"Ringworld" plot for 2300/2320

[yatima]

Hi all,
I'm looking for a bit of inspiration for a campaign I'm cooking up for 2300/2320 that is heavily inspired by Larry Niven's Ringworld and some stories by Dean Ing in the Man Kzin Wars collections. Here's the basic premise:

The crew of a survey vessel in uncharted space (Beta Aquilae cluster, 61 Cygni cluster?) come across a Bishop Ring in a lagrange orbit around a world in an uninhabited system. No response from attempts to establish contact.

The crew is shot down and crash lands on the ring surface and must explore it in order to find a way off it (the basic premise of Ringworld). On the world they find humans and kafers, living in low tech societies, in conflict. Previously, these populations were in secure areas on the ring but have broken out and come into contact over time. The Ring seems to have been a sort of alien zoo of sorts (Like the world in Dean Ing's Cat House story) and may house other races in other parts of the ring. The enigmas I'd like to confront the trapped explorers with are:

1. Who built this thing?
2. When?
3. Why?

Now, what I'd like to do is tap the collective wisdom of the list for inspiration, because I'm struggling to come up with satisfactory answers to these enigmas that will prove sufficiently interesting and sufficiently plausible.

I've been musing that it was built by the Eber, prior to their collapse, or perhaps by an Ylii faction that fled the civil war and collapse of their first interstellar society. Maybe it was the Medusae or the Enemy. Maybe it is in Aquliian space. Maybe the ancient Ylii faction are the Aquilans. Endless possibilities.

What do you think? Any input or comments?

 

[rancke]

My first thought when I saw that Bishop Ring was that I wanted to start a new campaign just so I could show them that picture.

My second thought was how a Bishop Ring would differ from Niven's ringworld so that I could provide surprises for those of my players who'd read the books.

* I suspect none of my players would come close enough to the ring for the defenses to shoot at them in anything other than a ship's boat. Certainly they'd never approach from above the surface, so they might be shot to pieces, but they would not be shot down. So I'd find another way to strand them in the system and I'd prepare for them to go in through a starport.

* The place is actually small enough to map in its entirety at a meaningful scale. It is also small enough to circumnavigate. In fact, unless the humans got out of their cage relatively recently, some of them will have tried to do just that. If all have failed, there'll have to be a good reason why, because the PCs will have to do it -- it's just too cool a notion not to!


Hans

 

[yatima]

Hi Hans,
Yeah, getting shot down is probably not a good method for stranding them there. You'd want to have a variety of possible mishaps to hand for stranding them when they attempted a landing.

The fact that it's small enough to map entirely is one of the main attractions for me too. I thought that I'd put a couple of large seas opposite each other on the ring, with a continuous river connecting them, the centre strip of the ring being terraformed as lush river valley, rising to highlands and mountains towards the rim walls.

There'd be a space station or control centre in the middle of the Luminaire, which may be the ultimate destination for someone trying to leave the ring, and I'd need a way to ensure they didn't just dock there first and not land on the Ring.

 

[rancke]

There'd be a space station or control centre in the middle of the Luminaire, which may be the ultimate destination for someone trying to leave the ring, and I'd need a way to ensure they didn't just dock there first and not land on the Ring.

Their star drive conks out and the only way to repair it is to get the autofactory at one of the starports to do it. Unfortunately the autofac requires a goahead from the central control station. There used to be a shuttle that'd take people between the starport and the central station, but the shuttle berth is empty. Only chance is that there's a shuttle berthed at one of the other starports along the ring. Start walking (once the ship is in the dock, it won't be let out again before it's repaired).


Hans

 

[Colin]

That could be an aquilan artifact, though given their extreme xenophobia it's not likely. I would look more to either the ancient Ylii, in their pre-Extinction War expansion phase, or the Enemy. The Ylli were active 100000 years ago, though, which may be too long for your purposes. The Enemy were active even longer ago than that.

I'd put it in Aquilan space, and have some of their robot systems monitoring it. Maybe it ahs examples of any race that could be a threat to the Aquilans (Sung, Eber, Pentapod, and yes, the Xiang. No Klaxun or Ylii, though. The Ylii scare the crap out of the Aquilans...)

 

[kmsoice]

That could be an aquilan artifact, though given their extreme xenophobia it's not likely.

No doubt, but one way it could be justified as if it an ark or zoo for good representatives of these races. Something that would make the Aquilans be able to justify their hatred of these races and anything that they did to them.

The hook comes from that whatever a race of extreme xenophobes would consider 'good' candidates for their ark is likely to differ a lot from what we humans would. Imagine Aquilans choosing subjects (consciously or not) for their ark among the especially savage. A great opportunity to introduce humanities worst, and what would a savage Xiang be like? Or how about especially peaceful, like some kind of Eden which is being threatened. Or just plain crazy, a giant lunatic asylum? Or they are all trained (genetically engineered??!!??) to view the Aquilans as gods and show the Aquilans what they see as their proper due?

 

[robject]

[...] The Ylii scare(d) the crap out of the Aquilans [...]

Now why was that, exactly? And is that what made them so nuttily paranoid in the first place?

 

[Colin]

The Aquilans are old. They only discovered their brain-damaged version of the stutterwarp relatively late in their space-travelling history, about 350 years ago. They had been in space, and exploring their local region for about 4000 years before that, though very slowly. The Aquilans are technologically very conservative, and risk-averse as a species. Ever seen the TV show "Monk"? They are all like that... Smart, but just short of completely crazy.

The Aquilans first encountered the Ylii in space about 320 years ago, shortly after they invented stutterwarp and shortly before they discovered the AGRA anomaly and Humans. They immediately realized that the Ylii were behind the ruins encountered on several Aquilan worlds, ruins which dated back to an incredibly ancient time (ie, I don't remember when the Ylii had their first space-faring age). The Aquilans equate age with threat, as they are a species that keeps getting bigger, and smarter, (and crazier) with age. So the Ylii are the biggest threat of all, after AGRA.

The Aquilans are amphibious, and were somewhere near the middle of the food chain on their home world. All of their reactions are threat-driven, as the most paranoid tend to survive the longest, and spread their genes. The most effective predator on their homeworld was at least as smart as them, but was wholly aquatic, and never developed tool use (think something like a rabid octupus, with more arms and teeth.) Oh, and about the size of a bus. The next most effective predator was amphibious as well, hunted in packs, with large, luminous eyes...

 

[epicenter00]

1. Who built this thing?
2. When?
3. Why?

Who - The Ylii did.

When - Tens of thousands of years ago. During one of their space-faring phases.

Why - Well, that's a little complicated. Let's take a page from Larry Niven "Ringworld Engineers" and Donald Moffitt's "Second Genesis" for this one. The AGRA intelligence is doing something out in the Pleiades but this isn't the only place they're doing stuff. They can't really explain what they're doing to us bugs.

Perhaps there's a risk in what they're doing. Like to "relieve pressure" on some "structure" they're building they need to safely release some radiation from the cosmic ylem of the area. "Some" being a relative term and "safely" being a relative term. "Safely" in this case being that it can't hurt the AGRA and similar entities. "Some" being supernova levels of radiation. In fact, they've been at this while in different parts of the galaxy. Earth has been close enough to be on the receiving end of these waves several times in the past - we call them the Late Devonian, Permian–Triassic, and Triassic–Jurassic extinction level events (the others were just random space rocks and so on).

However, the AGRA aren't entirely heartless as those on the Bayern discovered. In their own way, the AGRA wanted to tell the local promising species, "Hey, we're doing a little work in the basement here, and we might need to use a jackhammer, so get some hearing protection."

Unfortunately, the AGRA aren't really able to communicate with lower order beings such as ourselves without causing problems. That doesn't mean they haven't tried. The AGRA attempted to communicate with the Ylli several times in the past to warn them, causing mass insanity and contributing to the fall of Ylii civilization. After all, with the Bayern, the reality-rocking events were AGRA trying to tell the humans, "Well hello, actually we're just drilling a hole to hang a painting, pretty cool huh?" In these past times the AGRA were trying to warn them of much more and instill the Ylii with the knowledge of what might happen. Sanity-blasted Ylii who only remembered images of fiery destruction and the death of everyone would necessarily become paranoid or even apocalyptic. One of the times, however, about 20,000 years ago, the Ylii didn't all go mad, and even understood the gist of what the AGRA was trying to tell them.

The structure, like Ringworld's scrith material would be some wundermaterial developed by the ancient Ylii able to absorb the hazardous radiation and thus would be a kind of ark for intelligent species in the area (it'd be oriented towards the Pleiades). The Ylii collected all intelligent races they could find and put them there. Eventually, however, the effort of such an undertaking exhausted the Ylii civilization, and it fell due to internal strife (not AGRA's fault directly this time).

As for Kafers and humans at war - there's a small problem with that. If the Kafers and humans are at war and they're primitive ... the humans would be at the very least In Big Trouble if not outright extinct. Pound-for-pound, a Kafer is bigger, stronger, tougher, meaner, fearless, reproduce more quickly, mature much faster, and they live to fight. It's the classic "Orcs and humans" quandry in fantasy RPG worlds - as far as evolution goes, the Kafers are just better in all the ways that count before, say, early 20th century technology. In particular, in a Ringworld situation where there's no real deposits of metal or rock, the Kafers are going to have a big edge, one that I don't think the humans are going to be able to compete against with just wood and bone implements. You'd have to have something that somehow kept the Kafers and humans in check until now.

 

[kmsoice]

As for Kafers and humans at war - there's a small problem with that. If the Kafers and humans are at war and they're primitive ... the humans would be at the very least In Big Trouble if not outright extinct. Pound-for-pound, a Kafer is bigger, stronger, tougher, meaner, fearless, reproduce more quickly, mature much faster, and they live to fight. It's the classic "Orcs and humans" quandry in fantasy RPG worlds - as far as evolution goes, the Kafers are just better in all the ways that count before, say, early 20th century technology. In particular, in a Ringworld situation where there's no real deposits of metal or rock, the Kafers are going to have a big edge, one that I don't think the humans are going to be able to compete against with just wood and bone implements. You'd have to have something that somehow kept the Kafers and humans in check until now.

First of all you could impose on Kafers a requirement from reality that fantasy writers (or GDW ones) never seem to bother with ... rates of food production. Hoards orcs and goblins spring forth fully formed from darks holes in the Misty mountains having been raised on a diet of what ...? the few scraps of cave moss and mushrooms that are nourished by the occasional hot spring? Come on! Any group requires heaps of regularly produced food and if you aspire to be anything bigger than hunter/gathers it is by a laborious, backbreaking, time-consuming and complex method called FARMING. Farming, and civilization for that matter, requires some serious drudgery and long range planning, neither of which are Kafer specialties. Can you really imagine a Kafer grasping the idea of a calendar for when to drive sheep to a new pasture, or a Kafer keeping an irrigation system running all season long? [Ok, yes, I really do have a big problem with the idea of violent dimwits like the Kafers ever developing a civilization.] So sure you can have small wandering bands of primitive Kafers that break upon civilized human lands like a plague, killing and looting and then getting driven off or starve in the ruins which eventually are repopulated by humans. Humans could retreat to Motte-and-bailey castles, which require nothing but rammed earth and logs yet can make for nearly impenetrable fortifications that need time, patience and siege weapons to break, something the Kafers lack. If all the above is not enough for you then make the ringworld Kafers be pre-Striker-of-the-Stars, that takes their threat level down a good bit.

Second, by the time Kafer and Human star faring nations left their homeworlds they have been alone with their species long enough to develop a sense of racial identity, a 'us' vs. 'aliens' mentality, even if they are still split amongst antagonistic nations. So generally I have no problem with the 2300AD paradigm of Humans and Kafers locked in a genocidal race war ... but what if Humans and Kafers developed on the same word, or in this case placed on the same ringworld? What if there was no racial memory of a time when there was any thing other than multiple sentient races wandering about? Would they really still absolutely hate each other or would they see each other as just another tribe to trade and raid with? Sure in the long run only one species can occupy one ecological niche, others get pushed out, but such things can take millennium to work themselves out and maybe they already have -> humans dominate the arable plains while the Kafers take the deserts? Ohhhh imagine a new Roman Empire, founded by Romulous and Sleeps-with-Wolves! An empire where it does not offically matter what your race is, you are all ground down under the glorious civilized heel of the Empire (though I am sure it could be worth your life to be the wrong race in the wrong neighborhood after dark). The actual Roman Empire tended to be militaristic, chauvinistic, deeply conservative and loved it's blood sports; I can see the Kafers fitting in just fine. Humans might tend to take the agricultural worker, tradesman and cavalry/archery/engineer positions; Kafers tend to take the slave (the Romans tended to employ slaves over beast/wind/water power ->just perfect for the dimmer Kafer types) conscript infantry and elite infantry positions. The ruling class is made up of competing households of the different races. The War going on is actually the struggle between the civilized Empire and the barbarous tribes of forest dwelling Humans (~Celts/Germans) and desert dwelling tribes of Kafers (~Nubians).