High TL 9 vs TL2+RPM

[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.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by dfinlay

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.

As far as I can find, RPM has no rules for nearby individuals actively screwing up a ritual - the closest thing is that the GM can have each point of energy given by a semi-willing participant (as in "Willingly sacrifice HP/FP for this spell or we'll get the power by shoving this dagger through your daughter's heart") come with a Quirk. Note I suggested using a group of 1,000 elite soldiers with High Pain Tolerance, Fit, and appropriate Sense of Duty - it would presumably be a volunteer legion made up of some of the better soldiers you have. I'd expect a large TL2 polity to be able to manage that (I've little doubt Rome could have pulled it off).
Of course, nothing says that's the way it has to work in your setting, or that leadership had the foresight to set up such a legion.

[dfinlay]

Originally Posted by starslayer

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.

Huh, that's an interesting point. I had had the thought that the spells over that distance would be difficult, but that's true, gates can be opened long-term. Didn't think about that. I'm thinking I'll probably still impose STL restrictions on magic, though, not that it matters all that much in a one system campaign.

Originally Posted by starslayer

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

A result of comparatively low numbers and a very hidebound society that doesn't like to experiment (too dangerous in a generation ship to mess around with much). Combine that with intense fear of artifical intelligence.

Originally Posted by starslayer

Proposed scenario and time-line

Much of the early part of this is incompatible with my timeline and campaign premise, above, but I'll comment on the rest.

Originally Posted by starslayer

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.

Pretty much, though for different reasons. They were rushed into building generation ships, much of their technical material is lost, they have nowhere to turn around to and no excess of fuel. Plus, there's the morale factor: the people alive at time of arrival had been promised that they would be the ones to colonize.

Originally Posted by starslayer

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.

Hmm...I was thinking of them as being divided at the start of the war, but a great alliance might work.

Originally Posted by starslayer

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.

I do like this, since it leads into the fear of magic that I want in the setting. That said, losses shouldn't be that high as I want enough survivors from the invaders to at least form a good chunk of the upper and middle classes.

Originally Posted by starslayer

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?)

I do like the idea of a group of defectors, maybe exempted from the bans on magic, helping set up some protections for the invaders...hmm...

[starslayer]

One of the major things you need to address if your not going for a scenario like my own (IE- their reasons for needing a planet are entirely self-imposed) is why they are bothering with a populated system.

The concept that their home system is an absolute mess is a perfectly good reason to go out, but why bother making landfall ever again, genetic engineering can get rid of those pesky legs and replace them with another set of useful arms, beef up bone structures, and restore the damages from the rigors of space travel (which they'd need to do to have generational ships anyway); and asteroids would be a better source of raw materials than a planet.

A planet(s) that has life would actually be a detriment to colonization, because now there are factors that you aren't prepared for (IE that that life is likely incompatible with your own, and even if compatible you are not going to have resistance for the local diseases, which resources and time are going to have to be spent immunizing the colonists against). It's far easier to colonize the vastness of space and extract your required materials from abundant asteroids then deal with silly (and expensive to escape) gravity wells.

'lack of fuel' is generally confusing as well- what possible fuel could a culture advanced enough to build generational ships need that can't be extracted and refined on their generational ships from stellar dust clouds and the limitless electricity that comes form solar extraction and atomic reactors. Even our TL-8 society today uses predominantly hydrogen derived rocket fuels with the exception of booster rockets, which are really only needed if you are going to be leaving gravity wells. Generational ships are going to want something super high-efficiency like ion drives (which already exist at TL8), and are really reaction-mass ignorant (IE the mass itself could just be water- the big important factor is electricity to drive the mass)- hence I went with their 'need' to be on a planet (or even being near a star for that matter) being entirely self-imposed.

If you can build generational ships and are late TL9 you can do just fine (and arguably do better) with nothing more than raw materials, which will be easier to access from completely unpopulated asteroids. If they don't have the technology for extraction from asteroids, then they don't have the technology for extraction on planets- if they don't have the space (IE all the extraction tech is in the storage bays) then they could easier build a dome on an asteroid to run the technology then try to safely get it planet-side and set up there. If they don't have the tech to build some domes to start extraction- how were they going to do it on what were presumably hostile planets without atmosphere and life? Or even better how ARE they going to do it for planets that likely have INCOMPATIBLE atmosphere and life.

Basically for advanced societies- once you can get off planet long term, there's not too many reasons (at least non self-imposed reasons) to NEED to go back, and you'd have to be downright evil to put those self-imposed reasons above the value of an indigenous also space faring society.

When I mention experimental technology breaking down- I literally mean experimental technology that is not needed in space (IE maintaining actual farms in a traditional sense rather than say, solar grown seaweed farms that then get broken down in to requisite materials and 3d printed into a variety of dishes); it is pretty conceivable that right now in TL8 we could (if cost were no issue) put a permanent self-sufficient colony on the moon or mars (it would be risky because we have not experimented with it, but a generational ship HAS experimented with it, and perfected it, by nature of being a generational ship).

Again without selfish, and downright evil, reasons motivating them, it would seem strange to me that the majority of those on the generational ships even WANT to make planetfall for any reason more then raw exploration (which would encourage interaction rather than conquest); while I am sure that most people on the ships would want more space, and their may be real reasons why they want to get closer to another sun (more solar power so that they can take reactors offline- that can be achieved by space stations and asteroid/moon colonies.

So I think you need to spend some time really pondering the 'why bother with the inhabited worlds, and why not just view the habited world as a 'pit stop', or why not just colonize the planetoids that the mage society won't touch (due to toxic or no atmosphere)

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Personally, I assume the system is scaled for a typical adventuring party (4-6 people), and do it in multiples of 5. My own diminishing returns also aren't as harsh - each time the amount of energy per person is cut in half, the number of people who can be involved at that step doubles (so each step can contribute equal amounts of energy). In this case, that would mean 15 energy for the first 5 guys, 15 for the next 10, 15 for the next 20, and so forth (although I follow SSR, so doubling 20 results in 50, not 40). 1000 would be 5+10+20+50+100+200+500+115 people, or 15+15+15+15+15+15+15+(115*15/1000=1.75), or 106.75 (107 if I'm feeling generous). A hefty spell, but nothing like the 3,000 energy noted upthread.

That may be a better scaling rate, I have to admit. Thanks for sharing.

Originally Posted by starslayer

One of the major things you need to address if your not going for a scenario like my own (IE- their reasons for needing a planet are entirely self-imposed) is why they are bothering with a populated system.

So I think you need to spend some time really pondering the 'why bother with the inhabited worlds, and why not just view the habited world as a 'pit stop', or why not just colonize the planetoids that the mage society won't touch (due to toxic or no atmosphere)

The word 'generation ship' is being throw around: I'm not so sure that its an applicable term. Generation ships are generally self sustaining, but the description of these ships matches a long range colony ship, not a generation ship. They didn't have the resources to send only their self-sustaining elements, and probably can't keep up their full tech base.

[Angle]

When I use magic dependent societies, I like to use the alternate TL advancement rules. so for example, if you have a group of people that only use mundane technologies up to TL 2, but use boatloads of magic in order to
*Support a post scarcity society
*Cure any and all diseases
*Teleport intergalactic distances
*etc, etc, etc.

Then they're more or less TL 12. Thus, they come in at TL 2 +10.

As for the war, it would depend largely on how "Organizationally Advanced" the magic people are. If they're basically organized into tribes that can't support much in the way of population & specialization (there aren't many of them & more or less everyone has to spend a bunch of time gathering they're own food) then they're probably screwed. Alternatively, if they organize into cities of millions and support a diverse class of specialists, they'd have much more of a chance. Also how centralized are they? If every tribe is independent they probably won't even be able to put up any resistance. The invaders will be able to just chew through them one at a time, even occasionally allying with a rival tribe if necessary.

You should probably consult the records of colonial Africa and India in order to get an idea of how this will probably go. Just give the defenders better capabilities.

[starslayer]

Originally Posted by Angle

When I use magic dependent societies, I like to use the alternate TL advancement rules. so for example, if you have a group of people that only use mundane technologies up to TL 2, but use boatloads of magic in order to
*Support a post scarcity society
*Cure any and all diseases
*Teleport intergalactic distances
*etc, etc, etc.

Then they're more or less TL 12. Thus, they come in at TL 2 +10.

As for the war, it would depend largely on how "Organizationally Advanced" the magic people are. If they're basically organized into tribes that can't support much in the way of population & specialization (there aren't many of them & more or less everyone has to spend a bunch of time gathering they're own food) then they're probably screwed. Alternatively, if they organize into cities of millions and support a diverse class of specialists, they'd have much more of a chance. Also how centralized are they? If every tribe is independent they probably won't even be able to put up any resistance. The invaders will be able to just chew through them one at a time, even occasionally allying with a rival tribe if necessary.

You should probably consult the records of colonial Africa and India in order to get an idea of how this will probably go. Just give the defenders better capabilities.

Except that as posted the mage colony is societally advanced enough to have achieved interplanetary travel and colonization- they (or at least those trained in interstellar travel) understand the concepts of interstellar distance, and while ships that can travel that might be confusing it won't be a completely incomprehensible problem (whereas magic abilities will be incomprehensible to the invaders); which means their mages are able to access enough energy to span interplanetary distances and terraform worlds- I imagine this being some sort of gruesome sacrificial magic (so as not to make the mage world too utopian), and as a result their inter-tribe conflicts are particularly brutal- IE- the point of conflict is not to displace your enemy from their land, but to capture their people to fuel your own mages making new land available- Long term this means that the various tribes REALLY don't like one another and are very fragmented, but with no magical defenders an attacker, even one at interplanetary distances, is pretty much screwed. Most of the benifit of their high technology will never come into play- they will be struck down by destroy luck and control mind effects (if no one comes to their aid).


I have further problem with your proposed conquest though:
Somehow the invaders have enough technology on hand to subjugate MULTIPLE worlds, capture and exterminate ALL the mages (except perhaps a sole traitor tribe), figure out how magic works and develop countermeasures and establish themselves as the ruling body across an entire planetary system- but they fear AI, aren't prone to research, are hidebound, and don't have the tech to even keep their ships in operational order?

Once again, this is surmountable, but it involves making the invaders evil (and I mean that in the most genuine sense of the word- in that they are putting their own petty belief system above the rights and lives of an entire indigenous people; full on space Nazis ).

[Angle]

I think it was implied that the mage people had regressed from their space-crossing world-terraforming days. How that happened, I have no idea. Maybe all of that took place under the rule of one king taking advantage of a super high magic astrological event, and when that ended his empire collapsed?

As for magic being used to hold the invaders off, remember that they need to raise the energy to target the invaders, which is pretty expensive. With low populations, mass sacrifices can only get you so far, especially as you can only sacrifice one person per ritual by RAW. And even more so when you consider the fact that your people probably aren't willing to make that many sacrifices.

[SRoach]

Originally Posted by ericthered

That may be a better scaling rate, I have to admit. Thanks for sharing.



The word 'generation ship' is being throw around: I'm not so sure that its an applicable term. Generation ships are generally self sustaining, but the description of these ships matches a long range colony ship, not a generation ship. They didn't have the resources to send only their self-sustaining elements, and probably can't keep up their full tech base.

How about putting the ship on autopilot? Put the well-dwelling colonists into hibernation, and thaw them out on approach. Now, you have colonists who remember living on a planet and want to live on another one, and because the autopilot can't make such complex executive decisions, don't know about the "natives" until they're already on approach.

Take a page from Honor Harrington. Maybe the TL9 ones are on a slowship, and they were beaten to their dutifully registered destination by claim-jumpers, who have now managed to get three or four generations in on "their" planet, or even in the ground on "their" planet, if you want to make the slowship journey long enough. Possibly, they were given a ride to a new world, again per HH, and the Graysons, or the ST:TNG episode, "Up The Long Ladder", by smugglers, to a place where they could get away from Demon Technology, (the magic was an unexpected bonus.)

Naturally, the squatters are not going to be welcoming to these long-heralded new arrivals, and will want to take them out of the sky before they can land with their Demon Supertech.