Friday, April 22, 2022

Animal Planet - Pre-Crash Groups

SWN has rules for Factions that are highly regarded based on the reviews I have read. I have not, however, read them yet so I am not sure if the following would properly fall under factions.
To help add flavor to the world and foreshadow some of the frictions and hostilities that will occur planet-side after the crash, I want to detail some of the groups and ideologies that exist on Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil is a massive transport vessel that picked up thousands of passengers from each of a number of worlds and will drop them off on other inhabitable worlds.

The first set are surprisingly numerous on the ship, given their general disdain for technology. They were willing to board the Yggdrasil in order to escape the increasingly technocentric worlds of the Nexus for the chance to build new societies on uninhabited rim worlds.

Technophobes

  • Luddites (likely need another name)
    • Skilled workers and artisans who reject automation and utilize technology to varying degrees
    • Some, for example, will utilize power tools while others believe only in hand tools
    • All, however, believe that automated creation lacks soul and threatens their identity
  • Off-gridders
    • Prefer to live with no to minimal advanced technology
    • Some believe in a simple life in harmony with nature while others have a more conspiratorial bent and actively avoid government tracking and interference
  • Anarcho-Primitivists (Pre-atavists)
    • Recognize and embrace their animal instincts and seek to return to an original, more primitive lifestyle

The second set are the opposite, embracing technology more closely and fully than the average citizen.

Technophiles

  • Modders
    • Seek to improve themselves with cybernetic enhancements
    • Cyberware is expensive and redundant with handheld devices, so many non-mods (fleshies?) do not see the point
  • Inheritors of Immortal Steel
    • Seek to improve robotics and computing to the point they can upload their minds and consciousnesses into immortal robot bodies
    • Very health conscious, both physically and mentally, as they have to live long enough to realize their goals

The third set concern views of the proper place for love and sex. The various species that inhabit the worlds of Animal Planet cannot interbreed but their societies have grown into a melting pot that sees interspecies relationships form more regularly.

Love & Sex

  • Anti-Miscegenationists
    • Believe that sexual unions across species are contrary to nature and/or morally wrong
    • Attitudes run the gamut from "I would prefer they didn't" to "we need to stone them to death and burn the corpses"
  • Fecundists
    • A subset of mostly Anti-Miscegenationists who believe sexual unions should always be potentially fertile
    • Some believe that all females should seek to be pregnant as often as possible to populate the inhabitable worlds of the Nexus and Rim
      • Some go further and support scheduled breeding programs; some of these are not Anti-Misc ("have sex with whomever you want, as long as you also keep popping out babies")
  • Miscegenationists
    • Believe that sexual unions across species are acceptable
    • Mostly a rejection of anti-miscegenation rather than promotion of miscegenation

The fourth set are political or societal in nature and, while informing a character's background, will likely not have much direct effect after the crash.

Politicos & Socialites

  • Independent Lapine Republic (ILR) activists/terrorists
    • Rabbit supremacists who resent their annexation by the central government and seek to re-establish the interplanetary Lapine Republic
  • Seekers
    • Explore the cosmos to find clues to their origins and purpose
    • (The First Generation awoke on Prime a thousand years ago with no knowledge of how they got there)


Additional groups to be added as invented.

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