@Agemegos: I’m sure 11 point would be fine.
Is there any call for me to add an indication of economic inequality to the tabbed entries? If so, would a short descriptive phrase such as “unusually equal”, “moderate”, or “highly unequal” be best, a rating out of ten, or a percentage score (Gini coefficient times 100%, discussed in the key) suit best?
Anyone want to lose the average real income? What about replacing it with median real income?
Anyone want to chime in with whswhs’ anathema against the period of low orbit?
Do I hear a plea for the half-height or scale height of the atmosphere?
I hesitate to calculate the boiling point of water at sea level because I am afraid that GURPS star system generator output is going to imply that those are not very much above average surface temperature.
I think every reader will want different things. whswhs and I are both, I think, reasonably erudite, as are you, but each in a set of somewhat different directions. When I’m running a planet-visiting game the headline numbers I look at for a planetary environment are gravity, ppO₂, total atmospheric pressure, and surface temperature range, but whether I’m any more representative of space-game GMs than you…
(ppO₂ is more immediately useful than %O₂, though obviously one can calculate one from the other, because that’s what a body “feels”; whether you’re breathing 0.2atm of 50% oxygen or 5atm of 2% oxygen/98% helium you’ll probably get exhausted at a similar sort of rate. Similarly with how likely things are to catch fire. Then the overall pressure and the rest of the gas mix sets some bounds on habitability, with implications for decompression in some cases… you know this, I’m just saying that’s the order in which I look at things.)
So that said: I think I would use not the low-orbit period but the lowest-real-orbit altitude and period. If I put up a satellite that’ll fall in less than a year, how high does it have to be (therefore how good the optics) and what’s the interval between passes if I use a basic circular orbit? (I’ll then feed in planetary rotation speed.) I know the Kármán Line is important for jurisdiction, but on Earth that’s a nominal 100km vs lowest practical satellite orbit of 150km. (And not much is likely to happen between them.)
And I think if you’re calculating that you’ll have scale height too, which I would occasionally like but don’t normally care about much. (Noting of course that MSL may well not be practical settlement height.)
Moving on to the economic stuff, in GURPS I’d do it with wealth levels (40% of the population is Average, 20% Poor, etc.) because that gives me something I can reach for as a GM. Obviously that doesn’t work for you because it ties the thing to the specific game system. I’m not a great fan of Gini, or any single measure, because a whole bunch of different situations can produce the same number (and your canonical planets already cover situations well outside the well-studied economic models); the number alone doesn’t tell me much about why this planet is weird and interesting.
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How many of us would be happier with a single entry for the development level (2.0 to 8.5, explained in the key, with a parenthetic phrase indicating industrial sophistication (e.g. “Industrial Revolution”)), and no entries foraverage income or real exchange effects?
I agree entirely about pp[O₂]. One of my persisting dissatisfactions with the GURPS star system generator is that its only nod in the direction of this vital parameter is that it sometimes assigns the “low oxygen” marginal condition — with scant regard for the total pressure. And then it sometimes throws up planets with atmospheres so dense that they must threaten either oxygen toxicity or nitrogen narcosis and could do both at once, with no marginal condition and no indication of any third constituent.
I guess I am going to have to consider adding it myself.
What I want to know as a GM setting something on a world is: how desperate are people? How common is criminality, and why does it happen? (In my Wives and Sweethearts setting most material needs are taken care of, so you don’t get “stealing to avoid starving” crime – but you do get “want more stuff than my neighbour” and “bored with having nothing to do and unable to think of something more productive” crime.) How expensive is it to bribe a bunch of locals to cause a distraction? Will they sell me their grandmothers for a whiff of Imperial currency? I don’t think this is amenable to a simple table entry.
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That is a really good point. I’m going to have to think about that. Perhaps I’ll help myself to the extra 350 words that smaller type would allow, and write some pastichey epigraphs.
Meanwhile, there is a new draft at the same URL, in which I have adopted some of the suggestions made above, and on which I would like further comments if it isn’t much trouble.
That draft answers my points, and is fine for format.
A couple more questions about Tau Ceti:
- How did it attain such heights of development when serious efforts to invent something, or create a business, are subject to social punishment?
- If living alone is socially punished, what happens to people who, with all permissible effort, are unable to find a partner they can live with?
A variety of ways.
- There are businesses that are older than the current system.
- There have been people who have defied their neighbours, striven for rewards, accepted social marginalisation as the price of great wealth, and even sometimes found it possible to live down a past when you have a lot of wealth and employees.
- Some neighbourhoods have rather higher standards than others. If you live in Tuxedo Park your neighbours there won’t scorn you for striving more than the hoi polloi, only for striving more than them.
- There have been great corporate developments and expansions in which huge enterprises were achieved by a joint effort, with no single person involved in them expressing grandiose ambitions, working more than 36 hours per “week”, dressing too flash, living too grandly, or admitting to their neighbours what a fortune was accumulating in their retirement portfolio.
- There is a huge legacy of inventions and registered designs from Old Earth. Many things were even invented there that could not be manufactured commercially until interstellar commerce made markets big enough for them to be manufactured at efficient scale. Tau Ceti can to some extent bring new products to market without having to invent them.
- Governments and universities fund some R&D.
Very often they become marginalised and socially isolated. Some suicide. In San Pietro they can sometimes get ordained as “priests” and join the administrative hierarchy, which brings social acceptance in a defined role — the government of San Pietro is ostensibly a conservative patriarchate of the Roman Catholic Church: it has retained a celibate priesthood, though not a belief in God.
Looking for the moment purely at format:
- For Star, I would prefer either to eliminate the periods after Cetus and Sector and perhaps put one after the final right parenthesis, or eliminate the periods around Central Sector.
- The words tides and obliquity, despite being on the same lines as Oceans and Climate, are separate heads and ought to be capitalized.
- You say that Tau Ceti has repellent cuisine as a social quirk, but in the text you mention it as having gourmet cuisine. I’m not sure that these are inherently contradictory (I’m thinking about Roman banquets), but my default assumption would be that the two statements clash.
- Most entries are not capitalized after the heads, but you capitalize Muted.
- Why is the word écu italicized? In present-day American English, we don’t italicize pound, euro, ruble, rupee, or peso, because they’re not exotic foreign words for dollar, but the standard names for the respective currencies.
And as a matter of substance, I’m not sure that it’s right to say that the chief executive is a “Heads-of-Governments conference.” It’s not simply that I’m not sure how often the eight heads of government would meet for actual administrative purposes, rather than ceremonially. It’s also that, given the planet’s insistence that it is not a unified polity but eight autonomous polities, it seems as if such a meeting would give the “wrong” impression and might in fact be unofficially tabooed, if not constitutionally prohibited; having them meet might be like having the Queen refuse assent to an Act of Parliament, or more moderately like having the Thain exercise his power to call out the Shire-muster.
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I could see a case being made that those who are physically or behaviorally repulsive must be offered cosmetic surgery, gene therapy, neurological reprogramming, and other measures to make them more appealing, so that they are not denied partners “through no fault of their own.”
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In GURPS City Stats I addressed this by giving cities not only a Control Rating, but a Corruption score, which indicated the decrease in CR that was possible if you had the right social position or connections. I’m thinking, for example, of the British official who was visiting his mistress during COVID lockdown earlier this year; that might be CR 3/Corruption -2. Of course you’d want to spell out the particular form the corruption took, but a numerical rating doesn’t seem meaningless.
It seems likely that some will be socially pressurised into partnerships with no real bond. Since breaking those is also unacceptable, abusive relationships or murder-suicides will tend to follow. This world really is a dystopia for people who aren’t socially compatible with it.
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Q: How do you turn utopia into dystopia?
A: Lock the door.
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Thank you. It is the form that I am mostly concerned with at this stage. Particulars of the description of Tau Ceti are just drafts, and will be revised and polished later.
You say that Tau Ceti has repellent cuisine as a social quirk, but in the text you mention it as having gourmet cuisine . I’m not sure that these are inherently contradictory (I’m thinking about Roman banquets), but my default assumption would be that the two statements clash.
Many gourmets relish delicacies that ordinary decent people find revolting or horrifying. I’m thinking of fish and crustaceans that are carefully dismembered or even fried alive so that they will still be struggling on the plate, pungent ferments such as Limburger cheese, shrimp paste, and stinky tofu, cheese riddled with maggots, sausages that ought to “smell of shit, but not too much of shit”, game hung until approaching decomposition, and anchovies. I used to have Malaysian and Indonesian friends who found the idea of milk repulsive and found it hard to believe that people eat cheese of any sort. Many societies in Flat Black are so far down the path of eating cultured meat and synthesised food that moderately squeamish diners would balk at eating a recognisable carrot. Tau Cetian “real food” and traditional dishes from Old Earth (which include fish and game killed in the wild and sometimes even serve whole, besides cheeses and other ferments) might mostly be pretty tame by my standards, but in context it is pretty confronting.
But you’re right about the word choices in the draft. “Repugnant gourmetry” might be better than “repellent cuisine”, but in any case this is draft, and revision comes later.
And as a matter of substance, I’m not sure that it’s right to say that the chief executive is a “Heads-of-Governments conference.” It’s not simply that I’m not sure how often the eight heads of government would meet for actual administrative purposes, rather than ceremonially
In Australia, during the coronavirus crisis, the heads of government have been meeting every week, by videoconference.
It’s also that, given the planet’s insistence that it is not a unified polity but eight autonomous polities, it seems as if such a meeting would give the “wrong” impression and might in fact be unofficially tabooed, if not constitutionally prohibited; having them meet might be like having the Queen refuse assent to an Act of Parliament, or more moderately like having the Thain exercise his power to call out the Shire-muster.
It might be, but the European Union manages to hold a meeting of the European Council twice every six months while maintaining a pretence that its member countries are independent. I have decided that tau Ceti finds it possible to have the eight people with whom the buck stops discuss what to do with it, without offending the appearances.
In preparing such a document as this there is an inevitable tension between writing the lie that Watsonian encyclopaedia would be forced to print (that Tau Ceti is an amphictyony of eight independent colonies, or that Australia is a constitutional monarchy) and the truth that GMs, players, and diplomats need to be getting on with (that Tau Ceti is a technocratic bureaucracy and that Australia is a parliamentary republic whose appointed president has the title “governor-general”). It’ll get thrashed out during the revisions. For right now I’m trying to suppress my habit of polishing everything I write too early and too piecemeal. I want to get the scope and format of these entries right first, then grind out some draft, then polish.
Loveless marriages, scandalous divorces, and people living down scandal are far from uncommon in many societies.
This world really is a dystopia for people who aren’t socially compatible with it.
Sure is! But aren’t they all? My father thought that England in 1948 was a dystopia, and believed it strongly enough to emigrate.
Oh, quite! And perhaps a lot will accept the offers. The people who decline to have their asexuality, bisexuality, polyamorousness, or aromanticism “cured” by neuronal surgery might not be very numerous, but I think John is right in supposing that there will be some. Those are who I thought he was asking about; those are who I described in my answer.
My favorite story by James H. Schmitz, “The End of the Line,” envisions a future where ordinary human beings have eaten such food for so many centuries that they are no longer adapted to eating anything else, and indeed would die if they tried to.
Skimming the draft Last-Modified: Sun, 13 Dec 2020 21:06:51 GMT:
Given the insignificance of the cultural stereotypes, it seems that that’s a part which could be trimmed back if you wanted to fit in something else; as it is it takes up nearly a third of the text to say “they talk as though each nation had its own typical personality, but it doesn’t make any practical difference”.
For “Climate”, in an ideal layout I’d have something like “-10-30°C (worldwide), 2-15°C (inhabited areas)”. That may take too much space though, and hyphenating negative numbers so that they won’t look wrong is hard.
A Tau soap opera might have a mysterious stranger moving into the area who claims to be a lottery winner, but his dark secret is that he built a megacorp from the ground up…
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At least I cut the bits on variations in architecture and urban form.
Perhaps I am too intimidated by the accusations that I grind out hacky planets of hats. On the other hand, my last two campaigns have each included one player who pored over the description of Tau Ceti to choose exactly the place of origin that would characterise his PC. I got a soldier from Hell and the son of two feckless fringe-dwellers from Avalon.
A Tau soap opera might have a mysterious stranger moving into the area who claims to be a lottery winner, but his dark secret is that he built a megacorp from the ground up…
Heh!
With a third page I could add a paragraph on “soap opera plots” for each world, and they might be very evocative. I could also restore the “Attractions”, which were well-received though technically trivial, and add a section on the Imperial presence and activities.
Or, if I cross out two out of every three words in the blather about national differences between the octants, and scavenge another 350 words by using 11-point type, I could spend 500 words on “attractions”, “soap opera”, and “Imperial presence and activities” while still fitting each briefing onto a two-page spread or one leaf of printout.
Perhaps my best way forward now is to write the extra sections and worry later about sweating the word count down.
For “Climate”, in an ideal layout I’d have something like “-10-30°C (worldwide), 2-15°C (inhabited areas)”. That may take too much space though, and hyphenating negative numbers so that they won’t look wrong is hard.
Well, human permanent settlements are never found where the annual average temperature is less than 0 °C or more than 30 °C. So the habitable areas listings could be trivialised by a sentence in the key.
The first paragraph of the running text says where the inhabited zone is, characterised the uninhabitability of the zone beyond it, and describes the pattern of settlement within it. What it omits is to say that as Tau Ceti’s average temperature of 9 °C is about 6 K cooler than Earth, the thermal equator on Tau Ceti is probably about 22 °C.
I’ll give it some thought. I might need to hack a little model of meridional transfer of heat to get figures that depend in a plausible way on the world’s size and air density.
Yeah, that’s a very strong indicator that you want to include that sort of material.
Personally, I wouldn’t be interested in the attractions, but then I’m not much interested in the attractions of most Earth places, either. On the other hand, the soap operas/telenovelas seem like a novel and clever idea.
If you come up with something like that I’d be interested to see it, whether you include it in Forty Exotic Worlds or not.
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