I just saw someone over at RPGNet trying to promote a new setting he wanted to sell. And he got promptly banned for spamming.

Still, his website is rather amusing - if unintentionally so.

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I don't want to be too harsh on this guy (even though he is a spammer). After all, he has obviously put a lot of effort into creating this setting and this website - something I can relate to with Urbis.

Unfortunately, from what he presented a lot of this effort was misplaced effort - and this means that he produced a science fiction heartbreaker.


EDIT: And after getting banned on RPGNet, he promptly creates a new user account and posts this message...

Hit this page until you have found inspiration.




Yes, I finally did manage to create a proper random page function for the Arcana Wiki...

I'm currently working on a few ideas for a high-powered GURPS fantasy setting (I'm talking of power levels appropriate for Exalted here).

It takes place on an artificial world created by powerful aliens about 8,000 years ago, and abandoned 6,000 years ago. They seeded ecosystems (and sapient beings) from six different planets on this world. What I want to come up with is some sort of justification why the different ecosystems haven't intermingled totally. Different climate zones wouldn't work - the original zones were split up evenly along the entire spectrum of available climates.

The best justification I can come up with is that the vegetation of each ecosystem is dependent radically different sets of microorganisms - so when one ecosystem attempts to spread into a new region, the microorganisms of the former inhabitants have to be purged or at least weakened sufficiently so that the new life forms can spread into this region. For this region, the sapients living in this world sometimes set fire to patches of "alien" vegetation when they want to spread into new territories.

How plausible would this be? Or can anyone come up with a better explanation which allows for some intermingling and changing territorial boundaries, but not total integration?

The Arcana Wiki has been growing nicely since its inception less than two months ago, and it now features more than five hundred entries. By all rights, I should be satisfied.

And yet, it could grow faster still. The overwhelming majority of the entries were written by me, and while gradually new contributors are joining up, it's still not fast enough for my tastes.

With that in mind, does anyone here have any good ideas for finding new contributors? Where could I advertise the existence of the wiki so that I can attract a larger audience?

I am a member of the Delta Green Mailing List. For those of you who don’t know, Delta Green is an expansion of the Call of Cthulhu Role-Playing Game – it mixes the eternal, alien horrors of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos with modern-day conspiracy theories, millennial fears, and ordinary human greed and corruption to produce one of the most compelling RPG settings out there. While the traditional Mythos stories present humans as often innocent victims of otherworldly forces, in Delta Green humans are all too often the willing perpetrators who use the same otherworldly forces to oppress and torture their fellow human (before they themselves are consumed by these same forces, of course).

Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to participate or even run a game of Delta Green, but I stay on the mailing list nonetheless – for it has some of the best intellectual discussions about philosophy, technology, politics, and the general human condition I’ve come across. That it is all seen through a dark lens does nothing to weaken the strength of these discussions, for despite the fact that I am an optimist in general, I acknowledge that one must be aware of the darkest sides of human existence to be able to plan for the future in a realistic manner.

But I digress. Recently, I was thinking about the rate of human technological progress of late (=in the last century or two), which can be called nothing short of astounding. In the merest blink of an eye on a historical time scale we have taken to the skies, and even to space itself. The air is filled with radio and television broadcasts, and a network of computers and cables covers the world that makes instant communication possible in a way that would have been simply inconceivable to our not-so-distant ancestors. In fact, some claim that in the near future, humans will merge with machines into a Singularity where every human will have godlike powers and where we will become free and wild and beyond good and evil.

But when seen through the lens of the universe of the Cthulhu Mythos, this seems odd, for humanity is nothing more than a historical accident that is likely to die out sooner or later. Far more intelligent and powerful beings exist or have existed on Earth. They founded mighty empires with advanced technologies that lasted for millions, or even tens of millions of years, but they, too vanished. But if they had the same rate of technological advancement as humanity, surely they would have changed into something more glorious and lasting rather than dying out? It seems that their technological development reached some sort of plateau – while they might still have had some technological advances, it must have been so slow that it did not make a real difference in the end.

When I mentioned this apparent paradox to the Mailing List, the general consensus was that the current human rate of scientific progress was only a momentary aberration – humanity, too, would hit a “plateau” of its own, possibly very soon.

And now I come to the point of my post. Many SF settings assume that technological progress is still going on – if it isn’t, it is either because humanity has fallen into a New Dark Age(TM), or because humanity has spread to such a large number of worlds that scientists on different worlds can’t effectively communicate with each other, and thus spend most of their time duplicating each other’s efforts (in other words, technological progress is hand-waved away for the sake of the story...).

But what would be if the rate of progress slowed down to a crawl when we are still stuck on Earth, or at least in this solar system? It wouldn’t be hard to justify, even without any constraints put on research by society at large (which wouldn’t work under anything but an effective one-world government, anyway). After all, much of our research depends on one thing: ever-increasing computer processing power.

So far, Moore’s Law has been fairly accurate – processing power doubles roughly every 18 months. But what happens if we hit some ultimate limit on increasing computer speed imposed on us by the laws of physics? This day might not be far off...

Of course, it is possible to stave off the inevitable by several tricks – using massive parallel computers, better algorithms for certain applications, and so on. But sooner or later, we might run out of tricks – and scientific and technological advancement slows down dramatically. Then most of the research will be dedicated to making most efficient use of the resources we have. But at some point, we might run out of ideas.

How would humanity deal with this? What would happen if the new year doesn’t bring anything truly “new and improved” – just the same old in a newly designed package? What if we won’t be able to get any truly better versions of our cell phones, our computers, and so on? How would we deal with this blow to our ego? How would our economy – which is dedicated to the idea of perpetual growth – survive?

It’s easy to add the Cthulhu Mythos (or any other sort of horror) to this – all “breakthroughs” will come from desperate researchers who somehow make contact with otherworldly forces. But I think this might make for a fascinating setting in its own right – when Tomorrow won’t bring us the promise of a better world, what will left to give human desires a new direction?

Your thoughts?