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Old 01-19-2022, 07:13 AM   #21
The Colonel
 
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Default Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
That's always a workable option (although I'd argue for "proud soldier race"), but doesn't immediately lend itself to a crisis that would cause us to start seeking out allies. Perhaps one of our mercenary misadventures really ticked off one of the galactic powers, and now we need to try to find allies? The allies would necessarily be for actually fighting for us, but rather to hold the enemy in check due to threat of violence (basically "If you invade Earth, we'll all declare war on you to protect our allies").
In that scenario, allies might be more like "people prepared to put us on their approved contractors list".
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Old 01-19-2022, 08:43 AM   #22
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Default Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st

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Of course, turning that on its head can also be interesting. I read a short story some time back wherein it turned out that every species that had evolved intelligence and went to the stars were obligate carnivores... except for humans. Every other space-faring species is bigger and meaner, and we all smell like prey to them. That story was basically about a single human in a "fish out of water" scenario, on a space station and having to rely on the one alien there who wasn't interested in eating him/her (I don't think a gender was given, they were just "the human"). I always thought it would be interesting to explore such a setting, but with an organized group of humans rather than a single one well out of their depth - after all, all the "meaner" aliens may find it an unpleasant surprise to discover that part of what allowed humans to become top dog was largely us wiping out anything that had the nerve to eat us.
Throw in shades of the Kzinti War: we hate warfare not because we are bad at it, but because we are so terrifyingly good at it. One element I have used a couple of times is the aggressive alien empire that simply isn't prepared to face a species willing to turn its entire economy into a weapon of war. The Battle of Grover's Mill simply awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.
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Old 01-19-2022, 10:33 AM   #23
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Default Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st

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Throw in shades of the Kzinti War: we hate warfare not because we are bad at it, but because we are so terrifyingly good at it. One element I have used a couple of times is the aggressive alien empire that simply isn't prepared to face a species willing to turn its entire economy into a weapon of war. The Battle of Grover's Mill simply awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.
That would go with the "proud soldier race" over the proud warrior one - a species, or community, that never developed (or has forgotten) the concept of total war could certainly be justified in being intimidated by one that uses it routinely.

Actually, apologies for coughing Babylon 5 up again, but I seem to recall that that was a meme in there as well - the Minbari, whilst possessing a high degree of technological superiority which made winning the space war just an matter of time for them, struggled a lot more on the ground due to ideological issues - specifically, they were used to warfare being the preserve of a warrior caste, who could be eliminated and then the non-combatant castes could be more or less safely ignored. The ability of humans to simply "fight some more forever" was hard for them to comprehend. Also, I suspect, until you deploy battlesuit infantry, technology makes a lot less difference in man-on-man combat.
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Old 01-19-2022, 10:51 AM   #24
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Default Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st

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Maybe we could go with the trope that humanity is unusually aggressive for a species and turns out to be in high demand for dealing with other people's issues - we are the "proud warrior race" in this setting.
Alan Dean Foster milked that idea, a fair amount -- although, his aliens usually considered humanity's talent for destruction as a species-wide mental illness.

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Throw in shades of the Kzinti War: we hate warfare not because we are bad at it, but because we are so terrifyingly good at it. One element I have used a couple of times is the aggressive alien empire that simply isn't prepared to face a species willing to turn its entire economy into a weapon of war. The Battle of Grover's Mill simply awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.
I like this a lot, actually.

Make the carnivore aliens really terrifying, individually, but (as with many predators) reflexively territorial. That would make it difficult for them to organize for any endeavor that requires anything larger than an extended clan and its longtime allies or subordinates -- say, a few tens of thousands, even when things are desperate.

Scary up front, and never less than deadly at company-level infantry or marine engagements, with heavily armed vehicles with advanced weapons because they point them at each other, all the time.

On the other side, the slightly-backward, peace-loving, highly-social, harmless-looking primates of Terra, who have studied war so thoroughly and so deeply, they call it a martial art.
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Old 01-19-2022, 11:42 AM   #25
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Default Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st

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I like this a lot, actually.

Make the carnivore aliens really terrifying, individually, but (as with many predators) reflexively territorial. That would make it difficult for them to organize for any endeavor that requires anything larger than an extended clan and its longtime allies or subordinates -- say, a few tens of thousands, even when things are desperate.
So how'd they get into space?
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Old 01-19-2022, 12:09 PM   #26
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Default Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st

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So how'd they get into space?
Slowly.

More seriously, unless there's One Weird Trick to get into space without a massive expenditure of resources (which, to be fair, in a Star Trek inspired setting may well be the case), only being able to function in terms of tens of thousands is a serious problem for getting into space (while NASA only had around 30,000 "total personel" when they landed a man on the moon, they had around 200,000 "contract employees" - source). You could have discussions about how humans somehow made it into space while still such a young species - but my own inclination would be the One Weird Trick option, with humans just discovering it rather late in their development ("Wait, wait, wait. You're saying you first sent people to your moon by... putting them on top of a freaking chemical rocket? How have you people not blown yourselves up already?").
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Old 01-19-2022, 12:12 PM   #27
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Default Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st

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So how'd they get into space?
Yeah, that's a problem.
Hmm. Maybe borrow ideas from C.J. Cherryh's species, the Kif, in the Chanur novels?

They were a race of dedicated carnivores who had very rigid hierarchies based on perceived strength. If a warlord emerged capable of building a coalition strong enough, then other oligarchs either knelt or died. Essentially, the strong master/willing slave structure was underpinned by biological imperatives in the Kif brain.

Once the hierarchy was established, though, any particular Kif society remained peaceful and prosperous for its duration.

However, should the archon start to weaken, it would set off a brutal power-struggle. This could offer opportunities for external aggression, and sometimes one warlord would absorb an entire other "nation," decapitate its ruling class (often literally) and assimilate the subordinates.

So, under someone perceived as a, "strong leader," peace and prosperity could last decades.

Moreover, the Kif were intelligent enough to recognize the benefits of stability, so while power-struggles were brutally violent, they ended quickly. When one side clearly gained the upper hand, the surdinates of the others turned on their own leaders, slaughtered them mercilessly (mercy was not something any member of the Kif race could even recognize...), and then knelt.
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Old 01-19-2022, 01:31 PM   #28
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Default Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st

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You could have discussions about how humans somehow made it into space while still such a young species - but my own inclination would be the One Weird Trick option, with humans just discovering it rather late in their development ("Wait, wait, wait. You're saying you first sent people to your moon by... putting them on top of a freaking chemical rocket? How have you people not blown yourselves up already?").
Wasnīt there some SciFi novels written in which aliens visited earth inspaceships with FTL and antigravity, while still using muskets or such? We had just canceled out that antigravity could work and therefore developped a completely different tech branch.

That would be some weird trick, because everybody knew it was impossible we just didnīt try and ruined the academic career of the few who said itīs possible.

Getting a aggressive predator race into space which is also used to live together in family bands at most, is tricky. In one novel of AsimovsīRobot City? there was a dominant race in their home system were 3 other intelligent races, which were conquered an subjugated by the top race. The ship the characters met is staffed with a lot of the other races and only 1! member of the top race.
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Old 01-19-2022, 01:43 PM   #29
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Default Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st

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Wasnīt there some SciFi novels written in which aliens visited earth inspaceships with FTL and antigravity, while still using muskets or such? We had just canceled out that antigravity could work and therefore developped a completely different tech branch.
Yeah, that's one I've heard of, but never read (it appears to be The Road Not Taken, by Harry Turtledove). And yes, I had that example in mind when making the post, although I didn't recall exactly what the technology in question was.

Also, because it looks like I forgot to include it in my previous post:

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Throw in shades of the Kzinti War: we hate warfare not because we are bad at it, but because we are so terrifyingly good at it.
"I don't want to kill you, and you don't want to be dead." Seems like that would sum up humanity's attitude in such a setting - they aren't looking for allies to protect themselves, they're looking for allies so they don't have to go xenocide a few civilizations.
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Old 01-19-2022, 11:03 PM   #30
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Default Re: [Plot] What would cause a newly FTL-capable Earth to seek out allies among the st

As the new kid on the interstellar scene, we don't know anything. Our labor (and possibly our resources) could be purchased with knowledge in a way that can't be done with established species who have already picked up a corpus of knowledge about the galactic neighborhood. So we end up as contractors paid in intel, seeking reliable alien allies who will trade for useful knowledge.

I believe there's a SF story out there in which most intelligent life evolves on low-gravity methane iceballs, just because there are many more of those than large rocky planets. Consequently most aliens are comparatively fragile, and humans are like the Lava Men, which makes us very desirable as roughnecks in hazardous areas, able to survive thousands of milli-Gs and cavorting in molten ice.
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