[ERF] The Common Folk

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Insano-Man
Administrator

I could not have asked for more, but more time.

Posts: 810

[ERF] The Common Folk Sept 18, 2018 21:34:00 GMT -5

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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 21:34:00 GMT -5

EVERYBODY ELSE
Most people on Set don't live in a hole. They don't live out in the meat or up in some hyper-advanced battle fleet. As much as the Loonies like to think they own the place, the real Set is scattered across little villages and homesteads out in the wilderness. As much as the Cult of Meat likes to think they're the providers and the protectors, most folks are eating hand-to-mouth off crops and game. For just about every Space Looney who's never seen a soul from off-fleet, there are about twenty more nobodies drifting around orbit.

Society on Set isn't what you would call unified. The giant, disparate mass that makes up the bulk of the planet's population is just that; spread out, separated, and not all that concerned about what's happening halfway across the globe. Big nations aren't that common. Big cities usually don't end well. Even up in orbit, with all that interdependency and limited resources, people mostly mind their own business. Only the wandering sort ever pays a visit to the hamlet or station next door - and it's usually not for very long.

The lack of unity on the planet isn't a mistake. It's hard to keep something big together for all that long. Even way back in the glory days of the Pioneer Network, self-sufficiency was still the king of the day. Set doesn't like to be carved up for territory. Get big and the monsters will ratchet up their attacks. Cultists start slipping in through the cracks to make matters miserable. Loonies have a special title for towns that get too big; "credible military threat". If all that doesn't keep things small, a geodisplacement event might come out of nowhere to carve your empire in half. While it's not exactly impossible to keep a good thing going, it's not exactly easy.

Last Edit: Sept 29, 2018 7:55:11 GMT -5 by Insano-Man

If there are no cars left to drive, why shouldn't I walk in the street?

Insano-Man
Administrator

I could not have asked for more, but more time.

Posts: 810

[ERF] The Common Folk Sept 18, 2018 21:35:02 GMT -5

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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 21:35:02 GMT -5

THE AVERAGE FOLK: PLANETSIDE
Down on the ground, things are all over the place. They're everywhere and doing everything. Tribes of barbarians go on scalping trips into industrialized ruins full of scrapper bandits. Ex-Loonies huddle in little pillbox villages surrounded by grounded spacers in shuttle-husk shantytowns. The only thing that ever holds true of the most of the planet is that it's podunk as podunk gets. People live on the sweat of their own brow, out in the middle of nowhere, dodging inbreeding just as much as they dodge marauding crabs. Plenty of towns start up and never see another living soul for their whole existence.

There's a certain kind of rural, pre-industrial charm to most of Set's sea-level civilization. Most people live without electricity or on shoestring power budgets. Homes are built out of timber, clay, stone bricks, and whatever's on hand. Roads usually only go to the edge of town. Wagons are just as common as trucks, whether they're pulled by bear-sized lobsters or genuine horses. Guns and ammo are just as common as crossbows and bolts. Set hasn't peeled back all the way to sharp rocks and bone spears - in most places - but it's not exactly a planet of luxury.

Out in the less-travelled corners of Set, things get a little odd. People get funny ideas on how to live their lives. They live in giant mushrooms, make air gondolas out of gas-bag mutants, and fight tentacle-eyed monsters over fishing spots. They take over ancient stone pyramids, deck them in twinkling lights, and play loud music every day and night to draw in traders. They squat in century-old whale carcasses or spaceship hulks out at sea, fighting off monsters every day of their lives. Set's strange. People learned to roll with it a long time ago.

What they learned in the process is another story. Superstition is everywhere on the planet. Education, not so much. People grow up with the teachings of their elders. They hear stories about how grandpa wrestled eight-legged horrors aboard a brass ship on a sea of fire. They hear about angels and demons visiting grandma from above. They don't hear so much about science, reason, and logic unless someone's been trying their best to keep it all alive. Folklore and gut instincts hold ten times as much ground as hard facts. Sometimes, people even trade them for tangible goods.

Technology on Erf is a bit funny, too. Wrecks leftover from wars past and rotten luck are all over the planet. Burnt-out Looney tanks have sat out in the desert sun for centuries. Garbage hauler wrecks lie under tangles of vines in the middle of overgrown jungles. Ruins and rubble are on just about every continent. Every once in a while, a town gets lucky and finds a cache of shotguns and rocket launchers hiding in a basement. Sometimes, they find a working fusion plant instead. On occasion, people are smart enough to take things apart and figure out how they work. It's not all that unusual to find a village that's figured out combustion engines before they've gotten running water.

Trade makes matters even more complicated. Travelling merchants are all over the planet. Wanderers and nomads usually make their living off their sedentary cousins. Spacers crash and need to trade off their pricey hardware for spare parts. Without any sort of global economy or universal currencies, barter is the only way most people do business. Ammo, fuel, food, and water are popular stand-ins for cash. Looney base credits get some mileage, but nothing ever compares to something that puts food on the table.

The golden rule on Set is that, if it doesn't look like you, it's probably not going to be your friend. Monsters, hungry animals, and freakish mutants are all over. Towns usually see monthly, weekly, or even daily sieges by frenzied beasts from out in the wilderness. Drifters and caravans usually have to fight off some kind of horror show to get to the next settlement. The same goes for the aliens down on Set's surface. Plenty of people don't even know what an alien is. Most lump them in with monsters and mutants either way. It's about the same in reverse; if they don't hate mankind on principle, they probably think the five-fingered freaks are just another breed of nightmare.

Even then, down in the dirt, mankind is the star of the show. Humans are doing everything, everywhere, at every time of day. Nine out of ten sentient creatures on the planet are Earth's finest, whether it's out in the blights or deep in the meat. After humans, redworlders hold the distant second spot, mostly around Naza's Prong and other desert locales. Sorassan are a fair distance behind in third, mostly in the snowy places around Patzaghd and Kelpak. Sentient pseudocrustaceans come after - or so everyone hopes - and live just about everywhere. Paleworlders occupy the fifth rung, but no one has any kind of conclusive idea on their overall population. Most don't even consider them sentient.

Last Edit: Sept 30, 2018 10:30:17 GMT -5 by Insano-Man

If there are no cars left to drive, why shouldn't I walk in the street?

Insano-Man
Administrator

I could not have asked for more, but more time.

Posts: 810

[ERF] The Common Folk Sept 18, 2018 21:36:01 GMT -5

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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 21:36:01 GMT -5

THE AVERAGE FOLK: ORBIT
Up in orbit, things are miserable. People aren't common with all that space. Even further, orbit constitutes a tiny sliver of the population Set's got to offer. Variety's slimmer in space by sheer virtue of the requirements everyone has to put up with. Staying stocked in fuel and fresh air is one challenge. Maintaining orbit, not crashing into another station, keeping track of all those touchy astronautics - that requires a certain kind of mindset for the job. People up in orbit don't have the wiggle room for prejudice, piety, or anything that doesn't keep their engine burning.

Not most of them, anyways. Spacers have their own society up there, cobbled together out of junk and grit. They aren't fond of the gravity-afflicted midgets down on the planet. "Dirt-suckers", "bottom-feeders", "savages" - there are a lot of mean nicknames for the townies and travellers downstairs. When the spacers have to go down, it's something like stepping into enemy territory. Most think just about everyone planetside is with the Cult. When the little man on the ground comes up to space, there's a high-and-mighty attitude waiting for him.

One way or another, life in space isn't a whole lot different. Whatever spacers think doesn't mean much when it comes to the facts. People live hand-to-mouth all the same, just with a bit more movement and hardware. People go about their daily lives hunting for wrecks to salvage for fuel and repairs. They get wrapped up in trade routes to help keep stations afloat or go to work on one of those same platforms. Mercenary fleets band together to offer security - or protection - to anyone they can find. People fall in with pirates and raiders, boarding and looting just like bandits on the ground. The ways and means might be different, but they're all playing the same game; survival in scarcity at its worst.

One of the worst parts about being in space is the boredom. Faster-than-light travel doesn't exist up there. Not because it's not possible, but because most people who try to use it end up dead. If it's not the drive blowing up or ripping the ship apart in a dust cloud, it's because the Space Loonies showed up to ruin the party. Suspended animation is unreliable and uncomfortable for most parties. People have to make due with months-long travel times just to get from one place to another. Stir crazy doesn't begin to describe what spacers have to put up with.

Technology in orbit is only just enough to keep spaceflight going. People make due with assault carbines for marines, cannons for ships, and radios for chatter. They run nuclear power and burn chemical thrusters to get around. A mix of clumsy magnet-gravity on ships and centrifugal force on space stations helps keep people from turning out like overgrown flamingos - sometimes. Computers are everywhere and absolutely vital to everyone. It's a tremendous leap up from the ground, but it's all still at the bottom of its own pile. At the top is genuine artificial gravity, plasma railguns, and inertial dampening, with artificial intelligence running everything. Most of the time, only the Space Loonies get that much.

Money in orbit is a mix of currencies no one's ever really got the real value of. Space Looney fleet credits aren't recognized everywhere, but they're reliable most of the time. Unity Station's UCC is accepted in most places, but its value is never the same twice. Lebedrovez tries to keep its LEMEX popular, but that jumps around even more than the UCC. Just like on the ground, most people prefer barter over finance. Spare parts and fuel are favorites. Food stays competitive in the sparser sides of low orbit.

One of the few things that the orbit has on the ground below is that people up in space don't have the energy for xenophobia. Humans, Zaschia, paleworlders - as long as you're not trying to eat someone, nobody cares what you look like. Humans are still the most common up there, coming in at seventy percent of the total population. Fast behind them are the redworlders, stubbornly holding on to second place. Unionites and boglanders fill out the third and fourth spots, most of them cooped up in Unity Station.

Last Edit: Sept 29, 2018 3:22:24 GMT -5 by Insano-Man

If there are no cars left to drive, why shouldn't I walk in the street?

Insano-Man
Administrator

I could not have asked for more, but more time.

Posts: 810

[ERF] The Common Folk Sept 18, 2018 21:36:16 GMT -5

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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 21:36:16 GMT -5

THE AVERAGE FOLK: UNDERGROUND
The strangest thing about Set is that, as much as most people are living on the surface like lice, there are still plenty more underground. The strangeness isn't purely conceptual, either; people below the surface are an odd bunch in odder conditions. Things get weird down there. Take everything wrong or confusing on Set's sunny side and it's still not enough to compare to what's below. Somehow, despite all that oddity working against them, people are hanging on just about everywhere in the depths.

Closer to the sun, the cave people aren't that much different from the folks on the surface. Some are just surface dwellers living in caves a little deeper than usual. Get further down and they take after the planet. Their practices get stranger, their towns get harder to navigate, and their lives lose their sense. People are ruled over by crab tyrants and talking skulls. They worship stone wheelchairs driven by vicious slugs. They talk to their ancestors' tibiae for relationship advice. They use lightning rocks to teleport halfway across the planet. Honest-to-goodness ghosts haunt some tunnels. Some of them are actually pretty nice people.

One of the bothersome facts about living in a giant, stone chasm means you've got to build a little differently. Villages like to get vertical. When it's not a chasm, it's a set of twisting caves. Navigation isn't easy when the sun is a concept that doesn't exist down there. It gets a bit harder when angry monsters with backs full of glowing spines are creeping in the corners. Just getting around town can be a near-death experience. When the tunnels are manmade, things get even more difficult. Unsteady supports can bring a cave down without warning. Bad tunnel-carving practices can kill off a village in just one wrong move.

Traders and travellers aren't that common in the depths. Nomads get it a bit rough, too. Even still, they exist, and some of them do well enough for themselves. They wander around, bouncing between Looney bunkers and tunnel villages, hunting monsters and fungi for food. They're usually only just holding it all together; the hunter-gatherer lifestyle doesn't work out so well when the plants and animals are but once a week. Bigger, more complicated cave networks are usually where they roam around, especially when there's already a town or two to support them.

Meanwhile, new settlements and societies climb up from below because Set just wanted more friends. Deep down in the bottom are the Chambers of Myth, the birthplace of a million new residents each day. They pop out of nothing for no reason at all and start moving up. Nine out of ten end up dead because something awful happened before, during, or after the ride. The rest steadily climb up to either a new home in the underground or somewhere on the surface. Plenty of tunnel folk end up as surface towns by the end of their ride. Some end up going deeper because something coming up decided to knock them down. Nobody knows why it happens. Nobody's spent much time trying to figure it out.

Technology underground is about as weird as the place itself. Deep down, oxygen is hard to come by. Searing temperatures and crushing pressures get more and more common as you get further into the black. Paranormal activity makes it even harder to tell what's going to happen when you set foot in a new cave. Gas masks, air tanks, and other breathing protection are common. Handmade environment suits aren't all that scarce. On the other hand, guns, computers, and vehicles are about non-existent. It's not all that unusual to see a gang of tunnel bandits kitted out with leather spacesuits and rock javelins.

Population density in the underground is at its highest around the Great Filter, where the open space makes it easier to spot monsters. Better oxygen concentrations and livelier flora make it even better. The seas of ruins and real, watery seas help keep towns afloat through scavenging and shipborne trade. An odd point of note is that aliens are a fraction of a percent of the overall population. Most don't go that far down from orbit. None of them ever come up from the Chambers of Myth. For some odd reason no one's ever quite figured out, Set only deals in humans. The aliens are all just along for the ride.

Last Edit: Sept 30, 2018 10:10:51 GMT -5 by Insano-Man

If there are no cars left to drive, why shouldn't I walk in the street?