

I don't allow sacrificed in RPM. At least not in mass. RPM is generally an exponential system (and that which is not exponential is inefficient), while adding sacrificed energy from laymen is quite linear. It really does break things, and break them hard. And if a player figures out any linear way to get energy for RPM, I object. I do allow players to use an exponential scale to add energy though: the first input is at full strength, the next two at half, the next four at a quarter, and so on. Try the legion trick and you get 30 energy from 1023 people. That's just my house rule, but you don't have a classical magic-using society if you allow the legion of FP stunt -- someone already used it to cause a nuclear level holocaust.

My feeling was always that large scale sacrifice was hard. That's because iirc, anyone who doesn't fully have the interests of the ritual at heart screws it up pretty badly and sacrifice hurts. Trying to force people into giving sacrifice just won't work and any attempt to gather large groups to sacrifice without carefully vetting them leads to people ****ing up the ritual. If it is an issue in spite of this, I will probably do something similar to the scaling recommendations listed above. I've read RPM, but only run a game with it briefly, so I don't have a good sense of exactly what issues emerge in play.

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

If Magery is even genetic in the first place. The OP didn't specify.

The desired post-war setting might influence that choice. Is the original population gone? Still a few magic-wielding refugees? A subjugated remnant? Co-existence with the invaders, with varying possible degrees of hostility? In some of these, you might want magic to remain the exclusive province of the aborigines. In others, the invaders might take over magic along with everything else, or might need it to maintain their foothold.

It is possible for the high-tech invaders to learn magic, but they will be unlikely to have anyone very good at it before the end of the war, as magic takes a large amount of study. I've decided to go with Magic being purely learned (though, as with, say math, some people will have more of a knack for it), but Ritual Adept having a genetic component.

Originally Posted by starslayer

There are so many questions I have-
Why is an interstellar group bothering with conquest; with no FTL and no FTL coms they would have known that the place there were going was inhabited LONG before they got there, and should have steered away (doubly so when they could not identify any signatures of how those people travel interstellar distances, assumption should have been: They have technology way in excess of us, run).

Ah, sorry, maybe should have fleshed out the timeline a bit more. The short of it is that they were desperate. The long of it is below:

• An AI goes rogue (paperclip maximizer style) and humanity winds up in a desperate war that they cannot win.
• Eventually, desperate and losing against a vastly more intelligent foe, the survivors create another AI specifically to combat the first one and protect humanity. The ensure it will self-destruct on completion.
• Both AIs are completely destroyed, but the Solar System is as well. Due to the deployment of very heavy-duty weaponry (including nuclear), no planets are left inhabitable.
• The survivors build a fleet of generation ships and set out for a system with what appears to be multiple inhabited planets.
• Several generations pass and a proper social structure slowly re-emerges on the ship: top down, bureaucratic and authoritarian by the necessities of survival in space.
• After several generations, the ships finally notice the system they are heading towards is inhabited, not too long before arrival (bear in mind that there are no radio signals or similar for them to pick up on). Redirecting somewhere else isn't really an option for a couple of reasons: one being that they have enough fuel for the deceleration, not for a whole ton of redirection and another being that the people have been promised a new world and don't want to spend the rest of their lives in space.
• As a result, they decide to conquer the locals, who after all, don't have the trappings of a high-tech society.
• Due to magic, the war is harder and longer than expected and many die, but eventually, they seize control of the system and set up their authoritarian regime here.
• People now have a deep fear of magic, so mages are hunted down and grimoires are destroyed. Tests are supposed to be run on newborn babies people who test positive for the Ritual Adept gene are taken, brainwashed and recruited into the Mage Killer corps, the only legal mages, who use the Path of Magic to hunt down other mages and wear antimagic collars (a tech developed after the war) that are remotely controlled by their handlers.
• More than half a century later, hidden in the shadows and the farther corners of the System, renegade mages teach each other their secrets and try to keep their traditions alive, working with smugglers, pirates and rebels. This is when the campaign is set and I'm going for a bit of a Firefly feel.

I do like the suggestion of having them get scrywalls given to them by defectors, though. I might use that.