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beccaelizabethMy GURPS books I bought myself for xmas have arrived, Horror and Low Tech.
I have started reading little bits of Low Tech.
So far, China invented everything first. Everything. By several centuries.
They had some very useful plants, like bamboo, and insects, like mulberry silkworms and some lacquer bugs.
They also figured out how to make small quantities of high quality steel several centuries before everyone else.
There are also a whole stack of things where Arabic writing people got there first.
Honestly, Europe doesn't seem to be much cop at all in the first four tech levels.
We are not impressive.
If I'm thinking post apocalyptic low tech though it should be a bit different. Like, a lot of their problem was not having the theory. Trying to figure out chemistry without the periodic table of elements, or with working with earth water air fire as your basic elements, rather complicates things. Being unable to distinguish between different salts also makes things tricky, with recipes saying salt from location x because that was the closest they could get to saying a particular chemical. If you've had all that knowledge, and have posters of the periodic table, what happens after the fall? You no longer have an industrial tech base, post atomic zombies or whatever, so some things are not available. If global travel shuts down then some elements just aren't going to be available locally... at least without a lot of recycling. All tech would look like Tony in the cave, smashing up the incredibly advanced but useless to get at the 2 grams of shiny shiny metals. So what tech level would that be?
Alternate tech paths are usually written as TL (2+1) or whatever, but I'm thinking more TL (8-4). They're medieval again, not actually medieval.
Of course once you've ever had nanotech we're into sufficiently-advanced-science territory, and I'm just using the Magic rules for it. But that's kind of sidestepping the point.
Still, it's easier to use the rules for Soul Jar than to figure out a tech path that leads to brain mapping of a sort that's still useful to the select few.
Now I just have to decide what size gem they use for a jar, and where is most convenient to place the piercing that holds it on the body it maps. Do you say it's secretly plugged in to a nerve, or is it going wireless? Would an ear ring put it near the brain, or would that make it too obvious? Depends on the size of the gem. And where do you even get gems? Apparently all emeralds came from Egypt for many centuries. If you need emeralds to make your soul jar you're kind of out of luck... except this is post apocalyptic, so if you don't mind treating a trip to town like a zombie infested dungeon crawl you can just go to the shops. Or, after the most obvious sources are tapped, you'd end up looking in individual houses. Where the owners might still be lurching around.
If I used the spells the way GURPS does then they would have done all the thinking parts already, but no, I have stories and bend the rules to fit. I want to send my hero on a quest to find his father's soul jar, which might look like a signet ring, the secret sort that folds the really magical gem underneath to touch skin all the time. Or it could be a different item. A necklace that keeps the rock near the heart. An arm band, maybe tied on with leather or cloth and the stone is the only vaguely precious bit. A piercing like I was thinking... except that would fall off a skeleton, leaving less room for fun moments realising that moving rattling bone heap used to be someone you knew.
If it has to be on the head then there would be people wearing crowns that kind of sort of make them immortal. Aka targets.
Is it one jar per person? When is it decided which person? When you die is the obvious last minute. If you can steal it at any time up to that moment and retask it for your own immortality there'd be epic fights about it. Especially if they're limited items. If you can clean them out and start again... oh, that could get nasty.
When I was rolling up the magical medieval city I reckoned there were 24 houses in the Patrician sector, so I made that 24 Houses, which is a Greek alphabet. Tolly is Theta, and Theta owns quite a few properties... but they're most of the religious buildings in the sector. 3 shrines and 3 taverns. Like 3 churches with attached tea rooms. But Tolly wouldn't have anything to do with big beard in the sky religion. Solution: Soul Jars. Three different shrines, maybe they're three categories of soul, maybe they're three techs and I haven't thought of the other two. One for ex humans, one for AI, one for... something else. But if you can capture a copy of someone at the moment of their death and then talk to them later just by touching the stone... and, under the GURPS rules, risk being possessed by them if the soul had studied the right spells in advance... oh, you have all the plots in the world right there. You have the Babylon 5 Soul Hunter problem where people who believe this will work will try and use it on the 'best', however they describe it. But you also have a special sort of school, or a unique setting for ancestor worship. And it would be weirdly like a relative with dementia, if they didn't form new memories while they're these recordings in a gem. You could go visit them, but they'd never learn more about you. If you were a kid when you last met, they'd never know you grew up. Weird achey echoey stuff. You could get older than your father, see him from new angles as you grow up and start thinking of him as a kid that died too young. And if you had a whole series of stones, going back to the high tech times, you have an excuse for a higher tech level for those that study at this shrine. You could have lecturers from the golden age in there... or you could have a random grab bag of a few centuries worth of the rich and lucky. Maybe the oldest stones would belong to the youngest new adopters, or be children being insured by their parents. The stones wouldn't have been started as a legacy for all mankind, at least not the particular collection that ended up half way up a mountain in the Pennines. So it would be like a random bomb shelter full of survivors, only more compact.
Being the theoretical owner of these shrines is all the excuse needed for any amount of local politics. There would be religious schisms that reckon they shouldn't ask the dead, that it constitutes necromancy and must be stomped out, that the oldest dead were the ones that wrecked the world in the first place and simply can't be trusted. And then there'd be those hungry for knowledge, trying to wring every drop out of the ancestors. And kids growing up with it - Tolly growing up with it - they'd have access to friends, like internet friends, only as voices in their head. But their friends would be read only, never learning, never growing up. Peter Pan, but you can't join him. You'd outgrow your friends year on year, graduate to new ones. No classmates in this kind of school, or not ones that grow with you. It would be a bizarre kind of lonely, to lack continuity like that. Like changing schools every year. And you might get an elevated impression of your own maturity, or intelligence, with only that for comparison.
If you have a lot of students and the other kind of school for comparison you could get the best of both.
... but a theta kid growing up spending too much time in the shrines would be much more fun to write.
Shrine people would always be there and never get bored of him. They'd be so eager to talk at all they'd always want to talk to him, and they wouldn't remember if he asked the same things before. Like re-reading his favourite books, only more interactive.
Real world people would not be as convenient. They'd also be a lot less knowledgeable, many of them, about the things that interest him. Real world people are most likely the same people every year as well, from a town of 8000, which is very socially stratified. And they'd never have travelled. Nobody would take their kids out into the zombie infested wastelands for picnics. The town walls would be the edges of their world.
Shrine people could have been anywhere. Everywhere.
It would be ever so tempting to spend too much time in the shrine, and only come out for things that voices in your head aren't going to be good for.
ie puberty.
Lonely, smart, over educated, under experienced, shuffled off to play with the recordings instead of being raised by regular interactive people... oh that's a recipe for wizardry and disaster right there.
Excellent.
Tolly's a smith, armourer, and inventor. But he can do things with it no one else on Earth still can, so that's close enough to wizardry for local purposes.
And if you knew people could go into a soul jar like that, you'd never quite lose anyone. You'd never quite let go.
Soul Jars would be very different from true AI. Those would be interactive, and they would learn. They would learn everything, given enough time. But they would think different. So if you have a shrine for talking to AI, next to one for the ancestors, you'd have quite the contrast. They'd be more alien, like animal spirits, or stranger things. A different order of creation.
But they'd only ever be able to talk.
... it's not like anyone would build them a body ...
Would every family have an AI, or is it the special preserve of the Theta?
If they start with each family having password protected files then they'd end up with differently evolving AI.
And not every family would want to interact with their one.
The ones that did would shape their AI by their interactions, like raising a child, but one that is rapidly older and more knowledgeable than those shaping it.
They'd end up with a family spirit of a different kind from ancestor spirits. Maybe go Roman, with lares and penates? Hmmm, no, not spirits of place, simply old spirits with a history; need a different word.
But we've got a lot of areas of different nanotechnology, a lot of it pretty much out of control. AI might be what is meant to control it. Then you've got something like spirit mediated magic, only with a techy handwave.
But in town the only magic is the healer's herbs and the King's water, ever plentiful.
Theta's shrine is just access to a kind of collective memory with a learning interface. It doesn't preserve individuals like the stones do, but it is shaped by all the inputs of the past. It just doesn't interpret them through the filters or with the priorities of a human being.
So again, there's theta kids, which in this generation means Tolly, and they're growing up with frozen ghosts on the one hand and alien AI spirits on the other.
I don't know what the third shrine holds.
... maybe it's empty. Maybe they're keeping it for whatever happens next.
Or for when what happens next, posthumanity, comes back to visit.
Past/Present/Future, all of them ghosts.
... yes I watched a Christmas Carol again recently.
But if you've randomly rolled 3 shrines, it is one of the tempting configurations.
Other trinities are of course available, but I want something cold and knowledge based.
I was reading that the Hagia Sophia means sacred knowledge. It's literally a temple to knowledge. That was what I was thinking of, when I tried to figure what the Theta family would value enough to build shrines to it.
But all of them have their taverns attached, so it's weirdly like an internet cafe, only instead of the whole living world out there like the internet, there's these shards of spirits.
... actually you could have an internet cafe for one of them, but if you have a working internet it's hard to get people like Carry the messenger to wander around. I suppose she'd be for anywhere smaller than 8K people that doesn't have a surviving internet shrine. But a world that's still able to talk to every corner is a very different feel than a world where the walls are the edge of knowledge as well as view.
I already made the city be very xenophobic. It's a hangover of trying to keep the zombies out, when they're infectious. There's magic out there that is incompatible with the city magic, and city magic is about healing and staying alive. So there's the citizens, who fit, and there's the Strangers, who by law don't. If the Theta had an internet cafe they'd be talking to Strangers. That wouldn't go over well with the current administration.
Strangers are outside the proper walls, and in an emergency are unlikely to get inside. They're unprotected and they don't have a voice in the administration. The kind of cultural adjustments necessary to see all those people and still be willing to close the gates on them when they most need the help... not friendly. Not friendly at all.
Talking to the dead and talking to Strangers... well how do you prove it's not the same thing? You can't see any more of them.
So Theta could have an internet, it just wouldn't be popular. All that foreign nonsense.
I don't know though, it would change the feel quite substantially.
Soul jars and AI I'm sure of though.
Shall have to ponder that third shrine more.
Okay, so, if I found it as easy to write my dissertation as I do to design entire worlds, I would probably be done by now.
but then if I found it as easy to write the stories as do the worldbuilding, I'd have at least two novels worth done, from the worldbuilding for Incorrupt and for the Stone Circle.
Probably a lot more, those are just last year and the year before.
A lot of this stuff, I don't really start with the rule books, I have characters in my head and bits of plot and I just go through the rules to sift out interesting bits to build on.
I'd never roll something up and go oh no I can't make that work now.
This stuff is fun.
Even with a headache.
(Headaches are annoying.)
I have started reading little bits of Low Tech.
So far, China invented everything first. Everything. By several centuries.
They had some very useful plants, like bamboo, and insects, like mulberry silkworms and some lacquer bugs.
They also figured out how to make small quantities of high quality steel several centuries before everyone else.
There are also a whole stack of things where Arabic writing people got there first.
Honestly, Europe doesn't seem to be much cop at all in the first four tech levels.
We are not impressive.
If I'm thinking post apocalyptic low tech though it should be a bit different. Like, a lot of their problem was not having the theory. Trying to figure out chemistry without the periodic table of elements, or with working with earth water air fire as your basic elements, rather complicates things. Being unable to distinguish between different salts also makes things tricky, with recipes saying salt from location x because that was the closest they could get to saying a particular chemical. If you've had all that knowledge, and have posters of the periodic table, what happens after the fall? You no longer have an industrial tech base, post atomic zombies or whatever, so some things are not available. If global travel shuts down then some elements just aren't going to be available locally... at least without a lot of recycling. All tech would look like Tony in the cave, smashing up the incredibly advanced but useless to get at the 2 grams of shiny shiny metals. So what tech level would that be?
Alternate tech paths are usually written as TL (2+1) or whatever, but I'm thinking more TL (8-4). They're medieval again, not actually medieval.
Of course once you've ever had nanotech we're into sufficiently-advanced-science territory, and I'm just using the Magic rules for it. But that's kind of sidestepping the point.
Still, it's easier to use the rules for Soul Jar than to figure out a tech path that leads to brain mapping of a sort that's still useful to the select few.
Now I just have to decide what size gem they use for a jar, and where is most convenient to place the piercing that holds it on the body it maps. Do you say it's secretly plugged in to a nerve, or is it going wireless? Would an ear ring put it near the brain, or would that make it too obvious? Depends on the size of the gem. And where do you even get gems? Apparently all emeralds came from Egypt for many centuries. If you need emeralds to make your soul jar you're kind of out of luck... except this is post apocalyptic, so if you don't mind treating a trip to town like a zombie infested dungeon crawl you can just go to the shops. Or, after the most obvious sources are tapped, you'd end up looking in individual houses. Where the owners might still be lurching around.
If I used the spells the way GURPS does then they would have done all the thinking parts already, but no, I have stories and bend the rules to fit. I want to send my hero on a quest to find his father's soul jar, which might look like a signet ring, the secret sort that folds the really magical gem underneath to touch skin all the time. Or it could be a different item. A necklace that keeps the rock near the heart. An arm band, maybe tied on with leather or cloth and the stone is the only vaguely precious bit. A piercing like I was thinking... except that would fall off a skeleton, leaving less room for fun moments realising that moving rattling bone heap used to be someone you knew.
If it has to be on the head then there would be people wearing crowns that kind of sort of make them immortal. Aka targets.
Is it one jar per person? When is it decided which person? When you die is the obvious last minute. If you can steal it at any time up to that moment and retask it for your own immortality there'd be epic fights about it. Especially if they're limited items. If you can clean them out and start again... oh, that could get nasty.
When I was rolling up the magical medieval city I reckoned there were 24 houses in the Patrician sector, so I made that 24 Houses, which is a Greek alphabet. Tolly is Theta, and Theta owns quite a few properties... but they're most of the religious buildings in the sector. 3 shrines and 3 taverns. Like 3 churches with attached tea rooms. But Tolly wouldn't have anything to do with big beard in the sky religion. Solution: Soul Jars. Three different shrines, maybe they're three categories of soul, maybe they're three techs and I haven't thought of the other two. One for ex humans, one for AI, one for... something else. But if you can capture a copy of someone at the moment of their death and then talk to them later just by touching the stone... and, under the GURPS rules, risk being possessed by them if the soul had studied the right spells in advance... oh, you have all the plots in the world right there. You have the Babylon 5 Soul Hunter problem where people who believe this will work will try and use it on the 'best', however they describe it. But you also have a special sort of school, or a unique setting for ancestor worship. And it would be weirdly like a relative with dementia, if they didn't form new memories while they're these recordings in a gem. You could go visit them, but they'd never learn more about you. If you were a kid when you last met, they'd never know you grew up. Weird achey echoey stuff. You could get older than your father, see him from new angles as you grow up and start thinking of him as a kid that died too young. And if you had a whole series of stones, going back to the high tech times, you have an excuse for a higher tech level for those that study at this shrine. You could have lecturers from the golden age in there... or you could have a random grab bag of a few centuries worth of the rich and lucky. Maybe the oldest stones would belong to the youngest new adopters, or be children being insured by their parents. The stones wouldn't have been started as a legacy for all mankind, at least not the particular collection that ended up half way up a mountain in the Pennines. So it would be like a random bomb shelter full of survivors, only more compact.
Being the theoretical owner of these shrines is all the excuse needed for any amount of local politics. There would be religious schisms that reckon they shouldn't ask the dead, that it constitutes necromancy and must be stomped out, that the oldest dead were the ones that wrecked the world in the first place and simply can't be trusted. And then there'd be those hungry for knowledge, trying to wring every drop out of the ancestors. And kids growing up with it - Tolly growing up with it - they'd have access to friends, like internet friends, only as voices in their head. But their friends would be read only, never learning, never growing up. Peter Pan, but you can't join him. You'd outgrow your friends year on year, graduate to new ones. No classmates in this kind of school, or not ones that grow with you. It would be a bizarre kind of lonely, to lack continuity like that. Like changing schools every year. And you might get an elevated impression of your own maturity, or intelligence, with only that for comparison.
If you have a lot of students and the other kind of school for comparison you could get the best of both.
... but a theta kid growing up spending too much time in the shrines would be much more fun to write.
Shrine people would always be there and never get bored of him. They'd be so eager to talk at all they'd always want to talk to him, and they wouldn't remember if he asked the same things before. Like re-reading his favourite books, only more interactive.
Real world people would not be as convenient. They'd also be a lot less knowledgeable, many of them, about the things that interest him. Real world people are most likely the same people every year as well, from a town of 8000, which is very socially stratified. And they'd never have travelled. Nobody would take their kids out into the zombie infested wastelands for picnics. The town walls would be the edges of their world.
Shrine people could have been anywhere. Everywhere.
It would be ever so tempting to spend too much time in the shrine, and only come out for things that voices in your head aren't going to be good for.
ie puberty.
Lonely, smart, over educated, under experienced, shuffled off to play with the recordings instead of being raised by regular interactive people... oh that's a recipe for wizardry and disaster right there.
Excellent.
Tolly's a smith, armourer, and inventor. But he can do things with it no one else on Earth still can, so that's close enough to wizardry for local purposes.
And if you knew people could go into a soul jar like that, you'd never quite lose anyone. You'd never quite let go.
Soul Jars would be very different from true AI. Those would be interactive, and they would learn. They would learn everything, given enough time. But they would think different. So if you have a shrine for talking to AI, next to one for the ancestors, you'd have quite the contrast. They'd be more alien, like animal spirits, or stranger things. A different order of creation.
But they'd only ever be able to talk.
... it's not like anyone would build them a body ...
Would every family have an AI, or is it the special preserve of the Theta?
If they start with each family having password protected files then they'd end up with differently evolving AI.
And not every family would want to interact with their one.
The ones that did would shape their AI by their interactions, like raising a child, but one that is rapidly older and more knowledgeable than those shaping it.
They'd end up with a family spirit of a different kind from ancestor spirits. Maybe go Roman, with lares and penates? Hmmm, no, not spirits of place, simply old spirits with a history; need a different word.
But we've got a lot of areas of different nanotechnology, a lot of it pretty much out of control. AI might be what is meant to control it. Then you've got something like spirit mediated magic, only with a techy handwave.
But in town the only magic is the healer's herbs and the King's water, ever plentiful.
Theta's shrine is just access to a kind of collective memory with a learning interface. It doesn't preserve individuals like the stones do, but it is shaped by all the inputs of the past. It just doesn't interpret them through the filters or with the priorities of a human being.
So again, there's theta kids, which in this generation means Tolly, and they're growing up with frozen ghosts on the one hand and alien AI spirits on the other.
I don't know what the third shrine holds.
... maybe it's empty. Maybe they're keeping it for whatever happens next.
Or for when what happens next, posthumanity, comes back to visit.
Past/Present/Future, all of them ghosts.
... yes I watched a Christmas Carol again recently.
But if you've randomly rolled 3 shrines, it is one of the tempting configurations.
Other trinities are of course available, but I want something cold and knowledge based.
I was reading that the Hagia Sophia means sacred knowledge. It's literally a temple to knowledge. That was what I was thinking of, when I tried to figure what the Theta family would value enough to build shrines to it.
But all of them have their taverns attached, so it's weirdly like an internet cafe, only instead of the whole living world out there like the internet, there's these shards of spirits.
... actually you could have an internet cafe for one of them, but if you have a working internet it's hard to get people like Carry the messenger to wander around. I suppose she'd be for anywhere smaller than 8K people that doesn't have a surviving internet shrine. But a world that's still able to talk to every corner is a very different feel than a world where the walls are the edge of knowledge as well as view.
I already made the city be very xenophobic. It's a hangover of trying to keep the zombies out, when they're infectious. There's magic out there that is incompatible with the city magic, and city magic is about healing and staying alive. So there's the citizens, who fit, and there's the Strangers, who by law don't. If the Theta had an internet cafe they'd be talking to Strangers. That wouldn't go over well with the current administration.
Strangers are outside the proper walls, and in an emergency are unlikely to get inside. They're unprotected and they don't have a voice in the administration. The kind of cultural adjustments necessary to see all those people and still be willing to close the gates on them when they most need the help... not friendly. Not friendly at all.
Talking to the dead and talking to Strangers... well how do you prove it's not the same thing? You can't see any more of them.
So Theta could have an internet, it just wouldn't be popular. All that foreign nonsense.
I don't know though, it would change the feel quite substantially.
Soul jars and AI I'm sure of though.
Shall have to ponder that third shrine more.
Okay, so, if I found it as easy to write my dissertation as I do to design entire worlds, I would probably be done by now.
but then if I found it as easy to write the stories as do the worldbuilding, I'd have at least two novels worth done, from the worldbuilding for Incorrupt and for the Stone Circle.
Probably a lot more, those are just last year and the year before.
A lot of this stuff, I don't really start with the rule books, I have characters in my head and bits of plot and I just go through the rules to sift out interesting bits to build on.
I'd never roll something up and go oh no I can't make that work now.
This stuff is fun.
Even with a headache.
(Headaches are annoying.)
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Date: 2013-01-30 07:05 am (UTC)