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Barudak
May 7, 2007

Thanks Dark Matter, for vomiting unfinished plot hooks at players like youre a factory that only has bending units.

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Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
Clearly this Ringworld you speak of is actually just a portion of the Known World, or as the sages call it: Mystara.

NGDBSS
Dec 30, 2009






Speaking of humanity's One Unique Thing in scifi and of Phil Foglio, I recall that he had yet another take on this in Buck Godot. Simce the whole setting is in part a vehicle for comedy, our OUT is inventing popsicles (or more generally, frozen things on sticks).

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

NGDBSS posted:

Speaking of humanity's One Unique Thing in scifi and of Phil Foglio, I recall that he had yet another take on this in Buck Godot. Simce the whole setting is in part a vehicle for comedy, our OUT is inventing popsicles (or more generally, frozen things on sticks).

But that's kind of the fun way to do it. Imagine what totally normal, innocuous thing we do or have about ourselves that would suddenly justify our existence on the galactic scale.

unseenlibrarian
Jun 4, 2012

There's only one thing in the mountains that leaves a track like this. The creature of legend that roams the Timberline. My people named him Sasquatch. You call him... Bigfoot.

NGDBSS posted:

Speaking of humanity's One Unique Thing in scifi and of Phil Foglio, I recall that he had yet another take on this in Buck Godot. Simce the whole setting is in part a vehicle for comedy, our OUT is inventing popsicles (or more generally, frozen things on sticks).

And as a contrapoint, literally -everyone- had invented the ninja, right down to the costume and gimmick weapons.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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Night10194 posted:

But that's kind of the fun way to do it. Imagine what totally normal, innocuous thing we do or have about ourselves that would suddenly justify our existence on the galactic scale.
Penn Jilette wrote a story where humanity tried to justify its unique existence to aliens on these grounds and eventually it came down to (depending on how you look at it) "sleight of hand magic tricks" or "deep investment in complicated forms of inconsequential deceit" as humanity's unique justification for existence.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

unseenlibrarian posted:

And as a contrapoint, literally -everyone- had invented the ninja, right down to the costume and gimmick weapons.

Now i'm envisioning like... 50 different alien races all carrying slightly different Kusari-gama and going "Well, you all have to go home and change."

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Kurieg posted:

Now i'm envisioning like... 50 different alien races all carrying slightly different Kusari-gama and going "Well, you all have to go home and change."

That was basically how it went.

Buck Godot was pretty good from what I saw of it.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Nessus posted:

Penn Jilette wrote a story where humanity tried to justify its unique existence to aliens on these grounds and eventually it came down to (depending on how you look at it) "sleight of hand magic tricks" or "deep investment in complicated forms of inconsequential deceit" as humanity's unique justification for existence.
God, why do irritating libertarians have to be so good at science fiction?

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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Halloween Jack posted:

God, why do irritating libertarians have to be so good at science fiction?
Probably an accidental conflation of cultural traits, which make it so that irritating libertarians are more likely to know people who can make it so their sci fi can get published.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Halloween Jack posted:

God, why do irritating libertarians have to be so good at science fiction?

Fiction is the only place any of their philosophy actually works, and is the main, original justification for it, and so they naturally lead towards it?

I mean, Atlas Shrugged and all that poo poo was science fiction about invincible energy machines and crap, right?

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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Night10194 posted:

Fiction is the only place any of their philosophy actually works, and is the main, original justification for it, and so they naturally lead towards it?

I mean, Atlas Shrugged and all that poo poo was science fiction about invincible energy machines and crap, right?
Atlas Shrugged explicitly involves the invention of technological wonders over in Galt's Gulch, yeah. Otherwise it would've just been an obscure backwater that would have eventually been confiscated by The State.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Nessus posted:

Penn Jilette wrote a story where humanity tried to justify its unique existence to aliens on these grounds and eventually it came down to (depending on how you look at it) "sleight of hand magic tricks" or "deep investment in complicated forms of inconsequential deceit" as humanity's unique justification for existence.

Like I mentioned earlier, in Uplift one of the things that humanity can do since we weren't uplifted by a previously uplifted race, is Lie. Since everyone else is using one of the Galactic Standard languages, which makes it hard to describe things in an absolute falsehood. So the fact that humans can point at the sky and say something like "This blue pen is red" got the entire race declared guilty of witchcraft by one of the more deeply religious factions. And the only reason that we weren't wiped out in a holy war is because we had uplifted Dolphins and Chimpanzees at this point, which made us an 'ascended' race, and thus we couldn't be annexed by any other culture, and they couldn't find whatever race uplifted us (because there wasn't one) to hold them to task for creating such a dangerous monster that could lie and do calculus.

Kaza42
Oct 3, 2013

Blood and Souls and all that

Nessus posted:

Atlas Shrugged explicitly involves the invention of technological wonders over in Galt's Gulch, yeah. Otherwise it would've just been an obscure backwater that would have eventually been confiscated by The State.

How big was galt's gulch anyway? They have a couple dozen people living there, but they mention having mines and needing trains to transport the ore/metal out of said mines. Like... did they just take a hundred mile swath of land and hope their cloaking device stops anyone from noticing?

Serf
May 5, 2011


Halloween Jack posted:

God, why do irritating libertarians have to be so good at science fiction?

boy, that's one broad definition of "good"

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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Kaza42 posted:

How big was galt's gulch anyway? They have a couple dozen people living there, but they mention having mines and needing trains to transport the ore/metal out of said mines. Like... did they just take a hundred mile swath of land and hope their cloaking device stops anyone from noticing?
I think it was an isolated mountain valley (hence the Gulch) that they kind of holo-walled off. There's a lot of empty land out West.

Kaza42
Oct 3, 2013

Blood and Souls and all that

Nessus posted:

I think it was an isolated mountain valley (hence the Gulch) that they kind of holo-walled off. There's a lot of empty land out West.

So I looked it up. Apparently it's the town of Ouray, Colorado, which Midas bought, and the surrounding 60 miles of land. Ouray is small, but is still a significant tourist area (they have great ice climbing) and is on government maps, censuses and tax forms.

RiotGearEpsilon
Jun 26, 2005
SHAVE ME FROM MY SHELF

Night10194 posted:

Holy poo poo, that's Sanguine's latest game. What the hell happened.

Why did they abandon Cardinal and/or go into porn game.

They didn't abandon Cardinal, they just put it down for like ten minutes to crank out a fun weird slightly filthy space game.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

The Ringworld itself has wildly variant tech levels between its various cultures, ranging from 'these guys have floating cities and once broke the entire drat thing by tearing out the ring's attitude jets to make spaceships' to 'these guys have rocks'.

The rest of the setting is somewhere between 'there is money' and 'everyone can basically do whatever tho', with one of the things a lot of humans on boosterspice do is seeking out adventure because they're so loving bored. When you're nearing 300, you've done a lot of poo poo and now you get your kicks by heading out to the jungles of some random colony world and hunting alien supertigers.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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Mors Rattus posted:

The Ringworld itself has wildly variant tech levels between its various cultures, ranging from 'these guys have floating cities and once broke the entire drat thing by tearing out the ring's attitude jets to make spaceships' to 'these guys have rocks'.
Yeah, the general impression is that as of the Ringworld era the prevailing model is a strong social democracy on Earth and various levels of free-wheelingness on the colony worlds, although some degree of socialism is a necessity for most of the colony worlds simply because the necessaries of life there absolutely require technological infrastructure.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Bieeardo posted:

I was expecting a whole lot more sex from Farflung, when I read it for a review that just couldn't be bothered coalescing. The promo art, the author's background, that whole 'after dark RP' schtick... and I think I found maybe two or three overt references to sex and sexuality. It felt more like original series Doctor Who through the lens of a chaste Phil Foglio than an excursion into XXXenophilia.
That reminds me of that OSR game that was co-written by some creepy chud and Satine Phoenix, Something Sex of the Space Princess or whatever. It had a handful of oddly frank bits of sexuality, and the rest was an almost entirely forgettable OSR space game. The only interesting bit was the Build Your Own Species part of character creation.

Nessus posted:

Probably an accidental conflation of cultural traits, which make it so that irritating libertarians are more likely to know people who can make it so their sci fi can get published.
Oh wait, I know why: the CIA honest-to-God funded university writing programs in Middle America, manipulating American science fiction toward an obsession with rugged individualism.

It's like a story Frank Herbert, a frustratingly libertarian science fiction writer, would write.

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


Barudak posted:

Thanks Dark Matter, for vomiting unfinished plot hooks at players like youre a factory that only has bending units.

i was honestly surprised that "Adolf Hitler is recovered, recuperates in an Antarctic research base, becomes the first human (arguably) to land on Mars, begins establishing the 4th Reich" was such a no-sell. that's something that you could base an entire campaign setting around, but Dark*Matter mentions it like some historical footnote that's barely important enough to remember in the context of other things that happen on Mars.

the Heavenly Host being largely hostile to humanity will be touched on in some other material, so at least there's bits and pieces of that plot thread scattered around.

but drat, they took one of the most gonzo ideas they had and do nothing with it immediately after mentioning it, so that they can spend more word-count talking about the evils of the UN/NWO.

wiegieman
Apr 22, 2010

Royalty is a continuous cutting motion


Nessus posted:

Yeah, the general impression is that as of the Ringworld era the prevailing model is a strong social democracy on Earth and various levels of free-wheelingness on the colony worlds, although some degree of socialism is a necessity for most of the colony worlds simply because the necessaries of life there absolutely require technological infrastructure.

Earth and all its dominions only pretend to be a democracy, though. ARM controls everything in their reach.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
I know the "Nazis escaped to Antarctica and then to the Moon/Mars/Hollow Earth" is a very old thing, but when did it start?

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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wiegieman posted:

Earth and all its dominions only pretend to be a democracy, though. ARM controls everything in their reach.
The ARM's reach well exceeds its grasp!

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Halloween Jack posted:

I know the "Nazis escaped to Antarctica and then to the Moon/Mars/Hollow Earth" is a very old thing, but when did it start?

Probably about when no-one could actually find him in Argentina.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Halloween Jack posted:

I know the "Nazis escaped to Antarctica and then to the Moon/Mars/Hollow Earth" is a very old thing, but when did it start?

Neonazis of the weirder and more occultist bent have pushed the idea for a long time, thanks to poo poo like Vril (derived from a 19th century sci fi novel) and Thule (derived from wildly misinterpreted Greek stuff) and a desire to push the narrative that Nazis were actually wildly ahead of their time and super smart and didn't have huge systemic issues.

Cooked Auto
Aug 4, 2007

If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!




Halloween Jack posted:

I know the "Nazis escaped to Antarctica and then to the Moon/Mars/Hollow Earth" is a very old thing, but when did it start?

It's not that old actually, going by "Myths of the Third Reich" by Peter Olausson (only available in Swedish as far as I'm aware) the origins for all that is about 1990 when the Nazi Saucer ideas got picked up again after being dormant for a couple of decades after a craze in the 70's.
The origin for the Nazi moon base in this case, going by the book, is a Hungarian named Vladimir Terziski according to the book while the Nazi Mars expedition (a joint German-Japanese one even) stems from the writings of Rafl Ettl and Norbet Jürgen-Ratthofer who were also responsible for inventing a lot of the stuff about Nazi saucers.
They also wrote about a Nazi space expedition to the Aldebaran system apparently where they were going to get reinforcements to help win the war.

Sadly the book doesn't go much into about the Hollow Earth other than mentioning there were a couple of myths about nazi bases in the arctic that had gateways into a hollow earth.

Cooked Auto fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Nov 14, 2017

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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Mors Rattus posted:

Neonazis of the weirder and more occultist bent have pushed the idea for a long time, thanks to poo poo like Vril (derived from a 19th century sci fi novel) and Thule (derived from wildly misinterpreted Greek stuff) and a desire to push the narrative that Nazis were actually wildly ahead of their time and super smart and didn't have huge systemic issues.
"We weren't owned or completely disorganized, but were in fact cool and good at anything other than uniform design," says the Neo Nazi, as he slowly becomes a corn cob.

I think the Hitler escaped to Argentina thing was due to ODESSA, which was a real thing that did exfiltrate a lot of SS men.

Barudak
May 7, 2007

Nessus posted:

I think the Hitler escaped to Argentina thing was due to ODESSA, which was a real thing that did exfiltrate a lot of SS men.

At my work Im in charge of a program with the internal name OTESSA and every single time I work on it I have to do a double take and explaining what ODESSA was and why I know it exists is not a workplace appropriate conversation.

Ratoslov
Feb 15, 2012

Now prepare yourselves! You're the guests of honor at the Greatest Kung Fu Cannibal BBQ Ever!

Halloween Jack posted:

Oh wait, I know why: the CIA honest-to-God funded university writing programs in Middle America, manipulating American science fiction toward an obsession with rugged individualism.

Seriously? Could you point me in the direction of information about this?

U.T. Raptor
May 11, 2010

Are you a pack of imbeciles!?

Cythereal posted:

Another good take is the Guild Wars setting, where humanity is basically the elves of the setting: we're an ancient, cultured civilization with a rich history of magic and consider ourselves the most civilized and cultured race on the planet, but where once we ruled the world now we've fallen on hard times and are being outpaced by young, inventive races that have a far greater sense of urgency and purpose and are beginning to take over the world.
They're also literally aliens from another planet.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
Really? I've explained the bizarre particulars of right-wing ideology to people at work, but maybe that's not normal outside Charlottesville?

Drakyn
Dec 26, 2012

I realize this is at this point very tangential to the actual goal of the thread, but my own personal favorite 'how aliens see humans' bit of backdrop is the almost-entirely-incidental universe backstory in Hunter's Run. Basically, humanity finally ventures out of the solar system, meets alien life and....!
....realizes that actually interstellar civilization is very common and a ton of other people did that first and the good seats all over the entire galaxy have already been taken for like, ever. To rub it in farther, humans aren't even noteworthy for being the last guy to the table - they're just the latest faceless schmucks for a little while before someone else pops up to take the booby prize. Their unique, special thing is being Background Extra #040039A, like almost everyone.
And since nobody's willing to give a bunch of nobodies something for nothing, least of all tech, the glorious human colonization effort to seize the stars is facilitated by the daring, dashing strategy of 'humanity rents cheap cargo space in interstellar shipping arks to hitch rides to colonize shitworlds nobody wanted. Which they must rent.'
I swear, I need to reread that book some day to make sure I didn't imagine that stuff. It's possible my mind's playing tricks on me because the entire setup is too close to what I'd consider perfect.

Drakyn fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Nov 14, 2017

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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Barudak posted:

At my work Im in charge of a program with the internal name OTESSA and every single time I work on it I have to do a double take and explaining what ODESSA was and why I know it exists is not a workplace appropriate conversation.
Why, do you work at the Hitler museum? "It's funny, this system's name is almost like this crazy conspiracy thing." "Really?" "I know, right?"

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

U.T. Raptor posted:

They're also literally aliens from another planet.

Oh? Didn't know that. Oddly, that's also humans in the Witcher setting. Elves are the native of the planet, humans came in a starship long ago.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Nessus posted:

I think the Hitler escaped to Argentina thing was due to ODESSA, which was a real thing that did exfiltrate a lot of SS men.

The Soviets also didn't admit to finding Hitler's ashes (and a jawbone they confirmed was his with his dentist's help) until years after the fact.

Barudak
May 7, 2007

Nessus posted:

Why, do you work at the Hitler museum? "It's funny, this system's name is almost like this crazy conspiracy thing." "Really?" "I know, right?"

I am the very serious business guy and definitely not weird at all person at work. So instead I just laugh internally when we discuss that the OTESSA program will be relocating and restablishing itself so it can last for years to come.

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



Barudak posted:

At my work Im in charge of a program with the internal name OTESSA and every single time I work on it I have to do a double take and explaining what ODESSA was and why I know it exists is not a workplace appropriate conversation.

It was a pretty good Jon Voight flick, which is a pretty innocuous way to bring it up.

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Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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Barudak posted:

I am the very serious business guy and definitely not weird at all person at work. So instead I just laugh internally when we discuss that the OTESSA program will be relocating and restablishing itself so it can last for years to come.
What I'm getting here is that you do, in fact, work at the Hitler museum.

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