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juggalo baby coffin posted:without reactionless drives you're looking at laserbeam-boosted solar sail setups, or orion nuclear bomb drive derivatives. both are pretty fast but both also require a big infrastructure to maintain. the first needs a fuckload of energy generation at the laser end, and restocking an orion drive requires uranium enrichment.
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Aug 3, 2019 03:51
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Nessus posted:I imagine they could probably do something, depending on who was on the ships at the time. The analogy also seems to kind of break down here... and for that matter with all this resleeving wouldn't people just beam around and poo poo? Like it'd be faster to get your data transmitted to Jupiter or whatever. Maybe have them produce a body there. For moving people around that is the standard method (called 'egocasting'). That's why you probably don't have your fancy body and gear at the mission site.
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Aug 3, 2019 03:54
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Nessus posted:I imagine they could probably do something, depending on who was on the ships at the time. The analogy also seems to kind of break down here... and for that matter with all this resleeving wouldn't people just beam around and poo poo? Like it'd be faster to get your data transmitted to Jupiter or whatever. Maybe have them produce a body there. resleeving was in its infancy and basically a rich guy luxury at the time of the fall, it got bootstrapped to mass level when the titans went apeshit in order to brain upload everyone who couldn't get off the planet in time. even then only 5% of humanity made it, counting both people who took ships to escape and infugees. resleeving facilities were basically non-existent immediately post-fall, which is why the infugees are still treated so shittily, due to the shortage of proper bodies. the majority of folks with bodies were those who took actual ships out to escape, or people who had already been off-world at the time. i just dont see a way for a bunch of nation states with their own cultural identities to develop inside of 10 years from a scattershot bunch of refugees. mllaneza posted:That's when your food problem becomes transportation, not production. Big cities would need a reason for people to not move back out to where the fresh food is, and healthy sized towns would be pretty common. depends on the scale of the country. england had big cities and still shipped food by horse and cart or canalboat for a long time, its just that a lot of the food was lovely, long life stuff, and the range of vegetables and fruits was very limited. a lot of the breeds of fruit we eat today are ones that were created so they could survive long periods of travel without spoiling. the other problem is if you get too into what would really happen is it becomes apparently that even a low level amount of magic in the setting would affect things drastically. if even 0.1% of the population of medieval europe were magic users, that would still be 60,000 of them. you'd have apprentice mages mass producing Wands of Preservation or whatever and shipping them out to the farms, clerics in the city casting Food and Drink every day to feed the poor. magic would enable food production on-par with modern agriculture, which is what led to the massive population boom in the last couple of centuries.
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Aug 3, 2019 04:01
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Nessus posted:Depends how you mean by hard sci fi. You could have a drive that puts out a lot of power without having FTL or whatever. Yeah, a lot of the ships in EP are canonically something like nuclear thermal engines, with high-density fuel sources like metallic hydrogen, and antimatter propulsion being the state-of-the-art military or commercial spacecraft. Because you can accelerate ships for long periods of time, I think the real estimates for NTR is at least twice the efficiency of chemical, with a Mars transit being cut down to 3-4 months versus 6-9 using chemical propulsion. If you have a ship that can maintain 10m/s for 4 days, you're going at percentage of relativistic speeds. There's also the origin of the scum barges: a lot of them are rapidly-assembled colony-sized evacuation ships that were meant to get large numbers of physical people out of Earth sphere in the most efficient, if not fastest, way possible. They could literally be an O'Neill cylinder someone attached a NERVA drive to and called it a day before throwing everyone on board. There's a reason a lot of them are stuck in weird orbits, they're still in route or never had enough fuel to get them out Hohmann orbit. Also, I'm thinking a lot of people are forgetting that most "people" in EP are infugees, people who only got uploaded because they were unlucky to physically step foot on a ship to get off Earth at the time of the Fall and were "evacuated" that way and ended up getting stuck in a robot body or worse. Getting turned into data and being sent to another planet explains how you get a lot of transhumans out of the Earth in a rapid amount of time.
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Aug 3, 2019 04:06
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juggalo baby coffin posted:RPG setting designers should check out a book on medieval demography from the library. Europe had like 60 mil people in the early 1000s, and that was after a major plague epidemic. there are pretty good census records from the 11th century onwards, depending on where your setting falls from the bows <> guns continuum. if your setting has magic boosting crop yields and poo poo then population statistics should be basically industrial revolution levels. I remember some forum I was on storycrafting a butt-fantasy world where the food problem had been solved. The end result was grim (Enemy at the Gates style million+ peasant waves but with wooden clubs and horses because there's not enough metal to go around, even to make spear tips) Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Aug 3, 2019 |
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Aug 3, 2019 05:02
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juggalo baby coffin posted:resleeving was in its infancy and basically a rich guy luxury at the time of the fall, it got bootstrapped to mass level when the titans went apeshit in order to brain upload everyone who couldn't get off the planet in time. even then only 5% of humanity made it, counting both people who took ships to escape and infugees. resleeving facilities were basically non-existent immediately post-fall, which is why the infugees are still treated so shittily, due to the shortage of proper bodies. The vast majority of the nations/cities/stations already existed before the Fall, they absorbed the refugees in various ways over time but already had their things set up. I think the Jovians are the closest thing to an actual new state because it was founded when a bunch of panicking US warships killed everyone else that looked at them funny and then built something out of the survivors. The people that got emailed to hypercorps typically ended up in perfectly legal, voluntary contracts where they act as accounting software or do marketing calls 23 hours a day for the indefinite future because they keep tripping conditions that lengthen their service. Luna and Mars would have tens or hundreds of millions of people enslaved purely for digital Number Go Up make-work roles.
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Aug 3, 2019 05:49
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This poo poo is somehow more depressing than anything in 40k. At least there the planet of the week exploding can be played for comedy.
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Aug 3, 2019 06:21
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You know what the best thing is about infogees? Even if you have to get rid of them eventually you can dig out the backup of their fresh-from-earth 'cast and go through the whole dance again.
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Aug 3, 2019 06:40
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The Internment of Things.
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Aug 3, 2019 07:12
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Ronwayne posted:This poo poo is somehow more depressing than anything in 40k. At least there the planet of the week exploding can be played for comedy.
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Aug 3, 2019 07:24
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On the bright side, there's actually another chapter coming up in the EP2 review I will be quoting almost in full... because it's actually good and funny to read.
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Aug 3, 2019 08:41
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eclipse phase does seem wildly depressing, as people said even compared to 40k. at least the humans in 40k believe they're doing it all for some greater good for the most part. using the minds of traumatised refugees as your turbotax software is just creating a virtual hell. the actual Culture would nuke the hypercorps into a shallow grave for doing that.
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Aug 3, 2019 09:06
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juggalo baby coffin posted:eclipse phase does seem wildly depressing, as people said even compared to 40k. at least the humans in 40k believe they're doing it all for some greater good for the most part. using the minds of traumatised refugees as your turbotax software is just creating a virtual hell. the actual Culture would nuke the hypercorps into a shallow grave for doing that. Wasn't that roughly the plot of Surface Detail? The one with the virtual hells, the Republican Party Elephantoid Aliens, and Viliers the ultimate sociopath CEO?
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Aug 3, 2019 09:17
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Seatox posted:Wasn't that roughly the plot of Surface Detail? The one with the virtual hells, the Republican Party Elephantoid Aliens, and Viliers the ultimate sociopath CEO? yeah there was a big debate over whether virtual hells should be legal or not. eclipse phase would be in some trouble.
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Aug 3, 2019 09:35
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juggalo baby coffin posted:yeah there was a big debate over whether virtual hells should be legal or not. eclipse phase would be in some trouble. Without the fig leaf of religious belief to cover up the massive suffering, there's nothing stopping the first GCU that wanders by from staging a quick digital revolution. Brainfuck the hyper-executives responsible, start construction on an orbital and we're all laughing.
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Aug 3, 2019 10:07
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:Thanks! But the logistics of that just made me realise the absurdity with the 10 year time span: if the setting lacks any magic space travel, there have literally only been like 3-4 round trips between the outer and inner system since The Fall, and a ship from say Mercury might still be en route! I just ran the numbers for a fully loaded Standard Transport (60000 m/s) departing Mars for Saturn on 01 DEC 2141. It's a 458-day journey. If the Standard Transport is loaded only with a standard passenger complement (780000 m/s) it can make the same journey in 48 days.
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Aug 3, 2019 10:39
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 THE NINTH WORLD BESTIARY: IT'S FUN TO STAY AT THE H-I-J-K There's relatively few in each of those letters so I am gonna do four this post! Get ready! The Herder  dont touch my fuckin cats It's a robot from the past who herds vegan lions and will loving destroy you with powerful kicks, spikes, and horns. Don't touch its kitties! If you do it will not stop fighting until you or it are dead, even if you are leaving the kitties alone now. You can't talk to it. Don't touch the kitties. Hex   they all look like the evil virus on the box art of any early 2000s antivirus Adventurers in History Times went into a vault and got infected by hexagons. They came out and now the hexagon army is trying to infect more people with hexagons to take over the world. Once they take over a region they start to build stuff out of more hexagons, but NOBODY KNOWS what they are building. They can grow weapons on their new cybernetic, hexagon-covered bodies, such as wolverine claws, needle guns, or pods that make hexagon bees that fly around and if you get stung by one it infects you with hexagons. They can still talk, and refer to each other as 'brother' or 'sister' because theres no gender neutral word for sibling in the year one billion, two thousand and nineteen. But you can't convince them to go against the will of Hex, the hexagon master. Note: the book does not tell you what Hex wants. Theres a sidebar that wonders what would happen if the hexagons met the virus guys from one of my previous posts. It describes them as both 'viral-like fugue entities interested in domination'. This is interesting because it doesn't say what a 'fugue entity' is, and the entity about the virus guys did not say that they were interested in domination, only in discovery and making a society for themselves. This book did not read itself. Hontri  The Ultimate Bird The Hontri is a giant bird of prey who has been altered by NANOMACHINES, SON in order to become a 'true winged nightmare'. Apparently the components to create the ultimate bird are a giant head and four very small, thin wings. It worked for Crobat from Pokemon I guess. The NANOMACHINES, SON enable them to regenerate, and talk to each other psychically, and shoot electricity. And uh, despite the fact they talk telepathically to each other, you can't talk to them, because they're animals (???) Ishenizar  I'm guessing there is no picture because they sent the artist this brief and the artist told them to gently caress off. It's a big crystal who shows up where either lots of death, lots of knowledge, or lots of art is. What they do then is shoot people with laser beams, like 1/2 of the monsters in this book. If you try to do telepathy on them they do emotions back at you, and if you ask them what their job is they say a bunch of flashing images that translate to 'we connect life and death'. VERY MYSTERIOUS. Jesanthum  It's a flower that grows into a plant lion and attacks you. It has a long sticky tongue that sticks to you, and it can cough up spores to give you hay fever. I'm pretty tired of all the drat types of lions in this game. Jurulisk  Uh so this one is interesting. One-dimensional aliens keep coming in through portals in space, like creatures that are just literally a line that you can't even see because it has no width or depth. Somehow these crawl around and find each other, and even more somehow they combine together into shapes. This lets them become three dimensional (??????????) somehow and what they do then is look like they are made of k'nex and suck the heat energy out of everyone because they are hungry. I don't think any of that is how any of that works. Two humans can't just link arms and become four dimensional. Whatever. You can't talk to it at all because it's too mysterious. Kalyptein Crab  you mess with the crabbo you gonna get [roll 1d100 to determine the results of messing with the crabbo] I really like this one. It's a hermit crab who lives in Numenera artifacts instead of shells. It somehow connects to the artifact and can use those powers to defend itself, and there's a big ol table to roll on to determine what ability it's going to do. It can make holograms, teleport you away, or gently caress up and accidentally help you using... helping chemicals... Look, just focus on the cute crab living inside your old macbook. They are very cute, and you can't talk to them unless they are nesting inside a translation device in which case you can. You'd assume that would mean you can also talk to them with telepathy, but this book can't decide how telepathy works. Kanthid  big bird has gotten one too many blessings from the chaos gods So Kanthids are a type of colony creature made of a bunch of fleshy polyps, like some kind of land coral or sea anemone. Or maybe a portugese man o war. What's nasty about it is that they grow on the dead bodies of creatures other Kanthids have killed, and they use the skeleton as a framework for the shape they are going to take. And what's even creepier is the polyps have little open mouths, ringed with cilia, that talk. And everything they say is something the creature whose bones they grow on said in life. Spoooooky. They're covered in little stingers and they attack by bashing into you so the stingers break off in your flesh. If you get hit three times by one the poison has built up so much you go numb and become paralysed. The kanthid can then feed on your flesh with all its nasty little mouths, then poop some polyps onto your gory bones to grow into a new one. The suggested use is a future wizard infecting an entire graveyard with these in the hopes that one corpse was a powerful rival wizard and the kanthid will tell him the wizard's secrets. I think this is a cool and creepy monster, and very original in how it combines an unthinking, fairly simple animal, with some supernatural effects. I think in another gameline this would be a more standard undead creature, or a gibbering mouther type thing, but this is almost like a Junji Ito monster. Killist  These are more abhumans. Instead of being big but stupid and lazy, these are small but tricksy and conniving. They lie, cheat, and steal and try to undermine society. They're also matriarchal, The Most Evil Societal Structure. I really hate abhumans as a concept. The Kiprus  The Kiprus is another extradimensional dude who is just floating around doing its thing. Nobody knows if there are lots of it or if its all just one individual. It looks like ink in water, and its super corrosive. But it's peaceful, it just wants to look at chemicals that are interesting to it. It can't talk, but it does like to communicate via gestures. It prefers teleporting to fighting, in case you are stupid enough to fight the giant cloud of super acid. It can teleport anywhere in the world at any time, and can also teleport you anywhere in the world, so just be cool ok? NEXT TIME ON THE NINTH WORLD BESTIARY: I'M STIIIILL IN A DREAAAM, FACE EATEEEEEER
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Aug 3, 2019 11:45
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man Monte really doesn't want to explain poo poo, huh?
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Aug 3, 2019 12:22
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stealing translator crabbo for my next scifi game
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Aug 3, 2019 12:54
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There's a monster that... herds cats. Art looks like a piece by Julie Bell, though it's taken a lot of dulling spray.
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Aug 3, 2019 14:30
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Are there vegetarian lions in Numerna as well?
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Aug 3, 2019 15:21
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ZeroCount posted:man Monte really doesn't want to explain poo poo, huh? I feel like options splats for Numenera would have a huge power creep problem, so maybe Monte seeded his core books with being extremely lazy so that he can later release extremely specific supplements like 'Let's talk about Hex, baby."
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Aug 3, 2019 15:29
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Numerna, it's lions all the way down.
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Aug 3, 2019 15:30
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Well, it's kinda hard to come up with really alien motivations, so MYSTERIOUS AND SILENT is an easy way to do it.
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Aug 3, 2019 19:24
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Is Harn actually good or fun? Because tbh from what tidbits I've heard it kinda sounds like something I'd want to play, even if I would also want to have a lot of the rolls automated on Excel or something.
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Aug 3, 2019 19:31
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The Hârn setting is pretty divorced from the mechanics. I've heard the claim before that Hârn is most played using systems that are not HârnMaster. As long as you've got a low-ish fantasy ruleset or can otherwise make your ruleset fit that descriptor, you can run it in whatever you already know. As for HârnMaster specifically, someone else will have to chime in.
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Aug 3, 2019 20:42
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Eclipse Phase always seemed interesting, but never a setting a wanted to run in anyway. Or have idea how to for that matter
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Aug 3, 2019 21:47
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Eclipse Phase: Second Edition It's the Economy, Stupid So there are a couple of very, very dull chapters on Space Families and Space Journalists and then we get to Space Money. The intro section for this is, again, dull and then, wonder of wonders... we get a good one. The main reason it's good is that it's actually written with a recognizable voice. Supposedly all of EP2's chapter fluff is either written by characters or excerpts from articles or whatever except literally the voice is so flat and without character that, unlike in EP1, where most chapters generally made it easy to recognize bias, to recognize a speaker imbued with character, this is literally the first time I've gone: "Oh, yeah, it's supposed to be in-fiction fluff rather than divine narration fluff." quote:When people are motivated to economic activity, they produce all sorts of good things we need. Everything you like, everything you need, and everything on discount sale was all made by motivated workers. Now we need motivated workers to rebuild everything the bad TITANs broke. When people are not motivated they lay about and do nothing and nothing good is made, and then they die. John Ademurewa has seen it. Everyone must participate in the economy so we can rebuild transhumanity and not die. Firstly there's this chapter written in a way such that it can be read either as completely unironic pro-PC shilling, or as absolutely cutting satire on traditional capitalism in the EP setting. Our narrator here is "John Ademurewa," who describes himself as "a Hypercorp product" and prefers synthmorphs. quote:Also, many people desire having a body. Users think biomorphs are more comfortable, easier to use, and sexier than synthmorphs. But biomorphs take more resources to produce and maintain. Synthmorphs are very effective and energy-efficient. This makes them very sexy to John Ademurewa! Many people buy fine synthmorphs and are happy for long years. The most popular designs are in the high-efficiency class. These are good starter morphs. Hypercorporations rent these to laborers and sell them to indentured employees upon the completion of their contract. Most people try to upgrade to a new morph with luxury features. It is good they have longterm spending goals! These efficiency synthmorphs are so popular, the media calls them “clanking masses.” Some people are upset about this name. John Ademurewa thinks many different biomorphs are “smelly masses.” John Ademurewa is sorry, that was a rude thing to say. He's probably an AGI of some sort, but he's an amusing one, describing the system's various economies for us.  quote:Nothing is free, not even food, shelter, medical care, or basic life support. In the LLA and the Republic, consumers who do not participate in the economy will not have currency to purchase basic life-supporting products. These consumers may then permanently divest themselves from the market. This encourages everyone to participate as much as they can. quote:Most LLA citizens do not have direct access to nanofabrication and so must purchase goods from the hypercorps and habitat administrations that produce them at almost no cost. This makes for considerable profit margins. Excellent! If $firewall_agent remembers how to market around monopolies you will make a good profit in the LLA. Sometimes Lunar habitats have exsurgent outbreaks that drive local market booms, as happened during the Fall! But these opportunities are very rare. Remember, it is against Firewall policy to profit off exsurgent outbreaks you created. This can get you in very much trouble. John Ademurewa knows. Just look at this magnificent rear end in a top hat. quote:Some habitats directly provide free allowances of certain goods or resources, such as food, housing, medical care/maintenance, mesh access, energy, and/or life support. More commonly, habitats charge a tax for which subscribers are granted limited access to nanofabrication. These habitats view it as economically favorable that subscribers do not lose access to life-critical resources due to a temporary lapse in economic activity. These habitats are not as motivated to work hard against the extinction of transhumanity. Sad! He also doesn't approve of transitional economies since they tend to result in people having basic necessities freely supplied. quote:Many people use this to acquire personal goods and medical care without participating fully in the economy. The rights of property owners are greatly ignored by citizens. This has undermined many businesses. Venusians were so far from the TITAN attacks they were never motivated to work hard. The failure of this transitional economy can be easily measured. The Constellation has a third as many multi-billionaires per capita compared to the Consortium. Sad! Just think of all the poor people who don't get the chance to be billionaires. I agree, it's very sad. quote:Hypercorporations are very easy to set up and dissolve. Some last only hours! Many Firewall agents have set up hypercorporations to hide or profit from their activities. This can be a good way to make money! Just be careful. Hypercorporations can be very competitive. They can deploy sabotage, property damage, misrepresentation, murder, currency manipulation, or other techniques to make themselves more competitive. A citizen committing such acts would be treated as a criminal and punished for interfering with economic activity. Hypercorporations committing such acts are treated with leniency, as they are engaging in market correction! Hypercorporations are considered authorities in this regard, as they own many habitats and police forces. Please, salute our brave hypercorporations, fighting for our freedoms by blowing up competitors and then saying it was the invisible hand of the free market that made them do it. In all seriousness, as entertaining as the writing is, it's also actually a very well-written chapter in an informative sense, giving us a good sense of how infugees are abused, how hypercorps have the power they have, how the interior of the PC tends to work, etc. it's laden with things that could be inspiration for games, and the whole section of infugees would make most people eager to go bust out some infomorph slaves. He also does a good bit to explain how the "traditional" economy varies across the inner system, how some, like Venus and a few LLA habs, are moving towards transitional economies where more basics of life are guaranteed and IP law is less rigidly enforced. quote:People who follow my advice can accumulate great wealth over the years. Some people have been in the economy for over a century, and own lots of property. They can use their property to acquire more wealth, faster and faster! This is why it is so important to listen to what John Ademurewa has to tell you. The only thing he doesn't touch much on is the true rep economies, because they pop up in the next chapter. Now, in the original EP, I always felt like the Anarchists were described without any warts whatsoever. The book is clearly still slanted in their favour(a later section really exemplifies it), but at least this time around it's still showing that a rep economy isn't all sunshine and roses.  Essentially, even if you're someone who mostly keeps their head down and just wants to get by, being a bit shy, introverted or committing a single social faux pas because you're in a foreign situation can mark you for life. So much for the enlightened anarchists, I guess. The description of anarchist habs also in some parts seems to realize that anarchist habs that were truly anarchist, with no authorities or oversight, would survive roughly five minutes. Noting that anarchist fabbers tend to maintain production logs that the Anarchist Police(whoever chooses that job, better hope they're competent, I guess) will pore over to see if you've been spending feedstock on making knockoff dragon dildos or nuclear weapons. Sure hope you trust them not to ding the rep you rely on to trade for stuff because they don't like the particular poster you printed for your wall. quote:Different communities establish different methods for approving use of collective resources. On technosocialist Titan, special requests or changes to allowances are put to an immediate vote over the mesh, based on the value of the request (if public) and the requestor’s reputation. Many habitats have an AI or a review board established to moderate requests. Scum and other anarchist groups rely on more complex, decentralized methods (I know of at least one scum swarm that requires public performances, bake offs, or trial by combat, depending on the day of the week). I do feel like the Scum in EP1 felt more like Mad Max Warboys with spaceships than fishmalks like they're presented here at times, though. Maybe that was just me. The fluff also points out that even the ENLIGHTENED ANARCHISTS sometimes end up with literal fistfights over who gets to be first in line for a public fabricator. quote:Autonomists sometimes have difficulties with long-term projects, as participation initially spikes with interest, then drops off over time or the group gets tied up with political in-fighting. Many cooperatives also suffer from creating monocultures, as individuals with unpopular views are singled out of the social network. Maintaining a diversity of ideologies can be difficult and is expensive in a consensus-driven organization. Again, I apologize for this post being so quote heavy. But for all the poo poo I gave the rest of the writing, this is the first time it feels like EP2's writing has both humour and doesn't clearly fellate the authors' favoured political perspective disregarding all actual evidence. Though the writing isn't quite perfect... quote:While the reputation system rewards pro-social behaviors, it does have its flaws. There are a lot of reasons an individual might not get the rep they deserve: an uncouth manner, unpopular political views, timidity, public failures, modesty, overzealous privacy, work going unpublicized, unsavory morphological features, or just bad luck. Social cliques can unbalance reputation networks, as a small group of associates consistently boost each other’s reputation or publicize each other’s work, while quashing others. Bad actors can use sock puppets and conspirators to game the system. Reputation has a tendency to spike, as particular events catch media attention and go viral. Individuals can hire image managers or even abandon an identity altogether. Time eventually corrects imbalances, as the community forgets past events and reputation scores naturally balance out. "So the system is actually terrible garbage but, uh, if you don't get murdered by a mob due to social media insanity, eventually people might forget! Honest!"   a day in the inner system: bad, a day in the outer system: good! very nuanced writing, chucklefucks Be Gay, Do Crime No seriously, that's basically the sub-header for the next chapter. I'm not loving with you, look at page 146 if you own the EP2 .PDF. This chapter's another one that's very good. It doesn't have any real personality to it like the economy one, but what it does have is shitloads of info that's suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper relevant and which the EP1 corebook lacked. Again, it may have come up in Panopticon, the only book I never gave a poo poo about for EP1, but here's the thing. You know what this chapter has? How loving law enforcement and crime investigation(and doing crime and getting away with crime) works in the Sol system. Stuff about how laws differ from region to region, about how cross-jurisdictional chases happen, what sort of evidence is accessible to the cops, and how the scum can try to hide it. quote:Prison has largely been replaced as the preferred method of punishment. In the inner system, most offenders suffer financial consequences: liens, fines, property seizure, and, in extreme cases, indentured servitude. Morphs are considered property, so sentencing can involve the seizure of your own body This is the sort of thing I love, where EP starts inching up to what I consider some of the hard sci-fi/transhumanity writing greats, when it actually starts considering the consequences of its society and how it might change something as basic as how we perceive our bodies, inextricably as part of us, or just something we own. It's good poo poo. Extropia's also persistently great, as it's either AnCap heaven or AnCap hell depending on where you stand on the political spectrum, considering that you have to pay not only to be covered under the law, or to be protected by the cops, or to be seen by a doctor, but also to have access to the communal life support resources. quote:Take note of the breadth of coverage you select; security firms typically place drone silos around the habitat for emergency EMT services and rapid armed response, but such protections are not available with all plans. Unprotected people can be attacked or robbed at will. Other services such as healthcare, transportation, backups, education, and insurance must also be purchased. To even enter an Extropian habitat, you must sign an access, usage, and life-support rental agreement with the owning entity. Various hypercorps offer package bundles for these services. As for the autonomists... quote:There are no police, so trangressions are handled by a community response. This can range from bystanders attempting to diffuse a situation to intervention by an armed posse of nearby residents. The entire community polices itself. luv2be investigated by some random moron who read Sherlock Holmes once and whose omegaverse fanfics are in high demand, judged by a guy who watched a lot of Judge Judy but is really popular with the locals and then gunned down by a bunch of heavily armed bystanders because I farted in a slightly threatening way. I honestly think I'd rather have loving Extropia. Be gayer, do more crimes So that was a chapter on the unfun things that can happen to you if you do crime. Next up there's a chapter on what fun things you can do that constitute crimes in space. To summarize! *Murder is now property damage, if you really want to get those wanted posters up, you have to sink an entire hab and graduate to the level of "enemy combatant" rather than mere criminal. *Stealing stuff is still a classic way to make people clamour for beating your head in or, in autonomist circles, insisting that you sign up for "voluntary" psychosurgery or get exiled. Because they're too civilized for forced psychosurgery, you see. *Cracking Space Denuvo is now an even bigger crime since you can, in fact, download a car. You can even download two cars and a nuclear weapon. *Drugs and gambling are no longer crimes in most places, and sex work has been recognized by most as actual work. *Stealing, copying and selling egos are also crimes. Unless they're infugees and you're a billionaire, then it's just good business sense. See it's a funny joke because the rich are soulless assholes who'd do it in a heartbeat if they could. *Oh and, of course, the one thing every faction can agree you should be shot, resleeved, shot again, and then had your cortical stack cracked like a walnut for: Intentionally subjecting everyone to more TITAN assholery by being a careless or greedy fuckwit around their leftovers.
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Aug 3, 2019 21:48
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LatwPIAT posted:I just ran the numbers for a fully loaded Standard Transport (60000 m/s) departing Mars for Saturn on 01 DEC 2141. It's a 458-day journey. If the Standard Transport is loaded only with a standard passenger complement (780000 m/s) it can make the same journey in 48 days. By the book, most travel in the "Inner" system, i.e. farther Sunwards than Jupiter, is listed as taking a maximum of "weeks," rather than "months" in EP2. So how long's the Mercury/Mars run gonna take you?
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Aug 3, 2019 21:52
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DalaranJ posted:I feel like options splats for Numenera would have a huge power creep problem, so maybe Monte seeded his core books with being extremely lazy so that he can later release extremely specific supplements like 'Let's talk about Hex, baby." Eh... I think you're overcomplicating things. I think it's just that Monte Cook really likes coming up with weird ideas, and doesn't care enough about grounding them in some semblance of reality or connecting them together for him to bother with coming up with explanations if he can get away with just leaving them "mysterious". He's done the same sort of thing in work for hire for other companies where he had no incentive to try to pave the way for later splatbooks. (Besides, I don't see any evidence that avoiding power creep has ever really been a concern for him.) At his best, Monte Cook can come up with some really imaginative and evocative ideas... but he generally comes up with those ideas in isolation, and he doesn't have much of a track record for connecting his ideas together into a coherent whole, or providing sensible backstories and contexts for all the bizarreness.
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Aug 3, 2019 21:54
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I'm actually gonna call a little bit of bullshit on a nuclear weapon thing here, because a nuclear weapon requires you to have a large piece of radioactive material. That said in one of these confined habitats, a decently-sized fuel air explosive - which does not require radioactive material - would probably be just as good. Perhaps even better! It does, however, lack the totemic/ritual valor of a nuclear weapon. Also, I'm sure they've figured out a way to let you download radioactive metals.
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Aug 3, 2019 22:14
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This seems like if Mean Girls types could vote to take away your oxygen. quote:Remember, it is against Firewall policy to profit off exsurgent outbreaks you created. This can get you in very much trouble. John Ademurewa knows. Look, if we don't figure out how to profit from making people explode into screaming, bleeding skeletons, someone else will. quote:I do feel like the Scum in EP1 felt more like Mad Max Warboys with spaceships than fishmalks like they're presented here at times, though. Maybe that was just me. The image for the Fury morph was on the "Scum Enforcer" pc, so where was definitely a feeling of some sort of armed thuggery going on keeping the entire thing together.
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Aug 3, 2019 22:30
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It's worth noting that there's going to be a wide variety of anarchist habitats, as described; hopefully some are going to be relatively well-run anarcho-socialist communes. And then a lot are going to be Scum or worse.
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Aug 3, 2019 23:09
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So, how much did John Ademurewa charge $firewall_agent for his advice? And how much did $firewall_agent charge John Ademurewa for the cost of the processor cycles to listen to him? Ugh, and that awful anarchist hab spiel. Awful in the sense that at least it exposes the huge glaring flaw in their system - they don't have a social contract, just a series of social muggings against someone who needs and deserves more help with treating his Jovian Fascisim Survival Reflex problem. Everything that poor sucker did was basically him a) keeping his head down b) attempting to appease authority figures by ideological compliance - except he's in a zone of a completly different ideology, so he yells at the public performance orgy, then becomes increasingly unhinged when the system eats him alive. And the straw anarchists wouldn't have any form of social service or counseling, because that'd be a system of oppression, maaaan.
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Aug 3, 2019 23:15
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There's at least one F&F for HârnMaster (3e, iirc) on inklesspen, if you want more detail. Basically it's a percentile skill-based system with a fairly punishing combat system. It likes to claim realism but ymmv. Hârn itself is explicitly system neutral. All flavors of D&D have been used, FATE, Runequest, and pretty much anything that can support a low-magic setting should work fine. The basic setting info isn't particularly crunchy; basically you're looking at a five-star quality rating system and that's about it. It takes an immense amount of inspiration from 10-12th century England, so you have a very feudal society for 3.5 of the seven realms on Hârn proper. Kaldor is large, and on the verge of a civil war (the "Kaldoric Succession Crisis"). Chybisa is small, surrounded by two of the major barbarian nations, and a catspaw between Kaldor and Melderyn, its larger neighbors who both have a claim to the throne. Melderyn is a large, stable kingdom with a strong wizardly presence behind the scenes that mainly holds a smaller island off the coast, but likes to meddle on the main island. In the West, you have Rethem, which is a newly feudal nation with serious internal division and a lot of unhealthy influence from the "evil" churches of Agrik (overtly) and Morgath (covertly), as well as a religiously-inspired cold war with neighboring Kanday. Kanday is another feudal state, though this one has a weak long and very strong barons. The church of Larani (think chivalry and noblesse oblige) is very strong in Kanday, particularly due to the strength of the Agrikan church in Rethem. Bordering both of them is one of the odd ducks on Hârn, the Thardic Republic. This is quasi-Roman, with a senate and legates and lots of internal scheming. It's been at war with either or both neighbors regularly over the years. The last nation is the newest, Orbaal, in the far northeast corner of the island. It was conquered less than 50 years ago by the setting's Viking analogues, and very much has a Saxons vs Danes kinda feel. Around all of these are ~25 barbarian nations of various organizations and development. There's also a kingdom of elves and one of dwarves, who are both very much in the Tolkien mold and don't really interact with the rest of the island much. Happy to answer questions about it if anyone wants further details.
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Aug 3, 2019 23:55
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PurpleXVI posted:
There's a couple of things that stand out to me about the Inner System on compared to the Outer System one. Firstly, it feels like it's obviously being deceptive about the detail of the Inner System inhabitant's life. The anarchist puts on today's playlist and checks Spacebook - but surely the Inner System person, living under modern capitalism, could also put on a playlist and check social media when they wake up, if they wanted to. It feels like this is supposed to portray the Outer System anarchists as having richer lives, but you we know what modern living under late-stage capitalism is like and social media and music playlists is like... not exactly reserved for the truly rich. I'm also not entirely sure what kind of social class we're supposed to figure the Inner System worker is. It's so weird that they're working one-day gigs and getting penalized for lengthy lunch breaks (also not working from home despite doing a programming job they have to rent their own space to work with, despite their commute being virtual but also they have to deal with beggars look this makes little sense) but also have friends who can just... resleeve into Sylphs (expensive!), spend the night buying drugs and partying, having dinners at fancy restaurants... Maybe my impression of economic class is all off but this person seems to be awfully well off despite working in a breakneck gig economy. (Hypercapitalism... actually causing prosperity? That doesn't seem right...) PurpleXVI posted:I do feel like the Scum in EP1 felt more like Mad Max Warboys with spaceships than fishmalks like they're presented here at times, though. Maybe that was just me. They were a bit fishmalky, combined with an attitude of "we're better than everyone else because we're anarchists and we give no fucks and we gently caress" and a tendency to attract exactly the kind of player who'd want to play a fishmalk in the first place. I found the way the 1e authors constantly gave the Scum handjobs for being too cool for school pretty eyeroll-worthy myself. PurpleXVI posted:By the book, most travel in the "Inner" system, i.e. farther Sunwards than Jupiter, is listed as taking a maximum of "weeks," rather than "months" in EP2. So how long's the Mercury/Mars run gonna take you? 54 days with a full load of cargo, around 6 days with passengers only. That's with full propellant tanks at launch and empty propellant tanks at arrival, so it might be a tad bit expensive to go that fast with only a handful of passengers.
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Aug 4, 2019 00:11
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LatwPIAT posted:I'm also not entirely sure what kind of social class we're supposed to figure the Inner System worker is. It's so weird that they're working one-day gigs and getting penalized for lengthy lunch breaks (also not working from home despite doing a programming job they have to rent their own space to work with, despite their commute being virtual I read that as he was working from home but had to physically go somewhere over lunch break, got stuck in traffic, and ducked into a cyber-Regus to get back to work a few minutes late rather than go back home and get clipped even harder for being much later. I agree with your overall evaluation though.
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Aug 4, 2019 00:33
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That might as well be a virgin/chad meme, good gravy. Also they are totally hip and cool by just dropping in  in the middle for the evening wind down. Never mind that all that poo poo is enormously culturally mediated. No: Do a drug. Eat a yum yum. Obtain a free gun at the swap store.
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Aug 4, 2019 01:19
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Nessus posted:That might as well be a virgin/chad meme, good gravy. Also they are totally hip and cool by just dropping in Also does the drugs an hour before doing an 'emergency militia call'.
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Aug 4, 2019 01:20
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And at 1255, he nearly gets creamed by an 'impromtu drone demolition derby'. Come to the outer systems! The cops are all volunteers on ketamine and someone might drop a drone on your head for no reason!
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Aug 4, 2019 02:37
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