Future and Alien Civilizations

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Story Concerns

Roleplaying campaigns are frameworks for stories – the adventures and exploits of the player characters. The purpose of the society is to serve as a story element. Most commonly, societies are simply backdrops, the scenery against which the actors strut and declaim. Occasionally the story focuses on a conflict between the characters and their society, which elevates the society to the status of a "character" in its own right. The role in the story in turn determines elements of the society's structure and function. Is it an open, free society, or a restrictive culture? Who holds power?

Society in the Story

It's up to the GM to determine the purpose of a society. Is it scenery, is it an adversary for the heroes, or a mystery to solve? Sometimes it can be all three, or change over time.

Society as Backdrop

The simplest use for any society in a story or roleplaying campaign is as a backdrop. Making a world or culture alien and exotic reminds the players that this is a science-fiction adventure. An especially well-designed backdrop can provide lots of fun just by letting the characters "play tourist" and explore the setting. Life doesn't have to be a series of shootouts and bar fights, after all.

A useful thing for Game Masters to keep in mind is that all the people in the backdrop society don't know they're in the background. Each of them is the main character of his or her own story. Giving the PCs encounters with people who have their own goals and aren't especially interested in the evening's adventure will help make the setting seem more real and give it depth.

Society as Obstacle

Of course, a society can be more than just the setting for the heroes, it can be their foe. This can be overt, as when the PCs are military personnel fighting a hostile alien civilization, spies infiltrating a tightly monitored state, or rebels trying to bring down a tyrannical empire. But characters can come into conflict with a society even if they aren't trading blaster shots with armored stormtroopers. A merchant trying to make a profit in the face of heavy taxes and trade barriers is at odds with society. So is a lawman bringing justice to a wild frontier. Or lovers in a society that forbids marriage between social classes.

Obstacle societies obviously need features that will put them at odds with the heroes – restrictive laws, aggressive plans for Galactic conquest, widespread corruption, lack of interest in space exploration, or whatever. They also need ways for the heroes to circumvent or overcome those obstacles. Can they change the laws, or halt the conquering fleets? If change is impossible, can they get away to someplace more congenial, or find a way to accomplish their goals secretly? A society that is intolerable and inescapable doesn't make for particularly entertaining adventures, after all.

A different form of obstacle society is one that presents the characters with a puzzle. This often happens to explorers visiting strange new worlds, but can befall anyone trying to operate in an unfamiliar environment without enough information. A puzzle society is one that seems to not make sense on first examination. The inhabitants behave or think in a way that just doesn't seem rational. For example, why do the Venusians exile their adults to wilderness preserves when they reach 30 years of age? On the face of it, this is a puzzle, since one would assume people in their prime years would be an asset to society. The puzzle can also create an obstacle if the heroes will suffer some negative effect if they don't solve it in time (in this case the Venusians insist that all PCs over 30 must also be exiled).

But of course a puzzle must have a solution. In the case of the Venusians, it turns out that their species is infected by a parasitic fungus that gradually destroys the individual's intelligence. They send their adults off when they begin to revert to an animalistic state. Puzzles don’t have to be science problems like that one, of course. The Venusian situation could be the result of a strong religious belief (one must "return to nature" in order to achieve enlightenment or salvation), a political struggle (the Youth Party took over and is attempting to eliminate the middle-aged as a class), or economics (Venus has a constantly changing, information-driven economy, and Venusians over 30 just aren't mentally flexible enough to keep up). Often solving a puzzle presents a new obstacle or puzzle – can the PCs find a cure for the parasite, or will they too begin to lose intelligence? And if they do cure the parasite, then all of a sudden the Venusians are going to be facing some major social changes.

Evolving Societies

Social change causes conflict, and conflicts are the heart of roleplaying adventures. So any society undergoing change will offer many opportunities for heroes to show their stuff. Of course, all societies are changing, all the time, in different ways.

Technological change is one potent driver of social transformation; exposure to new ideas from other cultures is another. Economic cycles drive social change – a generation that grew up during a boom era won't have the same attitudes as one that came of age in a depression. External events like wars or even climate changes can alter societies.

In a game, social changes can be divided into three types: ongoing trends, cycles, and catastrophic shifts. Trends are quiet, gradual changes that often get lost in the "background noise" of everyday events, even though they may turn out to be very profound transformations. Emigration by Europeans to America radically changed the European social and economic system by knocking the economic props out from under the old noble landowners, but it took place over the course of a century and mostly happened "offstage," in places like Kansas. In game terms, these changes are likely to be too small to notice on the scale of the characters' adventures. Cycles include things like business cycles, the "generational personality" model of popular attitudes, the political "pendulum" of liberal and conservative ascendancy, and the rise and fall of civilizations as posited by historians like Spengler and Toynbee. Most of these cycles are beyond the ability of PCs to influence, and many of them happen on such a long time scale they don’t really affect the campaign. It can be interesting if the GM wants to posit a "jackpot year" in which several long and short term cycles all peak at once, leading to major economic and political shifts. This can be especially interesting if the PCs (or an NPC) can predict the crisis. Aliens with differing lifespans could have different cycle lengths: very long in the case of beings with Extended Lifespan, blindingly fast for short-lived species.

Catastrophic shifts, unlike the others, can take place almost literally overnight. In the case of wars, stock market crashes, or shocking events like political assassinations, massive changes can happen in a few days. Characters who get caught up in those changes can face all kinds of interesting challenges, and potentially valuable opportunities as well.

Dropping a major shift into the game setting should not be undertaken lightly. It must feel right to the players. If their characters have overcome some initial obstacles and are getting to feel at home in the setting, a major change will feel appropriate: the "second act" of the ongoing drama. But if the campaign has been running for a long time and the GM throws in a massive change just to "shake things up" the result may feel like one of the periodic continuity rewrites in a comic book series – a sign that the writers are running out of ideas. It's also important to make sure that the post-change setting is as interesting a place to have adventures as the original situation. If the players have been having fun running characters who are space merchants, an interstellar war that brings commerce to a halt and gets them drafted into the Navy may not be what they want to do.

Control and Intrusiveness

Exactly how much the social background affects the player characters depends in part on how much control that society has over its citizens. In general, the looser the society, the more the characters can ignore it and focus on their own plots and goals. As society becomes more intrusive, it takes up more of the PCs' attention, eventually becoming an obstacle.

Control Ratings

The GURPS Basic Set includes the concept of Control Ratings for each society. This is an abstract numerical rating of the intrusiveness and oppressiveness of a given state or culture. As with any single-axis description of something as complex as a civilization, it involves some oversimplification. Consider a frontier town on a remote world without many laws, but with summary execution as the only form of punishment. Is that an open society or a restrictive one? If the police can't carry weapons but are allowed to read all your e-mail, is that oppressive?

Game Masters may wish to break down a particular society's Control Rating into distinct sub-ratings for Civil Rights, Social Control, Legal Restrictions, Punishment Severity, and Economic Freedom. The overall Control Rating is the average of these. Civil Rights are the rights reserved for the citizens that the government may not infringe. The nature and extent of those rights depends on the culture’s priorities and history. For instance, many foreigners are baffled by modern Americans' attachment to their Second Amendment right to keep weapons, while Americans abroad are startled by things like government-licensed prostitution or marijuana sales. Typically a low CR in the Civil Rights department means that the citizens have the "upper hand" and will react with anger and indignation when their rights are infringed; a high CR means they are resigned to oppression and know not to complain.

Economic Freedom fundamentally represents how free the people are to buy, sell, and conduct business. Restrictive societies may make it very difficult to do business without government involvement, while open ones may consider commerce to be an entirely separate sphere. Economic Freedom also indicates how heavy the tax burden is (unless there is some unusual situation, like a war to fight raising the tax level or government-controlled resource sales providing a "free" income stream). Game Masters may wish to apply a society's economic CR as a penalty to Merchant skill when non-native characters are trying to do business there, in place of the normal -3 penalty for dealing with foreign cultures.

Legal Restrictions are simply how many things are against the law. Very free societies only ban violence against other citizens (and may even tolerate a certain amount of violence as "private wars"). As CR rises, more things are banned. Typically property crimes come next, followed by laws against fraud and deception, then laws banning reckless acts, then laws governing offensive speech and behavior. Cultures with a high Legal Restrictions CR try to regulate all aspects of behavior, leaving nothing untouched by the laws.

Note that alien or future societies may have very different ideas about what is restrictive and what is free. In a strongly religious culture, casual blasphemy could be a serious crime even at low CR, while in an honor- bound society murder in a “fair fight” could be far less serious than lying. Punishment Severity is a measure of how harshly the culture treats law- breakers. A low Punishment CR means sentences are light, fines are more common than jail time, and the emphasis may be on treatment or rehabilitation of offenders. High Punishment CR means that the socie- ty imposes heavy penalties to punish the guilty or deter future wrongdoers. This also affects how likely law enforcement agents are to use physi- cal or lethal force. A low Punishment CR probably means they don’t go armed, or carry only stunning weapons. High Punishment CR means they can use lethal force to stop fleeing suspects. Social Control reflects how much of a society’s intrusiveness represents extralegal mechanisms. There may not be any law against carrying a blaster on Aspen Station, but if you try it you’ll find the hotel won’t give you a room, the cantina won’t seat you or sell you a drink, and the repair dock won’t give you credit. Low social CR means that people mind their own business and don’t stick their noses into other people’s lives. High social CR means that everyone knows what everyone else is doing and lets them know what they think of it. Typically, social control CR is high in small close-knit societies, and low in diverse urban cultures. AVENUES TO POWER Characters within a society may wish to gain positions of power and authority themselves. There are at least three ways to do this. Work the System All systems of government have a mechanism for choosing who rules. There’s no reason why player charac- ters can’t join in. This can mean run- ning for office in a democracy, getting hired and rising to the top in a corpo- ration, or assassinating everyone with a better claim to the throne in a hereditary monarchy. Rising to the top by working within the system usu- ally takes a while, and may become the focus of an ongoing campaign. Of course, it’s easier for adventurous types to rise in some societies than in others. A feudal culture might reward boldness and cunning with ennoble- ment, but in a democracy the voters are seldom likely to keep re-electing someone who spends all his time off having adventures instead of doing his job. Start Your Own Characters may get the opportuni- ty to be “Founding Fathers” of a new society as a result of their actions in the campaign. Leaders of a rebellion or independence movement have to create a government to replace the one they’ve overthrown, and entrepre- neurs setting up a colony on a distant world can establish the kind of regime they like. Becoming the new rulers is a good way to retire characters after a suc- cessful adventuring career. They may become patrons to new, less powerful PCs, or the whole tone and structure of the campaign can shift from colony-building and rebel heroics to political infighting and diplomatic struggles. The Cortez Option Finally, sufficiently aggressive PCs may attempt to simply take over an existing state and make it their own private empire. This requires some- thing to give a small group of charac- ters (and whatever followers or merce- naries they bring along) an edge over the people they’re fighting. In the case of Cortez it was steel weapons and the sophisticated military tactics and command structure the Europeans inherited from the Romans. Empire builders in a space campaign can leverage their firepower by choosing low-tech opponents – even a single TL difference can have a huge effect. It’s also useful to choose a target society that is ripe for toppling. The Aztec Empire had lots of discontented subject tribes ready to ally with the Spanish. Even gold-obsessed strangers from over the sea were apparently preferable to the Aztecs’ industrial-scale human sacrifice. In Cortez’s case, this was pure luck, but future conquistadors can do careful intelligence-gathering beforehand to find a suitably unstable target regime. Low-tech cultures may have high- tech protectors. Primitive planets can be guarded by the space Patrol or the rangers. Trading partners or neigh- bors may get upset if some upstart

takes control of a nearby world. There may even be bands of bold adventur- ers on scene willing to help fight for the planet’s freedom. A clever conquis- tador will try to neutralize potential interference beforehand: point out the instability or awful conditions on the target world so that the new regime seems like an improvement to the interstellar community. Reassure trad- ing partners that existing contracts will be honored (even if they won’t). Buy off adventurers with a promise of a share in the loot. Bribe the rangers to look the other way, or choose a moment when the nebula pirates are occupying all of the Patrol’s attention.