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Old 03-21-2023, 11:04 AM   #2641
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Default Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

What TL would you say the people of Afghanistan are at? They've done fairly well against a TL8 society (the US).
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Old 03-21-2023, 12:51 PM   #2642
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What TL would you say the people of Afghanistan are at? They've done fairly well against a TL8 society (the US).
TL8 but broke. And besides that, there's a big difference between:
A) A protracted struggle against an unpopular government backed by a foreign power who are slowly bleeding political will.
B) An invasion of a rich and technologically advanced country.

All B does is give the foreign power more political will to throw around if things go to A or possibly:
C) An invasion by a rich and technologically advanced country who have decided to take lessons from the Roman Empire.
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Old 03-21-2023, 01:36 PM   #2643
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So how do you make what looks like a low-tech rural society going up against what looks like a high-tech urban society work?



Numbers. Make the "low-tech" society outnumber the "high-tech" society, and by a good margin.
Economic Threats. The big one here is food. Cities need countrysides to feed them. They also need raw resources. This can be a big lever to force the city to leave its defenses and centers of power.
Weapon Parity. You don't need this one to be perfect, but you do need the poor side to have crappy versions or desperate answers to what their foes have. If one side has automatic fire and the other doesn't, its hard to make the war work. This is pretty easy to justify in setting lore
Use Trappings: Perhaps the "high tech" people live in the ruins of high-rise apartment complexes, salvage smart phones, and use vehicles, but can't actually make any of these things, and scrape things together, while the "low-tech" people have a robust economy that lets them produce the stuff they DO use in large numbers.
Tone Down the Contrast: You have "factions" that look like urban high-tech vs. rural low tech, but there are big rural swaths under the control of the urbanites, and some of the cities are loyal to the rural side.
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Old 03-21-2023, 02:04 PM   #2644
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What TL would you say the people of Afghanistan are at? They've done fairly well against a TL8 society (the US).
Afghanistan was 7/8. They certainly weren't fighting with black powder muskets and pikes. While the United States had a technological advantage it wasn't 4 TLs of advantage and that technological advantage was balanced by the fact that the other side was:

fighting on the defensive,

in rough terrain that they knew well,

with outside technologically advanced support,

against an opponent that only had prestige on the line.

on the opposite side of the world.

At best the neobarbs will be able to hole up in chunks of the mountains, desert and deep jungle that nobody has much use for. The real threats the city states will have are each other as they compete for the resources they are desperately short on due to their lack of widescale infrastructure.
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Old 03-21-2023, 03:43 PM   #2645
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Both societies in the All the King's Horses and all the King's Men setting are poor. The technologically advanced city dwellers have certain technological advantages. They are building up and have practical plans on how to do so. But they don't seek a war. They are clever enough to know they don't need one.

Eric the Red had a solid list of threats that the Chieftains and theocrats can use against the cities. But the cities have their own cards in the game. One of the most powerful is thread. I know how to make bread from scratch. I'm certain many people on these boards can grow food. Can anyone here spin thread? Any weavers? Cloth, clothing, thread, needles, pins, and other sewing tools, are given as gifts and/or traded for goods.

The democratic cities have serious resource restrictions. But they have some advantages. First, they have fusion power generation. The breakthrough is recent and allowed a free use of the other two major advantages. Robotics and vertical agriculture. Energy, labor, and food security, these led to a Renaissance. The use of robot tunnelers has created a network of secure rail lines between the allied cities.

The Allied cities don't choose direct confrontation. They are mainly working on A) building themselves up, and B) luring away large numbers of the people of the chieftaincies and theocracies. The people that the allied cities lure in are generally exactly the kind of people the cities know they can use and the chieftaincies and theocracies need even more.

As to David's statement that the cities couldn't be open and egalitarian. If you are a citizen, these cities are open and egalitarian. But they are well aware that their situation is precarious. Noncitizens don't have the same freedom as citizens.
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Old 03-22-2023, 06:54 PM   #2646
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Both societies in the All the King's Horses and all the King's Men setting are poor. The technologically advanced city dwellers have certain technological advantages.

<snip>

As to David's statement that the cities couldn't be open and egalitarian ... Noncitizens don't have the same freedom as citizens.
This sounds feasible to me. Once the AtE winnowing has reduced population and associated growth rates down to the new agricultural carrying capacity, this is how things could progress.

Things could get interesting setting wise very quickly.
Noice.
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Old 03-25-2023, 01:20 PM   #2647
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By the Waters of Babylon

What did they exile you for?

I never really found out. I kinda suspect a coworker decided to get rid of me. But I had this one girlfriend who hated anyone she dumps that moves on with their lives.

So nothing political.

I never really had a chance to learn about politics.


This is a golden age Sci Fi setting. The State proclaimed you unmutual. For this you were exiled. The planet Cernunnos is a strange anomaly, it seems to have somehow been connected to Earth until the beginning of the Younger Dryas glaciation. Thus many recognizable Earth plants and animals exist on Cernunnos, including many extinct ones. It's presumed that the precursor species that space explorers have found traces of caused this. However, there is no certain information.

The exiles are sent to camps. These are basically minimum security prison camps with the main focus being survival through building a society. The guards are sometimes oficious and a bit bossy, but on the whole they don't much abuse their authority. They are more lazy/neglectful than anything else.

Basically, the PCs are exiles from a high tech authoritarian society. They have been sent to settle a primitive frontier, the conditions are deliberately primitive. Escape would require smuggling yourself aboard a spaceship and avoiding being caught for several years in a closed environment under intense levels of surveillance. It's known that the few who try are sent to worse places.

This is a primitive exploration game. The PCs would be exploring the forests (which have ice age fauna plus occasional random exotics). The PCs are looking for useful resources. Fertile land, supplies of timber and game, mineral deposits, and Precursor ruins, are all high on the list of desirable resources.
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Old 03-26-2023, 03:07 AM   #2648
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Default Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

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Originally Posted by Astromancer View Post
By the Waters of Babylon

What did they exile you for?

I never really found out. I kinda suspect a coworker decided to get rid of me. But I had this one girlfriend who hated anyone she dumps that move on with their lives.

So nothing political.

I never really had a chance to learn about politics.


This is a golden age Sci Fi setting. The State proclaimed you unmutual. For this you were exiled. The planet Cernunnos is a strange anomaly, it seems to have somehow been connected to Earth until the beginning of the Younger Dryas glaciation. Thus many recognizable Earth plants and animals exist on Cernunnos, including many extinct ones. It's presumed that the precursor species that space explorers have found traces of caused this. However, there is no certain information.

The exiles are sent to camps. These are basically minimum security prison camps with the main focus being survival through building a society. The guards are sometimes oficious and a bit bossy, but on the whole they don't much abuse their authority. They are more lazy/neglectful than anything else.

Basically, the PCs are exiles from a high tech authoritarian society. They have been sent to settle a primitive frontier, the conditions are deliberately primitive. Escape would require smuggling yourself aboard a spaceship and avoiding being caught for several years in a closed environment under intense levels of surveillance. It's known that the few who try are sent to worse places.

This is a primitive exploration game. The PCs would be exploring the forests (which have ice age fauna plus occasional random exotics). The PCs are looking for useful resources. Fertile land, supplies of timber and game, mineral deposits, and Precursor ruins, are all high on the list of desirable resources.
This vaguely reminds me of "The Beyond" by Jeff Sutton, where telepaths are exiled to a primitive planet to protect the sanctity of peoples' minds.

But something funny is going on the exile planet, so an investigator is sent...
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Old 03-26-2023, 06:47 PM   #2649
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. . . But the cities have their own cards in the game. One of the most powerful is thread. . . I'm certain many people on these boards can grow food. Can anyone here spin thread? Any weavers? Cloth, clothing, thread, needles, pins, and other sewing tools, are given as gifts and/or traded for goods.
I would agree that the cities can produce better quality thread & metal items such as needles. But technologically primitive society have been producing thread and needles for millennia. See the Wikipedia entries on "spinning whorl", "spinning wheel," and "drop spindle." Penelope's loom from the Odyssey was not in a city. I don't recall a city being on Odysseus' Ithaca. IIRC Neolithic sites have yielded bone needles to the archaeologist.

You may wind up with a technological divide in the back country, with the wealthy wearing clothes of fine even cloth stitched together with machine-made needles & high strength thread (and bright dyes), and the poorer folk in drab homespun.
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Old 03-27-2023, 01:17 AM   #2650
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I would agree that the cities can produce better quality thread & metal items such as needles. But technologically primitive society have been producing thread and needles for millennia. See the Wikipedia entries on "spinning whorl", "spinning wheel," and "drop spindle." Penelope's loom from the Odyssey was not in a city. I don't recall a city being on Odysseus' Ithaca. IIRC Neolithic sites have yielded bone needles to the archaeologist.

You may wind up with a technological divide in the back country, with the wealthy wearing clothes of fine even cloth stitched together with machine-made needles & high strength thread (and bright dyes), and the poorer folk in drab homespun.
Round here wool spinning and weaving seems to have been a cottage industry until well into the 19th century. Machine production seems to be much more efficient, hence why it stopped being done that way, but apparently it worked as far as it went. Apparently linen and similar were more demanding to do on a small scale but were still done - https://www.thoughtco.com/medieval-c...abrics-1788613 http://www.zetatalk.com/shelter/tshlt11k.htm (the latter seems to have actually been written with apocalypses in mind :-D ). I'm not sure that the argument that people wouldn't know how to do it holds up, as there seems to be plenty about this in books and museums (it seems to be a popular topic for "living history" stuff) and if this is a plague apocalypse it seems likely that not much of that would be destroyed - unless the Plague Wars were accompanied by other kinds of wars.

However, if the cities were producing cloth a lot more cheaply than the rural areas, it might not be economically worth it for the rural areas to keep producing any if it was cheaper to import it from the cities instead (this might have increased recently at the time the game is set, if the cities have recently acquired cheap power), and/or as Fred said the quality might be better. Unless the local leader tried to enforce local production/ban importing cloth in order to keep his kingdom independent of the cities... which might lead to a lot of smuggling.

The economies of scale for producing things like pins, needles and sewing thread seem to have been so great that those were among the things that otherwise-mainly-self-sufficient rural villages would buy from travelling pedlars even as early as Shakespeare's time, so that part sounds like a solid thing for the cities to trade in.

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What TL would you say the people of Afghanistan are at? They've done fairly well against a TL8 society (the US).
Quote:
Originally Posted by David Johnston2 View Post
Afghanistan was 7/8. They certainly weren't fighting with black powder muskets and pikes.
Well, so might the neo-barbarians be (although possibly less so since the cities are poor and there'll be less to spare) - calling them TL 4 or 5 might just be a rough guideline for what they can produce for themselves, with the possibility of some of them also having varying amounts of stuff from the cities. If the cities can have guns, so can they if they can afford or steal them, unless the cities are trying to keep those out of their hands - in which case, maybe you make like an 18th-century smuggler and hide the guns in the bales of cloth.

All this smuggling might be a possible adventure scenario, either as the forces of law and order or as the smugglers.
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