indy523

Except of Course the Dip!

Hey Everyone I finished developing my spirit house rules based on my ideas and your suggestions.
 
I had four pagers meant to reply three time but it forced it all into one long document.  Oh well.
 
They are broken out by Header four sections
 
Enjoy!

Hey Everyone I finished developing my spirit house rules based on my ideas and your suggestions.
 
I had four pagers meant to reply three time but it forced it all into one long document.  Oh well.
 
They are broken out by Header four sections
 
Enjoy!

You know it is funny, I have met several gun enthusiasts from the south and have never met anyone that matches your stereotype.  I remember some people buying ammo and weapons because there were promises to outlaw them but that was not an assumption by the people making the purchases, it was the rhetoric of the campaign which was pretty damn clear.  They tried to implement what they were saying as well if I remember but were stopped by the courts.
 
I decided I have absolutely no use for arrogant leftists that go around lecturing people on how ist and phobe all the right wingers were when  I saw on twitter the  video a young black kid made in a Seattle or Portland hospital, I forget which exactly.  Kid was maybe 20 and he was talking about the young white BLM Antifa member who, because the young black kid had a red MAGA hat on, approached him called him the N-Word to his face and then stabbed him in the stomach with a kitchen knife.  Luckily this kid survived.  He was pretty calm and reasonable considering what he went through but still did not have complementary things to say about the person that stabbed him.  Of course the cops never made an arrest because you know protesters were making a stand for Die versity.
 
See leftists can talk this kind of talk all they want but all the most terrible racial slurs and complete stupidity seems to come from their side.
 
For myself I would have no issue handing out at a bar with some rednecks who believe in Open Carry.  They tend not to ever pull their weapons or do stupid things with them.  It might be the training they got in all those  concealed carry firearms classes.  You know the ones that Alec Baldwin should have taken. That incident suggests to me it is the leftists that have guns I should worry about.
 
But whadda I know ....

So someone mentioned the issues with monetary systems for Space Opera campaigns but I would like to discuss what would be the most likely system in a world that survives nuclear Armageddon!
 
James Axler's Deathlands books to my mind have the best idea.  Bullets!  Ammunition!
 
In a world where everyone is scavenging the dead husks of nuked out cities with a population less than 10% the world was before the catastrophe the main source of power would be guns.  Guns are useless without ammo so it stands to reason the one commodity everyone would want to barter for would be ammunition.  Finding guns might be easy given the number of gun stores and the guns that would be stored in the homes of people that have been forced out of their homes or who died off but ammunition by default would be a rare and dwindling commodity giving a local baron controlling a town both power and wealth but as that ammo is used up to retain power so to is their wealth.
 
Black Powder weapons then may become more common place as people can much easier make gunpowder than they can the High Explosive propellant that fuels modern smokeless powder.  A black powder charge may be worth a penny while a 9mm round for a modern pistol might be the equivalent of an ounce of gold circa the 1880's
 
Certainly Barter would be a huge mainstay in this land but I would rate the items most likely to have a stable trading value because everyone wants them as
 
1) Bullets and ammo (all kinds including bows and arrows, black powder as well as modern ammunition.
2) Fuel especially petroleum
3) Livestock / Poultry any animal that can either be used for food or can assist in hunting food.
4) Wood / Clay
5) Any modern device that can be made to work. i.e. Junk
6) Glass either intact material from pre war days or current glass made by hand
7) Ore Copper, steel, etc.
😎 Chips, electrical cables, supplies etc. that can be used to make electricity with anything that is a permanent magnet as being a premium.
 
Let me know what list you guys think might be better.

The first question you have to ask is what do civilians do especially for work anywhere.  With Replicator technology manufacturing is probably cerebral engineering jobs only.  So there are no wage slaves in meaningless nine to five clock punching jobs.
 
Service type jobs like waiters, hostesses, concierges in hotels etc. only exist to give that sentient being touch to the ambience of the place.  Maybe there is a high demand for that, people to wait on you hand and foot but probably only in tourist areas or fancy restaurants etc.  So maybe there are a lot of these in the future, depends on the overall economy.  Star Trek always shows us the educated elite class, never the huddled masses of Star Fleet.  So who knows.
 
One could assume that the majority of people in the Federation have no job and are on a type of welfare but I think that would not work IRL.  Many of the ghettos and slums in the US that have high crime and murder rates are not so because the people are poor and can't feed themselves.  Really it is because the US Welfare system punishes people on it who try and save and get out by dropping them from the roles and fining them.  This leads to the only way to advance in life is to do something under the table and illegal.  These neighborhoods in the 1920's were arguably poorer than in current year but their children had higher literacy rates and many more of them advanced out of poverty.  Because of this I got to think that for the Federation to be the moneyless Utopia they proclaim it is that the majority of people do have jobs and work if only for the self satisfaction and confidence is gives people.  If not then those hoods they don't show in Star trek would be crime ridden hell holes.
 
Another possibility is that everyone is an artist now.  People write poetry, write about other people on blogs doing reporting, have their version of You Tube channels, write short stories, paint and draw and those without any talent would of course become critics telling everyone else what is good and what is not.  This area of society could expand to where there were many jobs in this field because why not.  It gives people something to do, gives them a sense of self worth and since energy is free and anything you want you can make out of a replicator then this would be the one area of society that humans and sentients would be able to dominate over machines.
 
The other possibility is that Star Fleet is heavily regulated and there are bureaucrats everywhere who are controlling aspects of society and so you need millions of investigators, clerks and enforcers to keep everyone straight on the rules.  This would seem counter to the Zeitgeist of the Star Fleet Universe but maybe in the future they invented the impossible, a bureaucrat that actually can help people.
 
Once you figure this all out then you can more easily answer the question Who is on the Star Ship?  Is everyone a budding artist, well you can do that anywhere so why not a Starship.  Maybe for some that gives them inspiration.

You need to think about the future of cloning and how this would affect this.
 
You could have clones that are made with devices that allow one to enter into the clone to operate it as if it were a computer avatar only better.  You could have real life Doom games where death and pain are experienced first hand complete with respawning points after one "Dies!"

You know it is funny, I have met several gun enthusiasts from the south and have never met anyone that matches your stereotype.  I remember some people buying ammo and weapons because there were promises to outlaw them but that was not an assumption by the people making the purchases, it was the rhetoric of the campaign which was pretty damn clear.  They tried to implement what they were saying as well if I remember but were stopped by the courts.
 
I decided I have absolutely no use for arrogant leftists that go around lecturing people on how ist and phobe all the right wingers were when  I saw on twitter the  video a young black kid made in a Seattle or Portland hospital, I forget which exactly.  Kid was maybe 20 and he was talking about the young white BLM Antifa member who, because the young black kid had a red MAGA hat on, approached him called him the N-Word to his face and then stabbed him in the stomach with a kitchen knife.  Luckily this kid survived.  He was pretty calm and reasonable considering what he went through but still did not have complementary things to say about the person that stabbed him.  Of course the cops never made an arrest because you know protesters were making a stand for Die versity.
 
See leftists can talk this kind of talk all they want but all the most terrible racial slurs and complete stupidity seems to come from their side.
 
For myself I would have no issue handing out at a bar with some rednecks who believe in Open Carry.  They tend not to ever pull their weapons or do stupid things with them.  It might be the training they got in all those  concealed carry firearms classes.  You know the ones that Alec Baldwin should have taken. That incident suggests to me it is the leftists that have guns I should worry about.
 
But whadda I know ....

You know it is funny, I have met several gun enthusiasts from the south and have never met anyone that matches your stereotype.  I remember some people buying ammo and weapons because there were promises to outlaw them but that was not an assumption by the people making the purchases, it was the rhetoric of the campaign which was pretty damn clear.  They tried to implement what they were saying as well if I remember but were stopped by the courts.
 
I decided I have absolutely no use for arrogant leftists that go around lecturing people on how ist and phobe all the right wingers were when  I saw on twitter the  video a young black kid made in a Seattle or Portland hospital, I forget which exactly.  Kid was maybe 20 and he was talking about the young white BLM Antifa member who, because the young black kid had a red MAGA hat on, approached him called him the N-Word to his face and then stabbed him in the stomach with a kitchen knife.  Luckily this kid survived.  He was pretty calm and reasonable considering what he went through but still did not have complementary things to say about the person that stabbed him.  Of course the cops never made an arrest because you know protesters were making a stand for Die versity.
 
See leftists can talk this kind of talk all they want but all the most terrible racial slurs and complete stupidity seems to come from their side.
 
For myself I would have no issue handing out at a bar with some rednecks who believe in Open Carry.  They tend not to ever pull their weapons or do stupid things with them.  It might be the training they got in all those  concealed carry firearms classes.  You know the ones that Alec Baldwin should have taken. That incident suggests to me it is the leftists that have guns I should worry about.
 
But whadda I know ....

Good! Bad! has no meaning if they are just labels.
 
Why is someone Bad and if they are Bad why can't they decide to become Good?  Christian thinking believes in forgiveness and eastern traditions believe you can work off karmic debt but ideology, especially in a fantasy setting does not have to follow our traditional paradigm.  T.S Lewis yes I know but that was the author's choice.
 
Perhaps when one breaks bad they lose the ability to be good!  Goodness, peace, mercy, kindness, forgiveness etc. might be a quality that we are born with kind of the opposite of original sin maybe and it is something that we have to protect.  Demons and evil may attempt to attack our character by making us destroy what is good inside of us because they know that once good is broken in a mortal it cannot be repaired.  It is just gone.
 
Such a world might have the kind of idyllic Andy Griffith Mayberry feel of a television show where everyone helps everyone out, no one steals  anything, the sheriff does not carry a bow and the deputy has one bolt in a quiver in his front pocket because nothing goes wrong in the kingdom.  The goblins and demons and evil races are the way they are because goodness was broken in the entire race.  Maybe at one point all the goblins were kind nice little creatures like hobbits but so many became corrupt they killed off all the good ones and there was no more good left in the race to be pushed to the next generation.
 
In this scenario the good kingdom is always under threat because Evil is always trying to corrupt people in order to turn the entire race evil.  Maybe some races are immune and goodness and evil are not absolutes so they are always neutral, able to decide or change their minds.
 
I would suggest this way of thinking about it makes for better roleplaying because the alignment has a purpose in the world.  It is explained and has rules and thus it is more than just OK I am good so I get to cast healing spells.  
 
You don't have to use this particular paradigm but if you think out one of your own and answer these questions to create a philosophy of alignment I would suggest it would be easier for you to answer these questions and make for a better game.
 
Cheers!
 
 

The Answer to that question is not where in relation to the lake the city is, either downriver or at the mouth of the lake flowing out but rather what is the elevation of the land both in the inland lake and downriver.
 
If your lake is a lake and not a sea i.e. it is fresh water than the basin of the lake must be elevated fairly high above sea level, like at least 200 feet or so otherwise the water near sea level would flow out like it does in New Orleans and much of it would be brackish.    If that is the case you have an enormous amount of water sitting at an elevated height, even if it is only 200 ft 67m this is still a great quantity of water sitting on a lot of potential energy.  If there are massive amounts of rains that affect the land around the lake or feed into the lake over an extended time and the elevated levels start to rise rapidly you only have one natural artery by which that excess water can flow out.
 
So this means in that case you either have flooding along a huge plain that would be devastating or a river that becomes a raging torrent of water overflowing along its banks.  Any city on a low lying flood plain would eventually be destroyed.
 
So how high is the topography of the lake  is this an elevated height with many waterfalls miles downstream that breach the heights or is it one continuous slow moving river.  This will affect trade and safety.  Any city would be best built where there are very high banks and elevated mesa on one side. 

The Answer to that question is not where in relation to the lake the city is, either downriver or at the mouth of the lake flowing out but rather what is the elevation of the land both in the inland lake and downriver.
 
If your lake is a lake and not a sea i.e. it is fresh water than the basin of the lake must be elevated fairly high above sea level, like at least 200 feet or so otherwise the water near sea level would flow out like it does in New Orleans and much of it would be brackish.    If that is the case you have an enormous amount of water sitting at an elevated height, even if it is only 200 ft 67m this is still a great quantity of water sitting on a lot of potential energy.  If there are massive amounts of rains that affect the land around the lake or feed into the lake over an extended time and the elevated levels start to rise rapidly you only have one natural artery by which that excess water can flow out.
 
So this means in that case you either have flooding along a huge plain that would be devastating or a river that becomes a raging torrent of water overflowing along its banks.  Any city on a low lying flood plain would eventually be destroyed.
 
So how high is the topography of the lake  is this an elevated height with many waterfalls miles downstream that breach the heights or is it one continuous slow moving river.  This will affect trade and safety.  Any city would be best built where there are very high banks and elevated mesa on one side. 

It is an inland lake as it is separated from the ocean on the west by a bout 1500 km of land.  The eastern side is much closer to the ocean by about 500 km of land.  The sea itself is a HUGE Basin with hill or mountains on all sides.  
 
But you are right, flooding would be a constant problem for coastal regions.
 
The river as drawn seems to be that WIDE slow moving type!

It seems likely that the area along the river would be fairly heavily populated too.
 
That's another reason for both being large and powerful.

Been to Quebec City a few times.  Never fails to impress.  This also reminds me of a city from the old Fantast Hero "Western Shores" campaign.... Wyrmcliff.  It is a plateau on which a city is built. (Overcrowding is a bit of a problem.  
 
Thanks for the ideas!

The flow pattern Killer Shrike ably describes above applies to North America's Great Lakes when taken as a whole. Each lake, except Michigan and Huron which are hydrologically one lake, is at a different elevation and flow into each other: water flows from Lakes Superior and Michigan to Huron, then through the Detroit River to Lake Erie, then over Niagara Falls to Lake Ontario, and finally down the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean, ultimately the only outflow for all the Lakes.
 
The St. Lawrence and its region may be relevant examples for how circumstances might have influenced the evolution of Mr. R's cities. Upthread I already mentioned Quebec City, the capital of the province, built overlooking the St. Lawrence; but Montreal, farther upriver, is a far larger and more economically important city. It's built on an island in the middle of the river, so river traffic almost has to stop at it (and could easily be forced to if naval power was applied). Montreal is also near the point where the Gatineau River, Quebec's longest, joins with the St. Lawrence. Thanks to the St. Lawrence Seaway, the river is the sole route for deep-water shipping between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic, and Montreal is smack in the middle of it. In this case the benefits of location outweigh those of being a government center.
 
That weight also shows in comparing Montreal to Ottawa, capital of Canada. Ottawa is built at the juncture of the Gatineau River and the Ottawa, another major river and traditional trade route. The incorporated city of Ottawa is over a million population, and its whole urban region adds to that by nearly 50%; but the city of Montreal is more than half again as large as Ottawa, and its urban region almost triple that of Ottawa's. (The city and urban region of Quebec City are close to 550,000 and 800,000+, respectively.) Ottawa and Montreal are around 100 miles/160 kilometers from each other, and while water travel between them is rare today, road, rail, and air travel is extensive.

I would do it procedurally, starting at the first regional settlement(s) in antiquity and walking forward in time introducing various events (wars, famines, new technologies, natural disasters such as floods, rivers changing course and / or getting damned and / or bridged (etc), over / under population, trade imbalances, and so on). Layer it up over time, to attain verisimilitude.
 
Also, it's useful to remember that contrary to common belief rivers flow downhill, not toward the equator, not toward a particular cardinal direction, and not in arbitrary directions. Thus the topography (particularly in regards to relative elevation) of the region should be carefully considered. If you have a giant lake with a bunch of rivers flowing into it, then it would logically need to be at a lower overall elevation to the areas the rivers are flowing to it from. If there is one river flowing out of it, then that outbound river would need to be flowing towards an even lower elevation, and there would need to be some barrier between that even lower elevation area and the adjacent areas or else some of the rivers flowing into the lake would actually flow towards that even lower elevation area instead.

It's possible that this lake actually has no outflow at all. The Caspian Sea is like that, emptying only through evaporation. It's a closed water system independent of the action of the world's oceans; in fact its surface is an average of 27 meters below sea level. Its main inflow is the Volga River, Europe's longest, but 130 other rivers of varying size also empty into it. The Volga has been of great economic and cultural importance to Russia for many centuries.
 
How this could translate to Mr. R's proposed setting, is that Aerelios and Danris could both be built at the mouths of rivers emptying into the lake, perhaps at opposite ends, making them important points of transit for traders going between the lake lands and other regions. Mind you, if one city is built at the delta of a more important river, that would probably work to its advantage.
 
 

The example of Quebec City might be inspirational. The main part of the city is built on a plateau overlooking the (quite broad and slow moving) St. Lawrence River. This helps insulate much of the city from flooding, as well as making the site much more defensible (you can still see the original cliff top defensive wall).
 

 

"How can I reverse the Polarity when everyone is Lithuanian?"

The Answer to that question is not where in relation to the lake the city is, either downriver or at the mouth of the lake flowing out but rather what is the elevation of the land both in the inland lake and downriver.
 
If your lake is a lake and not a sea i.e. it is fresh water than the basin of the lake must be elevated fairly high above sea level, like at least 200 feet or so otherwise the water near sea level would flow out like it does in New Orleans and much of it would be brackish.    If that is the case you have an enormous amount of water sitting at an elevated height, even if it is only 200 ft 67m this is still a great quantity of water sitting on a lot of potential energy.  If there are massive amounts of rains that affect the land around the lake or feed into the lake over an extended time and the elevated levels start to rise rapidly you only have one natural artery by which that excess water can flow out.
 
So this means in that case you either have flooding along a huge plain that would be devastating or a river that becomes a raging torrent of water overflowing along its banks.  Any city on a low lying flood plain would eventually be destroyed.
 
So how high is the topography of the lake  is this an elevated height with many waterfalls miles downstream that breach the heights or is it one continuous slow moving river.  This will affect trade and safety.  Any city would be best built where there are very high banks and elevated mesa on one side. 

The Answer to that question is not where in relation to the lake the city is, either downriver or at the mouth of the lake flowing out but rather what is the elevation of the land both in the inland lake and downriver.
 
If your lake is a lake and not a sea i.e. it is fresh water than the basin of the lake must be elevated fairly high above sea level, like at least 200 feet or so otherwise the water near sea level would flow out like it does in New Orleans and much of it would be brackish.    If that is the case you have an enormous amount of water sitting at an elevated height, even if it is only 200 ft 67m this is still a great quantity of water sitting on a lot of potential energy.  If there are massive amounts of rains that affect the land around the lake or feed into the lake over an extended time and the elevated levels start to rise rapidly you only have one natural artery by which that excess water can flow out.
 
So this means in that case you either have flooding along a huge plain that would be devastating or a river that becomes a raging torrent of water overflowing along its banks.  Any city on a low lying flood plain would eventually be destroyed.
 
So how high is the topography of the lake  is this an elevated height with many waterfalls miles downstream that breach the heights or is it one continuous slow moving river.  This will affect trade and safety.  Any city would be best built where there are very high banks and elevated mesa on one side. 

The Answer to that question is not where in relation to the lake the city is, either downriver or at the mouth of the lake flowing out but rather what is the elevation of the land both in the inland lake and downriver.
 
If your lake is a lake and not a sea i.e. it is fresh water than the basin of the lake must be elevated fairly high above sea level, like at least 200 feet or so otherwise the water near sea level would flow out like it does in New Orleans and much of it would be brackish.    If that is the case you have an enormous amount of water sitting at an elevated height, even if it is only 200 ft 67m this is still a great quantity of water sitting on a lot of potential energy.  If there are massive amounts of rains that affect the land around the lake or feed into the lake over an extended time and the elevated levels start to rise rapidly you only have one natural artery by which that excess water can flow out.
 
So this means in that case you either have flooding along a huge plain that would be devastating or a river that becomes a raging torrent of water overflowing along its banks.  Any city on a low lying flood plain would eventually be destroyed.
 
So how high is the topography of the lake  is this an elevated height with many waterfalls miles downstream that breach the heights or is it one continuous slow moving river.  This will affect trade and safety.  Any city would be best built where there are very high banks and elevated mesa on one side. 

If the clones were specifically made to never gain sentience then I could see a society not having moral qualms with it.  They would be organic robots in a that sense.

You need to think about the future of cloning and how this would affect this.
 
You could have clones that are made with devices that allow one to enter into the clone to operate it as if it were a computer avatar only better.  You could have real life Doom games where death and pain are experienced first hand complete with respawning points after one "Dies!"