New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Try this idea on a ringworld. Basically steal the plot of To Your Scattered Bodies Go, anything else from the Riverworld books can be ignored.

There's one thing from Riverworld you need to keep: the "grails" that supply food, clothing and so on. Without those, if you awaken fifty billion or so humans all at once without a huge agricultural system already operating, they end up eating each other because there's nothing else available in quantity.

The river is also very, very useful, because it provides a means of low-tech transport, and lampshades the question of distance. Ringworlds are so huge that it's hard to get anywhere without air transport, and that needs infrastructure unless it's very high-tech.

Philip Jose Farmer may have been an unconventional SF writer, but he knew how to maintain suspension of disbelief.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by johndallman

There's one thing from Riverworld you need to keep: the "grails" that supply food, clothing and so on. Without those, if you awaken fifty billion or so humans all at once without a huge agricultural system already operating, they end up eating each other because there's nothing else available in quantity.

The river is also very, very useful, because it provides a means of low-tech transport, and lampshades the question of distance. Ringworlds are so huge that it's hard to get anywhere without air transport, and that needs infrastructure unless it's very high-tech.

Philip Jose Farmer may have been an unconventional SF writer, but he knew how to maintain suspension of disbelief.

A Ringworld would have the surface area of three million Earths. You could spread out humanity over vast areas.

[PTTG]

The bishop ring is merely 700 times Earth's area. I scaled it a bit to make it about an even 1000, mostly helped by increasing the day length. Then I made most of the ring a mystery full of alien artifacts and wonders by having humans only occupy 40%. The millions of wormholes also help evenly distribute people, but yeah, even accounting for having a year of prep time, the first several years are going to be insanely difficult to deal with.

[Astromancer]

Slaves of the Toybox!

What is this place?

It seems to be a private pleasure world.

With slaves, warfare, gladiators, and torture?

Some people have a sick idea of fun.

Nevertheless, this is a human world with some kind of connection to home. If we can find it.

If we live that long.

The scout ship had a really nasty misjump. Luckily they didn't end up too far away. Sure the ship.landed about two thousand light years away from the stellar federation they crew were part of, and about twenty years before they left, but they could get home. They'd need to be careful not to create a temporal paradox, those bring a death penalty, if you even survive. But they could go home.

More later.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Slaves of the Toybox!

What is this place?

It seems to be a private pleasure world.

With slaves, warfare, gladiators, and torture?

Some people have a sick idea of fun.

Nevertheless, this is a human world with some kind of connection to home. If we can find it.

If we live that long.

The planet that the PCs have crashed on is significantly larger than Luna but smaller than Mars. Local gravity is 0.2G. The population seems to live under a set of bizarre force fields. These fields have some of the aspects of an energy field and in other ways resembles woven cloth. It's as strange a technology as anyone in the group has ever heard of.

There seems to be different levels of force fields. The outermost one seems to both shield the inhabitants from hard radiation and shift the visible light spectrum of the local star to something very close to Earth normal. The other layers seem to retain the atmospheric pressure. The second outermost field retains an atmospheric pressure like that of the Tibetan Plateau. The middle fields (there seem to be three separate ones) retain a pressure like sea level on Earth. The innermost fields (of which there are two under each separate middle field) retain a pressure of roughly 25psi.

The thicker the atmosphere the warmer the climate. The locals in the spaces between the middle field and the innermost fields travel over the the top of the innermost fields in boatlike sleds pushed by the winds. People in the highest atmospheric pressure areas can use wings, they flap with their arms, to fly.

The local cultures resemble a bright anthology student's attempt to write Sword and Sorcery adventure scenarios, but with much less magic.

The local flora and fauna ( and the local "humans" as well) show plenty of genetic modification. Much of it clearly either aesthetic or for dramatic effect.

More later, and additional notes when I can do some corrections.

[dcarson]

Inspired by Walkers on the Sky? https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/9/...HSKY451976.jpg

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by dcarson

Inspired by Walkers on the Sky? https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/9/...HSKY451976.jpg

The setting is inspired by that book. It goes in a different direction.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Slaves of the Toybox!

What is this place?

It seems to be a private pleasure world.

With slaves, warfare, gladiators, and torture?

Some people have a sick idea of fun.

Nevertheless, this is a human world with some kind of connection to home. If we can find it.

If we live that long.

The PCs are working under several restraints. First, they are in an area of human space that isn't really known to them. They have about the same level and quality of knowledge of this human culture as 18th century Europe had of China and Japan. They know that these cultures exist and some vague details, but that's it.

Secondly their governments have no connection or relations with the local cultures. It not that they have been refused or rejected as 19th century China would largely resist diplomatic relations with Europe. It's simply that there is such a vast distance between the culture that the PCs came from and the culture they are interacting with.

Third, although all of the languages humanity uses in this setting derive from 21st-century American English, they've been diverging for centuries. (This setting is long after an apocalyptic event and only the space colonies survived). The PCs have only a feeble knowledge of the local variety of English.

Fourth, and brutally, the culture that built TOYBOX, the world they are stuck on (or at least those in charge of TOYBOX itself) are vile. They are practicing slavery and other horrors. Think of the Eternals from ZARDOZ. The film makes no bones that the Eternals destroyed the old civilization and torment the survivors which they call "primitives." Moreover the Eternals feel totally justified in what they do. They saw the old civilization as immoral and their genocidal acts as a form of moral education. Like the Eternals, those in charge of TOYBOX feel that they are doing something moral and that their slaves are benefiting from the restrictions and burdens placed on them. DCARSON pointed out that I'm inspired by WALKERS ON THE SKY. Look at the people running that world and proclaiming themselves gods and insisting on being worshiped (and on their right to use the people of their world as toys). They also proclaimed that their crimes were for the victims' own good.

These people are monsters. Blind to their monstrosity, and certain of their superlative virtue.

Fifth, the PCs are aware they are in the past. They've heard that this area of human space was generally somewhat behind their culture technologically, except in some areas where they were ahead. Moreover they know that their culture was somewhat advanced above their neighbors (not a full tech level, more like the difference being 1950 and 1970. Important, but not a full tech level). The temporal paradox that might come from these people getting their hands on the PCs ship is a massive threat.

More later...

[Astromancer]

The Neighborhood

What did you call this meeting for?

I think the other groups of colonists see us as a threat and are planning to attack us.

Are we surprised? The other groups are paranoid,
authoritarian, and can only unify to attack someone.

Aren't you worried? We are on the same planet.

We are alone on the far side of the planet with an ocean between us and them. We haven't been at war so we built an agricultural and an industrial base. They lack both and are always on the brink of famine and technological collapse. Heck, they don't have a navy. How are they even getting at us?

They think the only way they can build their own futures is to unite against us. It doesn't have to be sane to be dangerous.


In many ways this takes GURPS:Alpha Centauri and reworks it. Remove the Manifolds and the intelligent aliens, you can keep the mind worms if you like. Basically, a group of democratically inclined and peaceful factions are settled on a roughly Australia sized continent with a climate and soil conditions roughly equivalent to New Zealand. These groups focused on building their settlements. This community is on the edge of being able to advance technologically. They have prosperity of a sort and are raising lots of kids.

Meanwhile the other groups are at war and are culturally and technologically retrograde. The leaders all fear the "Sea Folk" as they call the isolated democracy. They also all realize that they desperately need to redirect the violence of their neighbors away from themselves.

Basically, this is diplomacy and espionage on a frontier. The PCs are either "Sea Folk" trying to prevent an invasion attempt (it couldn't succeed, but it would be a burden) or agents of "The Alliance" who want to buy time so their group can heal and grow without allowing the other allies a chance to do so.

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by johndallman

There's one thing from Riverworld you need to keep: the "grails" that supply food, clothing and so on.

I've been thinking about this a lot. I was originally against it, but the more I think about it, the more I agree. I would like to make it something like advanced alien 3D printers, or 'leftovers' from some third party which inhabited the ring before humans were dumped there, but weren't the ones who built it. It should provide the option for players to make cool toys as needed, without totally obliterating the survival gameplay.

I would also point out that present-day non-agricultural societies in arid regions have population densities of upwards of 4 / km2. The ring, even limited just to the areas people have been placed, has something like 0.1/km2. So assuming people can get savvy pretty quick, the food is there. Yet it doesn't rule out roving cannibalistic bands of former suburbanites. Some food capacity from these grails could be reasonable, but I'm not sure it's essential.

One thought I rather like is that the grails or printers can make things from blueprints, but still need raw materials. If you want a steel sword, you need to either already have a bunch of iron, or you need to dump a huge amount of iron ore into the printer for it to work with, and you're left with a bunch of cleanly shaped silica bricks. Conversely, if you want a carbon fiber armor piece, you just dump in some sticks and food scraps.

I'm thinking there's a database of basic objects - knives, clothes, water filters, flashlights, tools, batteries, etc., and that includes pure ingots and other kinds of intermediate materials. So basic supplies can be had very easily, but more advanced stuff demands that you actually know how to make them out of bulk materials.