- Location
- Singapore
Screaming. Forever.
As they are now trapped in what they hate.
But anyway, what do you mean by luddites?
General Exalted Thread
As they are now trapped in what they hate.
But anyway, what do you mean by luddites?
Ridiculously Average Guy
I'm you, but stronger
- Location
-
People against technology, mostly. How would that handle in a world made of it?Screaming. Forever.
As they are now trapped in what they hate.
But anyway, what do you mean by luddites?
It wouldn't. You don't see people objecting to gravity, do you?
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
Luddites in the "popular" sense of the word don't make sense in Autochthonia because a life surrounded by machines is the only life the average Autochthonian can imagine, and Luddites in the proper sense of the word don't make sense in Autochthonia because the machinery of Autochthonia is a source of life, not a source of misery and economic deprivation.
- Location
- The Pagoda of Masks
Luddites would be part of a voidbringer heresy
Those people that live in tunnels between the cities?
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
No, the Tunnelfolk don't unilaterally hate machines/Autocthon, they just don't fit into the regime of the Eight Nations. They range from actual savages to political dissidents to maverick geniuses and more.
- Location
- Singapore
indeed.
Or maybe you mean by, say, Luddites, as in people who go against tech changes due to stuff????
Ok, if there were luddites, then they would be different. If IIRC, Luddites were basically people disenfranchised by the industrial revolution and the introduction of machines. Thus, in Autobot, it should be the opposite. They would probably be those who are the strongest proponents of machinery, using machines, tools, and such to produce goods. They would probably be against cottage industry, or basically people living without machines.
If they ever enter creation, I suspect they would start urbanizing any place they come close to.
Basically, my kind of guys.
Right, but I was thinking that if Luddites existed anywhere in Autochthonia then they would probably be Tunnelfolk.
- Location
- Singapore
Nein.
Even then, they siphon power from the lines, and still get food and water from the pipelines.
pheonix89
Wants to be Seven Of Nine
- Location
- North American Plaguelands
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I was thinking direct, press button for wide area destruction effects. Proxy/probability attacks weren't really what I had in mind, and I'm not sure how workable kaiju rampaging is for Lunars.
I was thinking more them siccing a Kaiju on the town, but turning into a Kaiju(-ish) form should be achievable for the ones that work towards that goal.
Five thousand years. That's enough time for all the Indo-European languages to emerge.
And since we're on the topic of Indo-European, we have both Latin and Sanskrit as examples of what happens when someone tries to preserve a single language as a continent-wide lingua franca. It calcifies, stops being used by the common populace, and suffocates. You can actually track the decline in the use of Latin and Sanskrit in historic documents, because the documents still being written in those languages start having more and more mistakes in them as people whose native language is diverging more and more from the original root language are the ones writing the document. For example, we can track the evolution of Old French by the way that French people writing in Latin start writing Latin with French-style sentence structure and start cutting down the grammatical cases to abide by French rules.
(Or for a more recent example, the way that Law French withered and died from the active Norman language as it was only used by English speakers [1])
To put it another way, we've seen what happens when people try to stop linguistic drift. It doesn't work - the best you can manage is a high-status calcified tongue that doesn't get used for day-to-day speech. And that's even before you get into how Autochthonian settlements are isolated in a way that you basically only get on Pacific islands IRL.
tl;dr - 5000 years is a really, really, really long time. They can try to enforce cultural homogenity, but it's not going to happen. Not unless a few hundred years before the present someone conquered and subjugated all of Autochthonia into a mega-empire and engaged in massive cultural genocide and replacement and probably killed a vast number of old cities and had new cities built on top of them - and even now that homogeneity is crumbling and the empire is falling apart and shit's going all Fall of the Berlin Wall on us.
I mean, I could be totally be sold on "Steam. Metal. Lightning. Smoke. Oil. Crystal. Long ago, the Six Nations lived in harmony. Then everything changed when the Steam Nation attacked" - but that's very much not present Autochthonia and only barely looks like it from a remote distance.
[1] "Richardson, ch. Just. de C. Banc al Assises at Salisbury in Summer 1631. fuit assault per prisoner la condemne pur felony que puis son condemnation ject un Brickbat a le dit Justice que narrowly mist, & pur ceo immediately fuit Indictment drawn per Noy envers le Prisoner, & son dexter manus ampute & fix al Gibbet, sur que luy mesme immediatement hange in presence de Court."
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- Location
- Gladstone, OR
That's... cool I guess? You should realize by now that I like to devil's advocate a fair deal in these discussions, not propose unilateral judgements on The Way Things Go- I save that for games I run.
I mean, on the topic of language in Autocthonia, we have three major sources- Machine Language (which mortals can't speak), Old Realm (which all Spirits know inherently?) and Autocthonic, which is derived from Old Realm and yes, spent 5000 years mutating.
So I agree that Autocthonia should have more languages than just Autocthonic, but that's irrelevant to the point I was trying to make, which was stop confusing how it looks for how it acts.
The thing is, humans are actually not adapted for the kind of life we see in Autochthonia. This, in real life, is because we're actually evolved hunter-gatherers, but we really aren't evolved for day in day out industrial line drudgery. There's a reason that the industrial age coincides with a very sharp drop-off of life expectancy, which is later made up for by radical advances in agriculture and later medical science. We're not designed for the kind of environment Autochthonia is. We can see how it actually fucks us up in real life when you look at the kind of injuries factory workers suffer. And there are a lot of improvements which simply increase productivity and can be implemented by the Exalted on a relatively large scale. Sleeping less. Healing faster. Resistance to disease (resistance to disease is actually very important given how closely packed Autochthonians are). And when you're doing that, why not start considering specialization? Maybe not everyone's going to specialize. But saying that you can't have genejacks or whatever in Autochthonia seems a little... off.
Transhumanistic themes even echo Autochthon himself whose themes include self-modification and transgression. Transgressing human limits via self-modification seems to be entirely within his baliwick, and help, at a Doylist level, to cement the alien-ness of Autochthonian society.
A slight increase in raw capability can lead to a geometric benefit in capability, especially in situations like Autochthonia where numbers are hard to bring to bear. If I can make a soldier twice as good, which effectively means (because he is fighting in urban combat) he will take down four times his numbers, and he costs only three times as much as a normal soldier to make, this is a good deal. Despite what the Autochthonia books would like to tell you, martial prowess is hugely expensive. Knights and other men-at-arms cost a lot in training and upkeep, ignoring all their equipment, and every hour of training you put your militia into is an hour of things they aren't doing to keep their god alive. Don't forget that Autochthonia doesn't have firearms. The one way that a militia scenario might make sense is if you had something like a gun which took little training to use and was cheap to make but equalized the odds. Crossbows aren't that effective. A burly guy jacked up on super-steroids wearing heavy plate is realistically near-immune to massed bolts. Swords and melee are still going to be the arm of decision barring artifact weapons. And that takes time. As a bonus, you don't have things like scythes in Autochthonia, where the peasants already are building up the muscle they need for getting into fites and winning and can just improvise by turning their tools of farming into tools of war.
If you need a military, it's better to have a smaller, dedicated force than try to train all your factory workers into also understanding the arts of stabbing people in the face. And at that point, if you can enhance them and thus decrease their necessary numbers, it starts making a lot more sense.
What is known about Autochthonia is:
1. Assembly-line style industrial era work is a way of life;
2. This isn't actually a cargo cult-people fucking up their work actually can lead to mass hardship;
3. Resources are scarce.
All of these suggest that you don't want someone taking 9 months off and then change to raise a kid. The way different polities in Autochthonia solve these problems should be different, but they are problems which would make you look dimly on getting tons of people pregnant. Maybe one nation solves it by effectively segregating men and women into different jobs, and ensuring that the women take jobs they can still do while pregnant. Maybe another solves it by their Matropolis or Patropolis having an exowomb deal where fetuses are transferred to the City. Maybe another does straight-up Clan-style Iron Wombs and easy access to regular contraception. But as much as Autochthon is a metaphor for the self-destructive, consuming facets of technology, Autochthon and Autochthonia should also be a metaphor for the positive, problem-solving aspects. And therefore they should be able to solve problems not by doing things The Way Normal People Did Them but by finding radical solutions that might or might not backfire. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
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It really is, because I know what Brave New World is. Everyone does, and that is part of the problem. Because Brave New World has been shaping the science fiction genre for nigh-on 90 years. Its the starting point of any one of dozens of other novels, and frankly there's already two other subsettings out-there for Exalted which exist to explore the ideas of ruinous excesses of technology and dystopian scifi-trappings unhindered by most of Autochthonia's fundamental premise, and that's the First Age and the Dragonblooded Shogunate. Subsettings which, oddly enough, do not risk simply reintroducing the same endemic setting problems that Creation has with placing mortals in Any leadership capacity over supernatural powers, where the answer lies in not having them actually be humans as we can understand them anymore. In which case, you're just populating the setting with also-rans to butt up against the Alchemicals in nonmeaningful ways.
If Autochthonia deserves a broader reference pool to work with, then it needs one which isn't just rehashing the same old saws of science fiction vaguely painted up with magic which Creation could actively be doing a better job with.
The rest of your post I don't necessarily disagree with, but Shyft essentially got to it first by pointing out that "cultural stasis" is a totally tangential point to what I was getting at, which is avoiding making Autochthonia into a dumping ground for every half-baked trope that hinges on Sufficiently Advanced Magic coded as Science to justify itself. Which is a pretty ironic tack to take with me, since the majority of my effort-posts in this thread have been the attempt to try and establish some kind of broader, non-monolithic texture and understanding of place as something which isn't a hyperbolic time chamber of antagonists and stooges that serves only as a staging point to frog-march a free technologically-advanced force back into Creation and leverage against peoples holding rocks and sticks.
Difference is, rather than uprooting the entire premise outright in an attempt to backfill a bunch of nongameable information about How We Got Here, I've been looking at it and the Octet as an endpoint of a long and ongoing history which doesn't actually have much relevance because the winners wrote the history books to say it was Always Like This. To each their own, I guess.
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This kind of dodges the point whatever that is more beneficial to have that instead of having more Alchemical Exalted, because obviously there are diminishing returns on the whole "Quality>Quanity" paradigm you speak of though, otherwise warfare in Autochthonia would just small bands of Alchemicals skirmishing agaisnt each other.
Two ways to think about it: The most amount of dice you're likely to roll at any one time is ~25 (unless you're playing the canon craft rules, in which case you'd want rather more).
On the other hand, since you're concerned with physical dice, you're likely playing around a table with a bunch of other people, so you can probably get by with ~15 and just borrow from other players when big rolls come up.
Alchemical Exalted require specific soul gems and a massive quantity of the five greater magical materials to build in the first place. They are not directly rivalrous to things which don't need that sort of expenditure.
And honestly? I'd argue that Alchemical Exalted probably don't fight wars in Autochthonia. There should be arms control treaties as to where and when these expensive, powerful weaposn which can wipe out thousands of people and therefore cause permanent harm to the Great Maker can be deployed. You don't want to throw two Alchemicals at each other and end up with both of them dead, because that's just bad juju for everyone. Wars in Autochthonia should be closer to modern special forces actions than the mass wars of Creation, because you have limited objectives, unstable logistics lines, and if those guys over there die, your world might become meaningfully more hostile and you might die too.
Except let's talk about the Fundamental Premise of Autochthonia. And this is going to go into a deep dive of history.
Autochthonia is the corpse of a great cyborg god that Iteration X found, which inspired it to turn away from its old skeptics and brother-knights in primium plate and transformed it into the radical religious transhumanists we know and love. It's a corpse-world which once had an ecosystem that was entirely cybernetic, and once when it was alive it was a maker god of some sort. Its associations were with toolmakers, but also with religion and with cybernetics, a literal deus ex machina. Cybernetics in both senses-the sense of cyborg implants, but also the sense of managed society. Of radical utopian science fiction-or dystopian science fiction.
This was expanded on and further explored in the 1E Autochthonians book, where Autochthonian society was generally described as regimented and was very much cybernetic, in the sense of the real life Technocracy movements and the early industrial age fetishization. Body modifications and implants were implicitly mentioned as a thing they did to specialists-alchemically enhanced supersoldiers the equal of any Gunzosha, for example. Even in 2E, the association with faith, machinery, and cybernetics survives.
But the fundamental premise of Autochthonia is that it's managed society, where everyone has their place and every place has its necessity. It's a modern society, in that it is interlocking, interdependent, and fragile. Unlike in the rest of Exalted, everyone in Autochthonia is interdependent. Unlike Creation, it's not a one-way street, the Exalts are far more dependent on the humans.
It's a place where an idealized version of Soviet Russia, the Manei Domini, and the World State should be able to exist together-not in harmony, but together. Sure, in some situations you might want to have normal humans. Beyond Earth's Human Hive and its managed eusocial society is more radical for all that it doesn't involve radical transhumanism, but rather a lot of people who were willingly indoctrinated in a certain form of thought. But in others, you might not.
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As I've argued - and I think you have before - an Alchemical costs a similar relative cost to a supercarrier, and each Charm is like a fighter. And then each Alchemical requires vats infrastructure similar to a dock and a support crew with similar training requirements to real life aircraft carrier staff and dock crew.
When put in those terms, you remember that a Gunzosha-equivalent costs around the same scale as a single mid-level Charm and that lighter enhancement armour might be cheap enough in relative terms that you can equip an enlightened mortal squad with it for a similar price. The idea of getting some frigates and destroyers sounds like an awfully good idea at that point, rather than trying to make a force entirely made of fully-stocked supercarriers. For one, it's not a massive calamity to your nation if you lose one of your less expensive force-projection assets.
(This also means you should have arms controls treaties which mean there are strictly controlled circumstances when Alchemicals must yield when fighting each other, which means for non-total wars when people are holding to the treaties you can have recurring antagonists who banter with you across the comms channel and who won't execute the PCs if they beat them and the PCs risk starting the equivalent of a nuclear exchange if they don't accept the enemy's yielding.)
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Thing is, Autochthonia already has suitable vectors for making stories about transhumanism, the Alchemical Exalted and the tunnel dwellers who form makeshift enclaves of machine-god worshipers outside the bounds of the Octet. And that's totally fine for them, because its not trying to raise the baseline of what "the average Autochthonian worker" entails, because at the end of the day, that worker needs to be readable as a Normal Person. The lack of a transhumanist angle is Autochthonia is something of the point to the exercise, because unlike Creation where you have massively broad tracts of pastoral wilderness where you can find rustic hamlets of Regular Everyday Folks tilling fields, raising families and having petty household dramas, Autochthonia is required to present conditions necessary where More Crazy Magic is not an valid answer to every problem. That you need a measure of enforced mundanity as a backdrop to help contrast a greater setting where the common man literally work the flesh of a cosmic godbeast to earn their daily bread.
Should it be Possible to make super-workers to offset things? Sure! There's undoubtedly someone who once attempted it, but that attempt should be cast as a marked mistake which settled into the current method, because it was found to lack something of the essential elements needed to get the job done. Because Autochthon needs to have "The Human Condition" as a critical element upholding the nations and his health, or else the decision to bring along mankind as anything other than a weird and arbitrary choice becomes moot. If massive numbers of super-strong, super-tough, super-devoted workers was all that was necessary to keep him stable, then there are all manner of spirits, elementals and such inherent to the Great Maker's nature to serve the same role just as well, if not more reasonably, than contracting out to literally the barrel-scraping species that was needed to create the Exalted.
And as you might guess, I take a pretty poor view of the outlook that the nations exist primarily to be an "ant farm" built solely to sustain and augment a private force of Alchemical Exalted "chosen of Autochthon" to leverage in his own defense against Creation.
That's nominally the role of the Regulator police-force, who are already part of a higher-caste of social bearing and receive better living conditions, food, training and equipment than the everyday worker as access too. Secondly, there is Estasia, which does maintain a sizable fighting force and justifies out the cost by using it to leech resources from other nations in place of staging salvaging or mining operations. They don't need to be Halo Spartans on top of that, because the eight nations are not continually under threat of wandering monster attacks.
I don't disagree here at all! But its still one thing to suggest the Method should be changed to accomplish those things, and another to say the People involved need to be different in order to make that change have any sort of sweeping relevance. Autochthonia is built on the premise of the former, and rejects the idea of the latter. There are no rustic farmers here to make your demigod stand out more strikingly for his innovations in the cotton gin, and simply upping the ante here to contrast the Alchemicals wielding Superscience Solutions before a public of Implausibly Perfect Mandroids rings incredibly hollow.
Also the general answer given is that pregnant workers of any stripe don't stop working for maternal leave, but simply get laterally transferred into aide work for the duration alongside other workers with valuable knowledge and skills who can't perform strenuously, like the disabled, elderly and sick. Aide work is less physically-impactful work like clerical duties, but still necessary things which needs to be done, and thus has no social stigma or "women's work" associations to the rest of society.
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Apologies for double-post, but that previous reply took a minute.
Also probably worth tossing in here to while I am throwing out links, if anyone else has a similar issue on EarthScorpion's point about linguistic mutation, I also made an attempt to recontextualize that into something more sensible a couple months ago. The short version is, everyone knows what the Voice Of God sounds like, even if they speak how they wish off the clock.
I actually wrote an entire short-essay around that fact in this very thread. You're welcome to read it, if you want.
I wrote quite a bit about the various issues surrounding this as well as my very first post on this forum.
Also probably worth tossing in here to while I am throwing out links, if anyone else has a similar issue on EarthScorpion's point about linguistic mutation, I also made an attempt to recontextualize that into something more sensible a couple months ago. The short version is, everyone knows what the Voice Of God sounds like, even if they speak how they wish off the clock.
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I'm going to note that it is canon that Autochtonia has a ton of sapient machines.
Specifically, one of the Eight Nations, Nurad I think, was famous for building automatons of varying levels of sapience.
They just happen to be in dire straits at the moment and are selling off or melting down much of their hightech (dirigibles, automatons et cetera) for raw materials as they drift closer to a major Blight Zone.
I feel I should point out that alchemicals bodies can be salvaged for materials to make a new alchemical including the soul gem. Killing a foreign alchemical and looting the corpse is a cost effective if risky way of reducing the cost for your next alchemical construction if you can gurantee you don't lose any yourself.