Its obvious from the book, and from its logic that there are pan-versal structures. The most common is the Smaller Multiverse like a line of worlds that runs from Chaos to Order, and almost all have a high magical bias. Also, every story is true somewhere so the story goes, and pan-universal structures are not exactly common in fiction, but they do exist.
And let me drop that thread for a second.
One of the evils besetting Old Earth was an abundance of competent, intelligent, and ambitious people. There were whole groups of elites suited to running things as they were, but only one group could run things.
In truth, what they were lacking was compassion and vision. An opportunity was placed before them to rise above, to make a grander, and greater land than any that had been seen before. Instead, they opted for stasis, for doing things as they'd done them before.
Which left the various groups of elites out of power. Civil war threatened, and this was not a world in which civil war might be survivable. Loitering remotely piloted vehicles armed with Fusion bomb pumped lasers, and hypervelocity beadpistols had replaced fighter jets and tanks. A man could control an rpv with voice and eye clicks, and with his hand hold a pistol that could shoot five thousand rounds per minutes of beads that accelerated due to airflow before breaking apart at slightly below escape velocity. A few seconds flow of beads, a mere pulse, could reduce an old-style tank to confetti. A 'fuse-laser' could turn a city block into a puddle in a fraction of a second.
And war was coming.
So all the sides were happy to accept exile for the losers. Earth spent itself nearly into bankruptcy to send the Five Ships out. The propaganda was of brave voyagers. The truth was War or Exile.
What happened on Old Earth afterwards? Some thought it turned inward, and became cautious and a touch repressive. Others thought that the war they had tried to dodge came to them anyways. No one thought that Earth would send any more into space in the next several centuries as much of the wealth of the world had gone with the exiles.
Of those who fled into space, there were four powerful factions, and one weak one. The powerful naturally took the best for themselves, and the nearer stars, and the finest of Earth's museums, and set themselves up. What happened to them is uncertain.
At least one must have suffered a total societal collapse all the way down to using bone for weapons because flintknapping was too complicated. One may have created its own stellar system wide enterprise as it was interested in the asteroid belt and the great wealth to be found there....or that system might be dead with space factories and habitats half-built and the makers starved. There was a slight chance of one developing into a local star federation, but who might do that was uncertain. One would have suffered a fall, and then begun climbing back up, and was no doubt thinking of travelling the stars like the Ancients did in a few centuries. They had fallen as far as steam power, but now, a mere fifty years later, they had aircars.
But, our colony, the weakest faction, had to be satisfied with the leavings. They got some wealth, some seeds (which mostly did nothing for them), but the Mona Lisa and David were already spoken for. So too the great space habs that Earth had spent nearly three decades building.
The weakest faction were firm believers in the value of the wise, the sensitive, and the strong to guide things. And so they set out with a group, and with another group of refugees that had been taken from refugee camps around the world. Again, they had the leavings of these camps as the others got to pick first. After all, each elite needed its followers.
And thus Old Earth got rid of elite troublemakers, and emptied out its refugee camps at the same time.
Upon arriving in the system they named High Frieresc after their leader's home city of Frieresc back on Old Earth, they began to study. Happily, they found a functioning biology that seemed as if it would be friendly to humans.
The sheer mathematical impossibility of this did not bother them as they were Darwinists at that time. Later they changed, but not by logic.
However, there were problems with the system. It was a trinary system, which had not been obvious to them back home to them. The three suns produced enough heat to bake an egg in its shell on the planetary surface. They also produced enough radiation to thoroughly scramble a genetic code.
They considered leaving, but then they found that their stardrive, which was rated for ten thousand lightyears, and had gone barely five hundred had maybe a hundred left in it. It seemed Old Earth had a few tricks up its sleeve. Perhaps Earth had sent them out in the hope that they would die, and had managed to help things along.
This revelation produced a coup d' etat. The security forces took over the Ship. They argued that insufficient paranoia, that they had not been listened too enough, that weak-willed leadership had contributed to this disaster. They had a point as the former leadership had been dithering for a month after the scope of the problem became apparent.
Things got moving. Exploration teams were sent down because as King Johannes the First (nee' Security Chief Clark Johannes)oointed out, they had to live here, so they might as well find out how.
The silvery surface of the planet turned out to be leaves, with a very high aluminum concentrate. They lost a shuttle when something exploded underneath it. Things seemed hopeless until the King ordered a nuke strike on the 'surface. The launch was meant to clear back enough space to peer through with radar. Instead, it caused an planetwide explosion at the level of the silvertop. Much later, they found out why, and realized that the silvertop explodes on its own every fifty years or so.
The radar went down, and down and down, and just saw more, and more tree trunks and branches. Eventually, several hundred miles down, the radar energy was attenuated enough to stop returning a discerible signal. Which meant that the planet was a solid forrest at least three hundred miles deep with an atmosphere of two hundred miles above the 'silvertop'.
Botanists suggested that the silvertop was a protection against the excessive radiation and heat. Biologist suggested that humans could live somewhere. Military types pointed out the fruits hanging from some of the silverleaves that read to sniffers as nitroglycerine.
The fruits were what had killed the shuttle. And since the suns gave so much energy, it seemed that the trees stored some energy in long chain, high energy molecules aka explosives.
The problem with landing a shuttle was a very difficult procedure involving dropping men on ropes with tools. The Firstmen (who later became important, and were known as the knightly Order of the Axe) built a platform for shuttles to land on from the native trees, and from the Ship material.
People started to be ferried down. This was a significant problem as the Ship had been designed to land, and unload its gorging holds. However, no one could think of a means to land the Ship with its multi-million tonne mass. The Launch Deck on Earth had been made of carbon-carbon chains which were tens of thousands of times stronger than the rather sturdy trees of the Wood of High Frieresc.
MORE LATER....
I'm surprised that the initial nuclear blast does not create a chain reaction of exploding fruit which if it does not decimate the planet's surface at least makes the clearing much wider and deeper than anticipated.
Just a thought.
--M. J. Young
Thanks. Yeah, I'll edit it to make it a world covering explosion which should be pretty interesting if the verser is on the ship, or if its an event that is told about after three hundred years later.
There does need to be some protection against this mass explosion happening naturally. Otherwise, it would happen all the time. Or maybe it does.
Every fifty or so years, the sky explodes. Hmmm, that works. And the nuke blast just triggered it off early.
Thus the earliest settlements are forced deeper than the later settlements. And thus I have an excuse for hi-tech 'dungeons' which later get abandoned as the silvertop grows back, and the Things in the Dark Below rise up into their natural habitat zone (yeah, if you start climbing down the tree below the human habitable zone, you start to meet all kinds of things...first its mega-tigers, and then deeper its some sort of giant spider with a stinger), and go deep enough, and the air gets filled with pollen,and deeper still and you can't breathe.
Some of that is me just making notes to myself.
They're good notes. This looks like a lot of fun.
--M. J. Young
The initial colonists, after recovering from the shock of seeing the world 'turn to flame', were relieved to find it was only the top tenth of a mile that was burnt. Still, they had to go down two miles before they reached a level where the radiation was low enough to be beneficial, and the air temperature was cool enough to be bearable.
They tried to go down deeper, but the Things That Dwell Below, included six-legged nine hundred pound 'megatigers', and twelve foot long maneating caterpillars. Below that were the Ambush Spiders, who are nearly ten feet wide, and choose a position over a likely passage and wait. Prey passes through, and they stab him with their spear-tongue which injects venom.
Below that, the air turns heavily pollinated, and then it breaks into purely unbreathable air as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide counts go way up. There are things that live down here No one has gone below the Breathless Zone, although a bathysphere on a cable could do the job. Supposedly, in King Johannes the First's reign, this was attempted, but the 'sphere did not come back up from its descent into the Breathless Zone, let alone the deeper levels of the forrest. Only a snapped cable was retrieved.
However, in this Time of Exploration, which features in stories, as tales of Doomed but Brave People, they found a number of mosses, frogs, and flowers. Some of these when gathered, reduced, and purified had very interesting properties. A few phenomenal poisons resulted, as did 'rigor mortis' which flowerdust (from the Mortis flower) gives the appearance of death for ten hours. Some hallucinogens, and natural opiates also resulted. The opiates were taught to the medics as even then the leadership could see the handwriting on the wall. Herbalism was going to make a comeback.
The hallucinogens however were kept secret by security as they followed their old habits. A few experiments revealed that some of the 'lucies' had shocking effects. Visions of moving items with one's mind were not illusions, but reality. Visions of seeing the past and the future were also verified.
The leadership had discovered some psi-active drugs that turned latent espers and tekes into actives. A course of these drugs, and a training program was devised. Eventually, it became a commonplace for sixteen year old nobility, the grandchildren of the security force, to take a half year and 'develop their noble powers'. Not all survived, and some that survived were drug addicted, and some were insane. Not all developed powers either. It became legend that you got your powers during the Glory as it was called, and that those were the only powers you could develop. You could improve your telepathy, for example, but you could never learn telekinesis if you had not demonstrated it during the Glory.
The silvertop grew back over the space of ten years, and the Things That Dwell Below moved up as their current life zone got too shady for them. They moved into what had been the Human habitable zone, which is a space about a half-mile thick, and began to feast on Humans. Of course, Humanity fought back, but in the end, the Things were too much.
One problem is that Humans are good at spotting threats in front of them, but not so good at defending a sphere. While the local creatures were designed for three-dimensional combat and ambush. The Ship had brought monkeys, and they survived, and eventually spread through the trees because they could adapt to three-dimensional threats.
The initial generation of colonists was forced to abandon their hi-tech living facilities, and move upwards. There they built new houses in the trees. They carved out tunnels from trunks, and built treehouses, but they had dropped technologically, and could not get it back.
Three hundred years later, a nobility exists with varying psionic abilities. Small villages dot the Zone, and live lives bound to their village by law. A baker's son is a baker, and may not leave his village without permission of his lord who grants it for Faire Days at the Castlehall every three months, or if a petition (which costs substantial money) is presented to him.
The nobles have staked out large areas of the Zone as hunting grounds, and encouraged megatigers to climb above their natural habitat (The result has been a breeding advantage for a section of the megatiger populace that did not have an advantage before. Smaller, but still dangerous megatigers are able to lose heat more quickly, and thus can survive in the Human Habitable Zone. These are the runts of the litter, who would have been eaten before, but with Human noble help they've been established in 'planetary parks' in the Human Zone so that the nobles have hunting sport.)
MORE LATER...
The verser arrives in the Human Habitable Zone a few miles from a village. If he joins up to the village, he finds they have a difficulty.
Some of the Hunt Tigers (the smaller megatigers) are leaving the planetary park, and are snacking on humans from the village. The villagers are forbidden on pain of death from hunting or trapping the tigers as that would spoil the nobles' sport. Informal pleas for help have been rejected as 'not in the proper form' so the villagers are putting together a very handsome, illustrated by gold paint petition on a scroll for relief.
This will be rejected on a technicality as it will be addressed to the old count who has died, and left his son in charge. The son and his cohorts do not care about the villagers, and in fact, would appreciate it if the villagers died. That way, the planetary park could be expanded, and made more readily accessible to Castlehall. And the village of Mor Ltai could be transformed into a hunting lodge suitable for young nobles.
The nobles are descendants of the security force that arranged a coup d' etat against the Captain. They believe that they are Psi Men, and thus finer, nobler, more sensitive than the peasant clods who have less feelings, and more primitive ones at that. Also, the peasants don't have Psi powers, and know that they can't have them.
Unfortunately for the Psi Men, anyone can have psi powers. It requires some work to activate them, but the lowest peasant is actually more capable than the nobles. The reason is that the nobles have become inbred, and are thus not as mentally stable.
One further problem is that the method of achieving psi powers is likely to cause mental illness in many of the recipients as its a drug based program.
And last, the Captain and his chief officers fled the Ship after they were routed. Somewhere on this planet is a village where the rightful rulers hid, and had children. It could be this one, or another one. There are certain devices that offer control of the Ship greater than the False Kings have hidden away.
And of course, some people own some small bits of technology here and there. One man might own a laser blaster with three shots left to it, and another four villages away might have a small gem that can whisper strange words to the sleeper, and another ten villages on might have a small chime that when rung will drive away Ambush Spiders.
This world has 12@5 Psionics, 15@10 Body, 14@1 Technology, and 2@5 Magic. It is an Alliance world.
=================================
While this needs to be re-written a bit, I think that might be enough for this world.
I think it's an excellent world altogether. I've a couple questions about the psionics.
You answered the first, that it is not that the villagers cannot learn psionics but that they believe they cannot, which means they will not attempt to learn them. However, your answer leads me to two other questions.
The first is because you state that the peasants would be more capable than the nobles were they to learn psionics, due to the fact that the nobles are mentally unstable from inbreeding. That's good, descriptively, but I want to know how it is supported mechanically. I find it difficult to imagine that all peasants have Psi BRAs higher than all nobles--at least some nobles must have high persuasions, intuitions, or will powers, to retain their positions.
The best guess I can suggest is that there is a "mental instability penalty", probably on a scale from -1 to -20 depending on the degree of mental instability. Most nobles are probably toward the high end on this. The effect of the drugs which induce psionic ability might be then be tied to a GE roll in an interestingly effective way. Rolls above 17 would create a mental instability penalty (part of the mental illness you suggest) by the formula Roll-17=penalty; thus a roll of 30 would create a mental instability penalty of -13, but that being rare peasants (about forty-five percent of them) who receive penalties would have lower penalties than the typical noble.
Since this is a general effects roll, we ought to have a positive outcome on the other side, and I've got one to suggest: those rolling less than 16 gain an @1 "pseudo skill" which establishes their bias at a psionic level greater than their skills (since they don't yet have any skills). That would be 16-roll=bias level, so a roll of 15 would give the peasant a 1@1 bias, and a roll of 3 would give him the very rare 13@1 bias. Although this is above the bias level of the world and thus he will only get the 2x12@ bonus for his skill performance, he will get the 13@1 bias for his skill learning efforts, and skills, particularly at the beginning, will come easily to him. That actually gives peasants more advantage than penalty from taking the risk, but the advantage will gradually be consumed as they advance (since if I have a 6@1 pseudoskill creating a 6@1 bias, it helps me until I've learned a 6@1 skill, and then it is worthless) and the penalty will be permanent (unless someone develops the ability to repair mental illness and uses it on those who suffer such fates--which is a very real possibility, particularly with a verser in the mix).
The other question is about that drug use solution. Certainly having a culture in which the use of a particular drug or series of drugs opens the door to psionic ability is quite common--one need look no further than Dune for an example. The question, though, is whether indig brains are different enough that they cannot release psionic power another way, or whether it is merely that this is the only way known to them. Put more concretely, if the Psientist were to enter this world, and use his considerable psionic and teaching skills to implant patterns of how to perform simple telepathy in the minds of specific peasants, would they be able to learn it from the pattern, or are their brains somehow locked against psionic ability of this sort until they have been released by the drug(s)?
This causes me to wonder how a verser could release the psionic energy in others without the use of the drug, but I can already answer that (P6@8 mind tinkering skills leap to mind).
The other aspect is whether this inability to perform psionically is enough of a difference to make the brains/minds of the indigs "Humanoid" relative to the verser. That's not a given; it is entirely possible for indigs in a given world to be "Human" in psionic terms but unable to perform psionically. However, it is a question to raise, it it would make a number of skills more difficult for the verser (if every time he had to contact an indig mind he had to overcome the -10 humanoid penalty or use telepathy to humanoids).
Thoughts?
--M. J. Young
I'm sick, it may be a bit until I reply
Mark,
There's two bell curves next to each other with the lesser peasant being equivalent to the normal noble.
This is quite viable. I saw quite a bit of it at one time. We live in a Credentialed-Classist Modified Meritocracy. A nobility with an entrance test is a more extreme version of this. Basically the people on top demand less out of themselves, and pat themselves on the back for how hard they work. And when someone tells me they work eighty hours a week, I'm not impressed, because I figure one-fourth is spent at the water cooler, one-fourth is spent flirting with the secretaries, and one-fourth is spent trying not to fall asleep in meetings. I knew two regular guys, both pretty tough, who tried to do eighty hours a week at real jobs with serious committments. Neither lasted more than three months.
I may be just a tiny bit bitter toward some of my 'betters' at the moment.
And yes, there are exceptions. When you get someone really bright and intuitive and motivated who is also on top....then you get King So and So the Good.
The question to my mind, if I want to use this social model, and I'm a little doubtful about it, is how far down the curve of decadence do I want to let things go? There is an advantage to such societies for a game....the Iron Curtain looked impregnable in 1980, in the reign of the chosen successor of Ronaldus Maximus, the Berlin Wall fell, and the whole thing collapsed. So that could give a relatively normal verser the chance to take on an entire kingdom and win because the whole thing is rotten to the core even as it looks terrifying impressive on th eoutside.
The further down the curve of decadence things get, the sillier and more arrogant the nobles get; also the two bell curves grow further apart.
I do like the mental instability penalty, and should use it.
Your notion that some elites in a nobility are neccessarily the betters is kinda amusing. Maggie Thatcher said ....In my years as Prime Minister, I wanted twelve men, strong, and true (to serve as her ministers) I rarely got them. Although I do see your point, and it can be valid, and it highlights an issue which has developed this world a bit.
The pseudoskill....hmmmm....yeah, that sounds novel, and it sounds like it could help create one of those "The Peasant King with Miracles who rose from nowhere." stories.
These are humans, and thus they don't need to use drugs to activate their skills. Its the only way they've learned to do it. Now, if the Psientist teaches them normally, they don't get the pseudoskill.