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I commented on a post about the book "The Lost Cause", then followed up to mention that our game's setting is built on a similar vision to author Cory Doctorow's in that book. I communicated that we hope our game appeals to a similar audience. And Cory Doctorow saw this, and shared it with his followers!
Cory Doctorow has now officially heard of us, and apparently vibes with our general concept!
I'm back to drawing: I need to replace placeholder art with the final art. This is Duncan Harris, head of the data group at the Aquarius H2 Hydrogen plant.
I've been thinking about Five's excellent comments about states and the borders of a post-state world on one of our previous discussions. And since this Lemmy community is intended partially as a repository of resources for players and GMs, I thought I'd gather up some of the cool maps I've been looking at, and organize them into categories of options/inspiration for anyone who is thinking about what a region outside the more-lore-established Nation of Pacifica might look like.
Five suggested a few really cool options, the first of which was the overlapping zones of the historical lands of indigenous peoples. The setting already features a massive, successful Land Back movement, so it would be quite reasonable from a lore standpoint to restore these wherever possible, or to establish a sort of hybrid mix with modern landmarks. This interactive map is also very useful: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/10/1127837659/native-land-map-ancestral-tribal-lands-worldwide
The next was Watersheds and I really love these maps. To paraphrase Five: in a world where states no longer exist, borders that still have importance are those drawn by nature. People still need to coordinate over land and water management. They give some wonderful world building suggestions though I'd also suggest that as Fully Automated! Is in the transition to a post-state world, but is not there yet, that there's excellent potential for factions, feuds, drama, and plot hooks in the existing states losing relevance to watershed organizations that overlap their territory and authorities, but don't necessarily encompass all of them.
The cool thing with watersheds is you can aim for huge nation-sized chunks of land, or tiny town-sized boundaries, all depending on your needs.
The last one I'll include is biomes. These are another natural boundary, though often a softer one than the watersheds.
And there's no need to restrict yourself to just one new way of redrawing the map. Societies are messy, and often slow to change. It wouldn't be unrealistic to end up with a mix of all of the above, along with existing cities and state or national borders too. Here's one example, though it's alt-history rather than scifi.
I hope this is useful, and if someday you're playing the game and redrawing the map, I'd love to see what you come up with!
I just finished re-reading Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted which was my favorite from the first time I read the books awhile back.
On this pass I was surprised to find that the the economy and system of Individual Mutualism briefly outlined in the second half of the book actually looks a bit (to my uninformed eyes) like the economy from FA! with a dash of Walkaway's philosophy thrown in. I don't think it's enough to reference it as a work in the genre or anything, I just thought it was neat. Harrison was quite progressive so I wonder if he pulled inspiration from anarchist works of the time.
I thought I'd post an excerpt of the text. To be clear, this isn't presented as a complete and actionable philosophy. In the story, the Rat is out to kill the guy who got his mentor killed, it turns out that guy is top general of an army. While infiltrating the fascist nation that that military rules, he accidentally gets himself drafted. That's all good with him - his target's in the army, he's in the army, he can make this work. Shenanigans ensue. During that time, he's part of an invasion of a society the book presents as bafflingly peaceful, which follows a largely incomprehensible philosophy called Individual Mutualism. This makes it both an excellent target for an invasion and an excellent resource for the Rat. Here's a scene of some locals trying to explain it to him (apologies for the quality of the photo):
Their emphasis on passive resistance and just leaving whenever possible reminds me a lot of parts of walkaway, but this section in particular reminds me of the economy section of FA!, where money is mostly used to track short term trades, and investment for a profit is banned.
Windrush is an aguamodo: a human with aquatic augmentations. She's a ship and port inspector, a proud member of the ILWU 122 (the International Longshore & Warehouse Union), and a mom. She has skills in inspection and healing. She also coaches underwater hockey at her kid's school.
Full character sheet: link
Bio:
Gillian Phong was born to Linda Phong and Melody Beridze in 2191. Linda was an aguamodo conservationist and documentarian, and Melody was a ferry pilot.
From an early age, Gillian wanted to be an aguamodo. She took swim lessons, got her scuba certification, and began breath and heart-rate training as an adolescent. In her teens, a friend of her mother Melody began taking her along on offshore windmill inspections. Soon, she added to her love of the ocean a fascination with the industries that took place within it. She went on to get her bachelor's degrees in Oceanography and in Supply Chain Infrastructure. It was during this time she met Sogobe, who she’d marry three years later in 2112.
Before she’d even graduated she’d started apprenticing with the longshoreman, and by 2114 she was a proud journeyman. She then applied for the union’s Martian cultural and tech exchange program and was accepted. She and Sogobe spent 27 months sailing out, working in Utopia Basin, and sailing back. This was where they met and fell in love with Amir. It was also during this trip that she trained as an emergency medic with the Mami Wata Medical Network.
In 2118 she gave birth to Aquemini, and in 2020 Sogobe gave birth to their second child, Hueiwoo.
I’m not sure why but I’ve always found the Civil Defense to be really cool, and I often try to work it into my stories in one form or another (though none of those have been published yet). When I was helping with reorganizing FA!’s box text on the military, I thought it’d be a good addition.
It fulfills the role of being an organized, primarily civilian, primarily voluntary disaster relief organization. It has a long history in dozens of countries, in one form or another, all around the world. Its provided training, search and rescue, preventative measures, emergency response, and recovery, in everything from wars, to natural disasters, and even the Chernobyl disaster. And the different formats used in all those countries give us a historical precident for almost any organizational structure we choose. Want to make it an auxiliary of a military branch? The US did that at some points. Directly part of the military? Some Soviet countries ran it that way. A purely civilian volunteer charity? Britain has recently revived theirs and is running it like that. They can even function as a volunteer militia, like the British home guard, or the American Civil Air Patrol who Wikipedia claims once dropped bombs on axis submarines.
And they have history. People like that kind of lineage, the sense of being part of something that dug people out of rubble in the blitz, that cleared radioactive debris in Chernobyl. There's a long history of sacrifice and service to draw on. And one with comparatively few atrocities on the record.
They're even pretty cool visually. They have the iconic blue triangle motif common in most countries, and a blue and white color scheme not really associated with combat.
Whether you need someone to respond to wildfires, to assist paramedics, to build levees in a flood, or to distribute and build tornado shelters, it's not a far leap from what they've already done. Like Noir said on the discord, given the scale of the Global Climate Wars in the game’s backstory, it seems pretty likely that every government on the planet would start handing out shovels and white helmets again.
And I think it fits the anarchist influences in solarpunk. Putting some of the responsibilities and capabilities for disaster relief back in the hands of the community. It's also a decent role for a varied cast of characters in a RPG. People with regular lives and skills who can be tasked with a quest and be granted some degree of official legitimacy.
When I wrote up the Civil Defense section for the game manual, I tried to provide enough flexibility to allow players and GMs the option to adjust the local Civil Defense chapter to fit their campaign. I like the idea of modern chapters tracing their lineage to different local groups, a postwar militia here, a wildland fire fighter unit there. Like the Defense served as a way to bring various factions (especially armed ones) into the fold, providing them with improved legitimacy in trade for increasing oversight and standardization. So while they’re supplied and trained by the same organization, at the unit level they have some leeway in how they operate and what they specialize in, which can conveniently fit any campaign that wants to use them.
Mayhem is a super-tough MMA fighter anarchist. He's very into Anarchy. If you have a friend who is really into anarchy (and/or MMA), we've got the premade character for them!
Joaquin Krikorian was born to Melissa Krikorian and Alexandar Keith in Slab City in 2093. Melissa was a programmer and musician, and Alexandar was a busker, traditional story-teller, mime, and philosophy professor at Reed College.
Joaquin’s family split their time between Portland and Tijuana for most of his childhood. In 2108, when he was 15, Melissa’s band was eager to see and perform on Mars, and at the same time the Reed Philosophy Department was looking for professor to visit and attend a philosophy conference. They invited Joaquin, but he preferred to stay with family friends in Los Angeles. He spent this time dating, and getting to know himself and the land of Southern California. He delighted in sports from a young age (a passion that would be hard to satisfy during a trip to Mars) and began to get increasingly active in martial arts, along with meditation and psionic mental discipline training.
In 2111 Joaquin got his endurance upgrade mod, and a year later got a brain trauma resistance mod. Joaquin reunified with his mother when she returned that year, though she returned without Alexandar, who stayed on Mars for another Martian year. By 2113 Joaquin was 20 and starting to compete seriously in mixed martial arts when he wasn’t doing Ayahuasca with his girlfriend Nahr. Mayhem (as he’d come to be known in the ring and out) and Nahr then accompanied Melissa on a musical tour of Patagonia, continuing to fight and love and expand his mind, both with books and also with drugs.
Alexandar returned to Earth in 2114. The family made Portland their home base for the next few years. Over this time, Mayhem got his short-duration athletics boost mod and his armored skin mod. Mayhem got more active in social organizing with the Oregon Anarchist Party. In 2117 Mayhem and Nahr adopted a young Canaan dog named Poodle.
In 2119 Mayhem followed Nahr back to Los Angeles for her to join a prestigious documentary film production collective. Mayhem decided to try serving their community as a protector, but after a few months with the LA Protector League there was a mutual agreement that it wasn't a great fit. Now he serves as a protector with the more ideologically aligned Free Protector Network.
Marigold was adopted at birth by Carol and Georgie Sinclair in 2108. As the oldest of five, Marigold has always been a leader in their large household. They’re the product of their mothers’ inquisitiveness, their father’s confident passion for service, and a general love of taking things apart. In school, communication and writing were long their favorite subjects, narrowly beating out applied science and engineering. After a class field trip to the KNOCK LA newsroom when they were 12, Marigold became captivated by the sense of heroism they associated with investigative journalism.
On their school newspaper (Toypurina’s “The Recruiter”) they made a beat in looking for undisclosed potential conflicts of interest in procurement processes (they found five over two years) and performing other investigations into administrative oversight. Their greatest achievement was an expose on the fraction of school district travel opportunities which were provided to administrators versus educators. Marigold’s discovery that educators only received one sixth of the district’s off-world travel opportunities compared to upper level administrators when adjusted for group sizes received passing coverage from all the major municipal papers and earned them an angry letter from the school district’s head office, which Marigold framed and hung up in their room.
Knowhound spends their time hanging out with their friends Shoshana, Rocco, and Goat; going on adventures around Torrance with their younger siblings (where they’re equal parts protector and bad influence); and chasing leads for stories that either make it into an article for the school paper or wind up as microreports on the neighborhood Community Post.
Pulsação aka Pulsa aka Aide Fuentes is a Capoeira master who loves dancing and defending anyone in danger as a member of the LA Protectors League.
I want to really simple layout to serve as a training simulation. The idea is that I think people will find it easier to learn combat if they can role play, but in world they're in a simulation.
I also wanted to try making a map fast. In the past it's been a long, slow process. This is a partially built trolley in a factory that players can use to trying out tactics.
