andrewrgross

One of the other devs asked about the description of the "Independent States of America" in the following passage. They asked if allowing for a southern succession was offensive or inappropriate. How does this read to others?

...

2077 - The American realignment

Following the third contested election in a row, the new governor of Florida declared that the state would no longer send taxes to DC, and began restricting the flow of goods from its coastal and space ports until its preferred candidate was seated as president. DC mobilized the military and national guard, and the governor of Florida demanded the backing of neighboring states. Internal conflicts within the military ranks began to rise as states began taking sides. Alabama’s governor immediately took the side of Florida and other states began forming alliances. Texas and Oklahoma declared joint neutrality. Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia allied in rejection of Flordabama, despite recognizing many of the same grievances and demanded a peaceful solution. Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, WV, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska formed a block in support of the US, as did New England. Mississippi and Louisiana were the most conflicted until an attack on US-loyal soldiers at Camp Powell began a civil war, and Louisiana and Mississippi joined the Texan alliance. The result was a transfer of power from the federal government to four regional state collectives:

Pacifica, made up of the west-coast: California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona.

Oyate Ni’na Tan’ka Makobdaye ka Heitanka (ONTMH), made up of Colorado, The Dakotas, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Utah, Wyoming, and parts of Alberta, Iowa, Manitoba, Minnesota, Missouri, and Saskatchewan.

The Independent States of America, made up of most of the coastal south: Florida, Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, etc.

The United States of America: the remaining states of the north east and central continent remained within the United States, although many formed regional state compacts and much of the authority of the federal government was shifted to these states and their state collectives.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/8382697

I love seeing this. I'm not quite ready to by this particular bike, but I'm definitely going to share the info with my husband and see what he thinks. This could suit our needs in the next year or two.

I love seeing this. I'm not quite ready to by this particular bike, but I'm definitely going to share the info with my husband and see what he thinks. This could suit our needs in the next year or two.

What does healing look like in a solarpunk game?

We've tried to adapt some classic conventions -- healing positions & med kits -- for the setting.

• First, there isn't a price to them. (Obviously, right?)
• Second, we've tried to wrap a bit of science around this magic: inflammation-responsive growth factors, wound-closing growth factors, vascularization growth-factors... you get it.
• Third, we've tried to bring the themes of embodiment and connection to the physical world into healing. Instead of dispassionate medibots or jabbing yourself with a needle full of nanobots, healing is literally hands-on: users rub a messy clay-like substance into major wounds, and the drinkable tonic requires heat to activate, either applied with heating pads, hot water, or massaging action.
• The effect of healing is based on a combination of skill points in the Medicine skill and the Care skill. This means that players need points in at least one of these to use the medputty, and need points in both to be an effective healer build. Healing actions are also only half as effective when self-administered as when done by an ally.

How would you like to see healing represented in a solarpunk adventure?

Healing

Healing players can be performed in a variety of ways. Here are several:

Med Putty

Med putty is a complex, viscous emulsion of proteins, angiogenic growth factors, and MEMS suspended in a stabilizing biopolymer substrate. This putty is used for rapidly stabilizing biological damage. It can close wounds, reduce inflammation, relieve extreme pain, and otherwise remedy major bodily harm, at least until further intervention can be provided. It has a consistency like toothpaste and is stored in squeeze tubes. Once open, a tube must be used immediately, and typical use requires an entire tube per treatment. In this way, tubes of Med Putty serve as the primarily in-game med-pack. A key gameplay function is to allow a player to perform a healing action as a single action within a round of combat.

When a player uses a tube of med putty, they don’t need to roll. The number of HP restored is equal to their skill points in Care + Medicine + either Intelligence OR Dexterity.

The effect is cut in half if players are using medputty to heal themselves.

Restoration Tonic

Restoration tonic is a liquid potion that contains a complex of anti-inflammatories, analgesics, and repair agents coupled with targeting agents. The targeting agents allow the biochemical packages to migrate to regions of damage and release appropriate agents to quickly mend soft tissue injuries. Its use relies on heat and gentle physical mediation to help reach target regions and to mediate biochemical repair. This is typically provided with the application of hot water under a massaging showerhead or massage with heated gloves, but most applications of heat and gentle pressure will suffice.

Within the game mechanics, restoration tonics are often used as a versatile health potion for restoring a character’s Endurance stat worth of lost HP outside of combat. The tonics are not rare, but because they take around 10 minutes to use and 20 minutes to take full effect and require facilities like a shower, they serve to allow players to recover HP once a dangerous encounter ends, rather than in the middle of an action scene.

As with any healing practice in game, the damage which is being healed should make sense. In most cases, the rapid healing can be explained as a bit of an illusion: the damage doesn’t disappear, but the pain is relieved and the effects of the injury are resolved sufficiently that they can heal more fully with rest or with further medical attention later.

GM’s can choose to limit the use of restoration tonics to once per day if desired or offer special advanced healing tonics which provide Endurance + 4 points of HP or Endurance x2, or have players roll for Endurance + Athletics (perhaps as a favored check) and receive whatever value they pass by in HP.

Hydration

Drinking water will restore a character 1 HP once per day. It’s also recommended for players.

Narrative Healing Actions

Narrative healing is the best kind of healing. This consists of having players describe the specific medical remedy they’re applying (or repair, for a synth). They then must roll for success on that action. Typical skill checks may include Dexterity or Intelligence + Care or Medicine. Examples would include applying a splint, suturing a wound, or performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation. GMs and players are encouraged to use future technologies like healing putty in conjunction with narrative description if they’re capable.

Synth Healing

For synths, healing is justified in game as “temporary repair”. Temporary repair allows a synth to isolate and bypass damaged components and rely on backup systems to return to restore functions and delay the need for full repair. Synths require 25 minutes to perform a temporary repair, though they can speed this process up by performing an Endurance + Machines check and subtract however much they pass by from the 25 minute diagnostic time.

Synths are much less defined in game than organic creatures, so a lot of the narrative and mechanistic decision-making lies with the GM. GMs may wish to heavily limit temporary repair, instead forcing machines to replace modular components. Or, they may choose to use advanced self-repairing micro-machinery to afford synths and cyborgs greater healing capabilities than organic creatures.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/8178247

We're editing down the manual, and I'm sharing some backstory to the world that didn't make the cut in the manual. This is the kind of silly microfiction that players are encouraged to write and share. This particular piece I wrote because I was trying to imagine where gorillas would live in the US, and why, and how.

In writing the backstory for Ewan Reinhart, I decided that the Gulf Coast was probably the most ecologically sensible place to try to establish a population of gorillas, and then started imaging the circumstances under which the US would do so. Surprise: it's the military industrial complex working hand-in-hand with border control!

The Establishment of the Gulf Coast Gorilla Population

Starting in the 2030s, Northwestern State University in Louisiana began trying to create a stable population of gorillas within one of Louisiana’s wildlife preserves. Among the project goals were tests of whether uplifting would improve the ability of the gorillas to thrive and assist humans in optimizing their survival. Several years after transplanting heirloom gorillas from US zoos and administering enhancement programs, the US Department of Defense began piloting Project Primal Warrior: a project to test the feasibility and performance of gorilla shock troops. In 2042 the DOD invested heavily in the Louisiana Gorilla Sanctuary project with the goal of creating 1,000 gorilla infantry soldiers by 2050 and the goal to produce 10,000 u-gorilla soldiers by 2060. They continued to generously fund the Louisiana Gorilla project in order to support the project goal of producing a target population of 40,000 gorillas in the US by 2060 in order to support Project Primal Warrior.

Herman Ducharme was among the early cohorts to undergo Army training. In 2042, at the age of ten he began keeping a journal at the request of his handler. Concurrently, he began keeping a private diary in addition to one his handlers reviewed. It documents Herman’s exploration into unscreened literature at the fort library and conversations among the other gorillas about their situation. Ducharme’s secret diary would go on to establish a historical record of an emerging political consciousness among the early gulf coast gorilla troops. In 2048, the military began deploying army-trained gorillas along with Customs and Border Patrol agents. In 2049, the Bureau of Land Management began establishing gorilla habitats for mixed populations of maximally and minimally enhanced gorillas along most of the eastern third of the US-Mexico border. Though the pretext was for gorilla conservation, contemporary news coverage recognized the motivation to try and surveil and control the border.

By 2052 the Department of Homeland Security began the top secret project Simian Sentry. Under the program, DHS began incentivizing, manipulating, and pressuring the population of 8,000 gorillas living directly along the border to discourage crossing attempts through violence against humans who passed through their territory. Around the same time, residents of the southern Gorilla sanctuary became acquainted with members of the nascent parahuman rights movement through their contact with Veronica Sandoval’s production team, who were working on “Voices of the Unheard”.

In 2056, the brutal murder of a family camping in Louisiana brought national attention to the danger the gorillas living along the gulf coast posed. In the midst of the furor, a young gorilla investigator named Whisper Dubois and a human partner broke the story on the clandestine militarization of the southern Gorilla sanctuary by the DOD and CBP under Simian Sentry. The program was canceled following heated congressional hearings that took place amid a fierce public debate over the public perception of Gorillas. The DOD began phasing out Project Primal Warrior soon after. Attempts to evict 6,000 u-gorilla infantrymen from the barracks in which they’d lived since they were children led to riots among both gorillas and humans. The military eventually completed the move-out by offering a generous severance package and investments in gorilla infrastructure. Because of the gulf of trust between the Gulf Coast Gorillas and the US government, these monies were directed – on the gorillas’ insistence – to the Circle of Nations for management and disbursement. By 2060, the weakened US government had lost interest in managing the complicated situation they’d created along the gulf coast. To the gorillas’ delight, the federal government eagerly left matters to the states and the Circle of Nations as much as possible going forward.

We're editing down the manual, and I'm sharing some backstory to the world that didn't make the cut in the manual. This is the kind of silly microfiction that players are encouraged to write and share. This particular piece I wrote because I was trying to imagine where gorillas would live in the US, and why, and how.

In writing the backstory for Ewan Reinhart, I decided that the Gulf Coast was probably the most ecologically sensible place to try to establish a population of gorillas, and then started imaging the circumstances under which the US would do so. Surprise: it's the military industrial complex working hand-in-hand with border control!

The Establishment of the Gulf Coast Gorilla Population

Starting in the 2030s, Northwestern State University in Louisiana began trying to create a stable population of gorillas within one of Louisiana’s wildlife preserves. Among the project goals were tests of whether uplifting would improve the ability of the gorillas to thrive and assist humans in optimizing their survival. Several years after transplanting heirloom gorillas from US zoos and administering enhancement programs, the US Department of Defense began piloting Project Primal Warrior: a project to test the feasibility and performance of gorilla shock troops. In 2042 the DOD invested heavily in the Louisiana Gorilla Sanctuary project with the goal of creating 1,000 gorilla infantry soldiers by 2050 and the goal to produce 10,000 u-gorilla soldiers by 2060.

Herman Ducharme was among the early cohorts to undergo Army training. In 2042, at the age of ten he began keeping a journal at the request of his handlers. Concurrently, he began keeping a private diary in addition to one his handlers reviewed. It documents Herman’s exploration into unscreened literature at the fort library and conversations among the other gorillas about their situation. Ducharme’s secret diary would go on to establish a historical record of an emerging political consciousness among the early gulf coast gorilla troops. In 2048, the military began deploying army-trained gorillas along with Customs and Border Patrol agents. In 2049, the Bureau of Land Management began establishing gorilla habitats for mixed populations of maximally and minimally enhanced gorillas along most of the eastern third of the US-Mexico border. Though the pretext was for gorilla conservation, contemporary news coverage recognized the motivation to try and surveil and control the border.

By 2052 the Department of Homeland Security began the top secret project Simian Sentry. Under the program, DHS began incentivizing, manipulating, and pressuring the population of 8,000 gorillas living directly along the border to discourage crossing attempts through violence against humans who passed through their territory. Around the same time, residents of the southern Gorilla sanctuary became acquainted with members of the nascent parahuman rights movement through their contact with Veronica Sandoval’s production team, who were working on “Voices of the Unheard”.

In 2056, the brutal murder of a family camping in Louisiana brought national attention to the danger the gorillas living along the gulf coast posed. In the midst of the furor, a young gorilla investigator named Whisper Dubois and a human partner broke the story on the clandestine militarization of the southern Gorilla sanctuary by the DOD and CBP under Simian Sentry. The program was canceled following heated congressional hearings that took place amid a fierce public debate over the public perception of Gorillas. The DOD began phasing out Project Primal Warrior soon after. Attempts to evict 6,000 u-gorilla infantrymen from the barracks in which they’d lived since they were children led to riots among both gorillas and humans. The military eventually completed the move-out by offering a generous severance package and investments in gorilla infrastructure. Because of the gulf of trust between the Gulf Coast Gorillas and the US government, these monies were directed – on the gorillas’ insistence – to the Circle of Nations for management and disbursement. By 2060, the weakened US government had lost interest in managing the complicated situation they’d created along the gulf coast. To the gorillas’ delight, the federal government eagerly left matters to the states and the Circle of Nations as much as possible going forward.

Hey! Our game tries to integrate into its vision of the future an assumption of the restoration of Indigenous culture and agency on Turtle Island. As we're getting ready to release, we'd really appreciate getting more eyes on it and letting us know how it reads and if there are any changes we can make to improve its quality.

The main section which I'd like thoughts on is below. This is taken from the section of the World Guide describing major historical events and turning points. Constructive feedback would be appreciated. Feel free to copy, share, repost, ect. to any other forum where it may get attention, and direct folks to contact us through any social media or email channels on our website (https://fullyautomatedrpg.com). And thanks!

2042 - The Yurok People v. The Bureau of Land Management

In 2028, congress passed the Federal Ordnance for Restoration of Environments for Sustainable Territories (or FOREST) Act. The FOREST Act was a massive compromise legislation which created new programs to encourage forestry management. It included terms to make preserving and expanding forests as carbon sinks financially competitive with logging and mineral extraction by allowing companies to sell carbon offsets; funded construction of new parks; relaxed limits on hunting; and provided dozens of other favors for the various stakeholders needed to secure passage. One of its 35 sections even contained a largely symbolic gesture to American Indian tribes which would return neglected land to them under conditions which were believed unlikely to ever be exercised.

The effects were mixed. By 2038, millions of additional acres of land had been set aside as protected reserves. Many policy experts believed that the reduction in drilling and fracking that occurred was driven more by local bans and a rapid decline in financing as the banking sector began to recognize that new carbon infrastructure had become such frequent targets of sabotage that their risk wasn’t worth the declining returns. Eventually, the carbon offsets market crashed in 2041 following the Second Paradise Fire. A lawsuit followed.

During Our Children’s Trust v. Green Growth Climate Solutions, the climate advocacy group Our Children’s Trust showed that Green Growth Climate Solutions had purchased hundreds of square miles and contracted with the Federal Bureau of Land Management to be responsible for forestry management of thousands more of federally held land in order to sell worthless carbon offsets. At the same time, they’d neglected to perform any meaningful sustainable forestry services as contracted. During the trial, experts testified to the well-known fact that carbon offsets were a junk science that did not meaningfully address the climate crisis, and that the fire danger created by hundreds of thousands of acres of neglected land was well known.

The judgment put Green Growth Climate Solutions out of business and crashed the market for carbon offsets. It also created a scandal for the Bureau of Land Management, which was wholly under-resourced and unequipped to fulfill their legal responsibilities to manage the vast tracts of land that now returned to their oversight. A solution came in the form of The Yurok People v. the Bureau of Land Management in 2042.

As soon as the Green Growth case wrapped, the Yurok People brought a suit to enforce section 33 of the FOREST Act of 2028. In the trial against Green Growth it had been shown that the land belonging to the Bureau of Land Management that they’d contracted to Green Growth and the land privately held by Green Growth (which reverted to BLM following Green Growth's desolation) had been left fallow for nearly a decade. In a crowning achievement for the First Peoples’ legal movement, a judge concurred that these circumstances fulfilled the conditions outlined in section 33, and granted them 8,000 square miles of territory.

Green Growth’s practices had been common throughout the industry, and as the market crashed and more suits were brought in other states, native groups reclaimed millions of acres more. Though the judgements were stinging, the federal government saw a silver lining. Responsibility for the ever-growing problem of wildfires now rested with the native groups who’d won their cases.

Over the 2040s, the various nations of the first peoples managed to surprise the doubters. They formed the Circle of Nations to assist in inter-tribal management of their expansive returned territories.

They turned land assumed to be of low value into productive food forests, nature reserves, scientific centers, parks, and traditional hunting preserves. While reducing uncontrolled fires, they turned the land into a source of wealth and influence. They granted permissions to communes which met their strict qualifying requirements to live upon the land and learn their techniques. They fed and housed themselves and then thousands upon thousands more.

By the 2060s, the Circle of Nations and the first peoples had become a highly influential force within American science and policy. As society at large underwent a radical rethinking during the years following the Treaty of Antarctica, many of the values and practices of the first people finally saw overdue adoption within the wider culture of the second people.

Windrush is an aguamodo: a human with aquatic augmentations. She's a ship and port inspector, a proud member of the ILWU 122 (the International Longshore & Warehouse Union), and a mom. She has skills in inspection and healing. She also coaches underwater hockey at her kid's school.

Full character sheet: link

Bio:

Gillian Phong was born to Linda Phong and Melody Beridze in 2191. Linda was an aguamodo conservationist and documentarian, and Melody was a ferry pilot.

From an early age, Gillian wanted to be an aguamodo. She took swim lessons, got her scuba certification, and began breath and heart-rate training as an adolescent. In her teens, a friend of her mother Melody began taking her along on offshore windmill inspections. Soon, she added to her love of the ocean a fascination with the industries that took place within it. She went on to get her bachelor's degrees in Oceanography and in Supply Chain Infrastructure. It was during this time she met Sogobe, who she’d marry three years later in 2112.

Before she’d even graduated she’d started apprenticing with the longshoreman, and by 2114 she was a proud journeyman. She then applied for the union’s Martian cultural and tech exchange program and was accepted. She and Sogobe spent 27 months sailing out, working in Utopia Basin, and sailing back. This was where they met and fell in love with Amir. It was also during this trip that she trained as an emergency medic with the Mami Wata Medical Network.

In 2118 she gave birth to Aquemini, and in 2020 Sogobe gave birth to their second child, Hueiwoo.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/7878389

I’m not sure why but I’ve always found the Civil Defense to be really cool, and I often try to work it into my stories in one form or another (though none of those have been published yet). When I was helping with reorganizing FA!’s box text on the military, I thought it’d be a good addition.

It fulfills the role of being an organized, primarily civilian, primarily voluntary disaster relief organization. It has a long history in dozens of countries, in one form or another, all around the world. Its provided training, search and rescue, preventative measures, emergency response, and recovery, in everything from wars, to natural disasters, and even the Chernobyl disaster. And the different formats used in all those countries give us a historical precident for almost any organizational structure we choose. Want to make it an auxiliary of a military branch? The US did that at some points. Directly part of the military? Some Soviet countries ran it that way. A purely civilian volunteer charity? Britain has recently revived theirs and is running it like that. They can even function as a volunteer militia, like the British home guard, or the American Civil Air Patrol who Wikipedia claims once dropped bombs on axis submarines.

And they have history. People like that kind of lineage, the sense of being part of something that dug people out of rubble in the blitz, that cleared radioactive debris in Chernobyl. There's a long history of sacrifice and service to draw on. And one with comparatively few atrocities on the record.

They're even pretty cool visually. They have the iconic blue triangle motif common in most countries, and a blue and white color scheme not really associated with combat.

Whether you need someone to respond to wildfires, to assist paramedics, to build levees in a flood, or to distribute and build tornado shelters, it's not a far leap from what they've already done. Like Noir said on the discord, given the scale of the Global Climate Wars in the game’s backstory, it seems pretty likely that every government on the planet would start handing out shovels and white helmets again.

And I think it fits the anarchist influences in solarpunk. Putting some of the responsibilities and capabilities for disaster relief back in the hands of the community. It's also a decent role for a varied cast of characters in a RPG. People with regular lives and skills who can be tasked with a quest and be granted some degree of official legitimacy.

When I wrote up the Civil Defense section for the game manual, I tried to provide enough flexibility to allow players and GMs the option to adjust the local Civil Defense chapter to fit their campaign. I like the idea of modern chapters tracing their lineage to different local groups, a postwar militia here, a wildland fire fighter unit there. Like the Defense served as a way to bring various factions (especially armed ones) into the fold, providing them with improved legitimacy in trade for increasing oversight and standardization. So while they’re supplied and trained by the same organization, at the unit level they have some leeway in how they operate and what they specialize in, which can conveniently fit any campaign that wants to use them.