Maraille
Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2022 7:04 pm
I may possibly be in a situation where I could use your Maraille setting in an rpg campaign in a few months (or maybe it won't happen, but I will be moving to another state and was talking about the topic with someone who is moving to the same place.) I got thinking about stuff probably beyond the scope of any campaign I would set up and am curious how much longer you envision the jondiles being able to maintain low tech on the rest of the planet? I assume that, given sufficient motivation on the part of the jondiles, they could maintain it indefinitely, but mention is made on the relevant page of your site that a growing number are starting to reconsider the whole idea - perhaps a small segment of the population as of 4901 but more than 0 people and implicitly growing if it's now an idea under discussion.
I can see a couple of ways it could go if the lid is taken off of planet-wide tech development. (I assume socionomics would have suggestions on how to proceed but I unfortunately have not received my PhD in socionomics yet, alas.)
1. Uplift the low tech societies as fast as possible. Fly our hovercars over to the main continents, tell them what's up, give them some batteries and stuff and try and get a society using 50th century technology within one or two generations or something like that.
2. Stop capping tech development but don't actually overtly interfere or give them 50th century stuff. Just let them move on from 15th century stuff and let them advance slowly as they figure things out, over the course of a few centuries, and hope that you can successfully intervene if necessary when they find out about nukes and are possibly considering using a few nukes on those bad bad people over there.
3. Removing the tech cap is unintentional due to internal political divisions on Ile de Maraille. There are a bunch of people who are in favor of keeping medieval society on the planet and a bunch of people who aren't and things get out of hand and we get something in between options 1 and 2 because partisans are fighting each other and unable to effectively achieve their desired goals but definitely are able to ensure the old status quo is no longer the case.
4. Removing the tech cap is removed because some disaster causes the jondiles to be either unwilling or unable to enforce it. An asteroid hits their island or they all die of covid or something, and couldn't even enforce the tech cap if they wanted to. This is basically 2 except they don't have the option of intervening if they see the low tech people doing something inadvisable.
5. Maybe I missed something and there's another way this could play out, assuming that the tech cap was removed at all. (Obviously all these options assume the tech cap is being removed for some reason.)
These seem like the ways it can play out once a decision gets made to remove the tech cap but I don't know how close the tech cap is to being removed. From a Doylist world building point of view, I am amused by the idea of the tech cap lasting long enough for fully fledged language families to emerge, rather than a handful of languages with immense dialectical variation, but morally speaking*, I would be a supporter of removing the tech cap in some prudent way if I were a member of jondile society.
*This is definitely a fun idea to work with for worldbuilding purposes and I am in no way judging anyone for having the idea or for thinking it would be a fun setting in which to write a story or do an rpg. My moral stance is solely about what I would think if the setting were actually real.
I can see a couple of ways it could go if the lid is taken off of planet-wide tech development. (I assume socionomics would have suggestions on how to proceed but I unfortunately have not received my PhD in socionomics yet, alas.)
1. Uplift the low tech societies as fast as possible. Fly our hovercars over to the main continents, tell them what's up, give them some batteries and stuff and try and get a society using 50th century technology within one or two generations or something like that.
2. Stop capping tech development but don't actually overtly interfere or give them 50th century stuff. Just let them move on from 15th century stuff and let them advance slowly as they figure things out, over the course of a few centuries, and hope that you can successfully intervene if necessary when they find out about nukes and are possibly considering using a few nukes on those bad bad people over there.
3. Removing the tech cap is unintentional due to internal political divisions on Ile de Maraille. There are a bunch of people who are in favor of keeping medieval society on the planet and a bunch of people who aren't and things get out of hand and we get something in between options 1 and 2 because partisans are fighting each other and unable to effectively achieve their desired goals but definitely are able to ensure the old status quo is no longer the case.
4. Removing the tech cap is removed because some disaster causes the jondiles to be either unwilling or unable to enforce it. An asteroid hits their island or they all die of covid or something, and couldn't even enforce the tech cap if they wanted to. This is basically 2 except they don't have the option of intervening if they see the low tech people doing something inadvisable.
5. Maybe I missed something and there's another way this could play out, assuming that the tech cap was removed at all. (Obviously all these options assume the tech cap is being removed for some reason.)
These seem like the ways it can play out once a decision gets made to remove the tech cap but I don't know how close the tech cap is to being removed. From a Doylist world building point of view, I am amused by the idea of the tech cap lasting long enough for fully fledged language families to emerge, rather than a handful of languages with immense dialectical variation, but morally speaking*, I would be a supporter of removing the tech cap in some prudent way if I were a member of jondile society.
*This is definitely a fun idea to work with for worldbuilding purposes and I am in no way judging anyone for having the idea or for thinking it would be a fun setting in which to write a story or do an rpg. My moral stance is solely about what I would think if the setting were actually real.