What about worlds where the residents are not all that good at what they do?
Here are some examples:
1. Red Shirt Horror World: This one is listed in the back archives, and unfortunately is thus unfindable. The idea is a world where diving behind cover, and getting weapons to deal with the Things is considered Sheer Genius!
2. The Verse of the Incompetent Santa was created by Tom Day. Its the world where every year Santa get kidnapped by some Force of Evil. This year, all the heroes have been kidnapped by the FOE in Legion of Doom style, and the only person who can save Christmas is ...you.
3. Chillblaines is a world where the reigning deity decided that having everyone come down with colds and fevers very frequently was preferable to war. The verser will be very effective for the first...maybe twenty-four hours until...ahhhh-chooooo!
4. Verse of the Enlightened Pansy: I just watched a Doctor Who episode yesterday (which I enjoyed), but one has to laugh a bit when Dear Old Grandpa is locked in a car, and gas is spewing into the car. Sounds tragic right? And his fairly hefty adult granddaughter is standing outside the glass window (and he's no little guy either) banging ineffectually on the glass window. And the good Doctor, who's handled Daleks and Cybermen, and has a sonic screwdriver, which one might think could shatter the glass is reduced to banging a bit on the window, but softly so as to not bruise his purty hands.
Early in the show, the Doctor avers how he finds that people with guns tend to be the enemy. Now the show is honest enough to let the UNIT commander jab back about the Doc's weapons...but still.
You also saw a gung-ho reporterette who couldn't handle being locked in a car, and having it dumped in a placid river.
Its like any solution that involves the teeniest bit of effective violence (even to glass...after all, its got feelings) is not even considered.
How to achieve this world:
Anyone with a 2@ Intellectual or Social skill or higher cannot have a Physical skill that is higher than 1@7.
If you have a 2@ or higher Intellectual or Social skill, it is a Difficult Wchallenge to use effective violence. That is, you're allowed to be violent in ways you know won't do much. You can kick and squirm, and shriek,a nd pound your fists on the Cyberman's plate armor, but you can't hit it with a sledgehammer.
There is also a Class Element to this. The Social/Intellectual Elite are aware of their physical inferiority to the 'hulking brutes', and so they go out of their way to make sure that any attempt by a hulking brute (as they call normal guys behind their backs) is sabotaged, and/or punished in some way. This Class protection sometimes reaches suicidal levels.
The ideal solution is of course for the 'brute' to realize the ineffectualness of violence, and let the clever elite solve the problem.
The elite rely on cleverness, and indeed, they are quite good at it. They have a lot of practise at it, and they are always thinking That Way...at least their heroes are.
It is said that to a man with a hammer, all problems look like nails. This is a good point which the elite make over and over again. The opposite point, that to a man without a hammer, no problems look like nails, even the ones that are is not made by anyone. And anyone who tries to make it soon finds themselves socially harrassed, losing their job, or having their book contract revoked.
And this is how the clever wimps rule the world.
5. In the Libertarian Revolution Cycle of Worlds portrayed in one of my WAW's, there is one world where old woman trade in their jewels for a chance to buy the fertility drug that the Trader is selling. Its a world of old people who chose not to have children.
'the fool contented all in self, living shall forfeit fair renown...'
They partied, and they didn't believe in the future. They were good socialists like the Europeans of today. And now they realize that there simply is not enough energy and will to save their civilization as it falls to pieces.
But, if they can have children, and enough of them, perhaps they can pull their civilization back from the brink of the Collapse.
As it is, in twenty years, population is going to shrink by half. Hard jobs are being undone. The roads are cracking, and no one can repair them. The economy is in the tenth year of a genteel recession that is rapidly grower harsher.
Some people want to place their bet on robots, and others even more ambitious want to upload their brains into the robots, and continue the Party. But, the brilliance to do the job is lacking.
Its unlikely the robot path will save them.
7. Low Psi World: What if the only things you could believe in were the things you saw? Patriotism, Courage, Honor were not even words because the concepts behind them did not exist. One did not plan for the future because the Future, as a concept, did not exist.
The people of Ssal's Land, a planet near the galactic center, knew they had a problem. Their neighboring suns (quite close, less than a lightyear away as this was the galactic center) were about to undergo a prolonged period of turbulence.
The decision was made to put everyone in the population into cryo sleep, and sleep the centuries away while the robots tended their bodies.
Unfortunately, no one knew that Ssal's Land was in a sub-universe. Like a number of places in the greater universe, it was really a separate reality. On a cosmic level, the main universe had much in common with a block of Swiss cheese. Dozens of sub-universes littered each galaxy.
With the only intelligent beings in Ssal's Land sleeping, the psi bias began to drop.
It had been low already. No one noted that Tekes could not work there because no Teke had gone (they were quite rare, and Ssal's Land was a frontier world of a great civilization.) The civ established there were a bunch of greedy amoralists, and so the psi bias dropped further.
The first explorers had labelled it 'oddspace' because the greater galactic powers have some idea of bias. If they had come while the civ established itself, they would have labelled it 'verboten space'. Later, once the people woke...the explorers if they had come would not have labelled it anything.
As exploration is a concept first before its an activity.
And so, amidst a technological civilization run by robots, hordes of uncivilized barbarians loot and pillage. They do not think of the next hour, let alone the next day.
The robots try to rescue them to some degree, but the robots can't understand why their masters are acting like this. So sometimes the robots 'take samples' to 'examine'. No viral disease has been discovered. And now the robots are 'monsters' to the persons on the planet.
Babies are raised by the robots.
No one can read or write.
The robots have long ago sent a report, and Ssal's Land has become a horror to the neighbouring star systems where sane and civilized humans and aliens interact.
8. World of Illogic: This is a high-psi world with telepathy and empathy available to all. Its used to hook everyone into the world mind.
And the world mind is crazy, illogical, and very strong.
And everyone buys into the world mind's ideas as it has access to their brains, and it can overwhelm individual defenses.
9. For the past two thousand years, anyone with a scrap of ambition or vision or good sense has left the smoking ruin that is Earth (after the Fascist Wars which obliterated major portions of continents). The Galactics came and offered to everyone the chance to leave Earth.
By their moral reckoning, Earth was the site of many great crimes, the original nuclear strikes of the Fascist Wars being only the latest. The fact that the surviving defenders were able to wipe out their attackers reassured the Galactics that some humans were worth saving. By their lights, if one murdered, or failed to defend oneself, then one was defective. They feel that Earth is a contributing factor in Humans being defective, so they don't improve it.
So, Humans have spread across the galaxy in colonies and on planets of their own. But on Earth, the last, most hopeless remnants of the gene pool...the cowardly, the ignoble, the shiftless all gather around and complain about the Leavers who are traitors to Earth in their book. And then they spend the rest of their time trying to steal from each other.
10. 10,000 A.D.--Each year, another rain of cosmic rays causes mutations in the human genome. Each year, strong mutations are culled by natural selection, but weak mutations might pass muster. Gradually, the genetic load of humanity increases.
No one ever finds a time or place where a mutation actually added complexity to a human. Some humans do better for a while because a mutation helps them out. The Zero Asthma mutation helped out as the skies grew poisoned. One did not react to the poisons in the air, one simply breathed them in.
But, those who had lost the defenses against allergens found that they had also lost their defenses against the Plague of Year Four Thousand.
Humanity grew stooped, hard of hearing, pustule covered, and slimy. Bones were crooked, and soon one eye grew to be more common than two milky white eyes.
The beauty queen of Year Five Thousand would have been considered for plastic surgery as significantly deformed if she had been born in the Year Two Thousand.
By the Year Ten Thousand, the planet was creaking along on limited resources, and there was no will to find more. People lived in the Ancient Complexes built in the Year Seven Thousand to survive for megayears. But they survived poorly.
And a resident of the Year Ten Thousand would be bipedal, but not be recognizable as a human to a Year Two Thousand human. In the Year Ten Thousand, Humanity and its DNA are so riddled with copying errors that despite genetic engineering (and sometimes because of it) that few in the know think that Humanity as a species will survive to the Year Eleven Thousand.
And the typical resident of that time would react to a modern human, much as a modern human would react to one of Tolkien's Elves.
