Sci-Fi: Superintelligence Considerations

 

Most of my better thoughts went into this post from 2017. This post is leftovers, footnotes, and expansions.

NASA JPL

Terminology

c is cognitive speed. It's not intelligence, it's the speed at which a mind processes information and initiates actions. It's not an exact measure. Humans operate at 1c (mostly). A fly, casually dodging your flyswatter, operates at 10c or 100c.

#c is the local baseline cognitive speed. For humans, that's 1c. For some trading algorithms, it might be 10,000c or more.

>#c means "significantly faster than the local cognitive speed." Bullet time.

<#c means "significantly slower than the local cognitive speed."

Naval battles, in the age of the battleship, were both surprisingly slow and astonishingly fast. Engagements were plotted on a <#c scale. Relatively few 1c-scale decisions matter. Effectively, it doesn't matter how good your intuition is, because you've usually got plenty of time to make mistakes.

A chess game, despite requiring a lot of thought, takes place on a <#c scale. The point isn't thinking quickly (thought that does help). It's thinking correctly.

Baseball requires >#c decisions. These days, a batter has to swing as the ball is leaving the pitcher's hand. No time for conscious cognitive processing. No time to aim. Just analysis and action at a level below the steady 1c tick of conscious thought.
 

Mass and Momentum

A fighter moving faster than the eye can follow is a standard trope. A cyborg gunslinger with iron muscles, sprinting through raindrops that seem to be standing still.

There are still limitations. The faster you move pieces into alignment, the more force you need to apply (and then cancel out).

Consider lobbing a tennis ball gently up, then swatting it gently down, then catching it. Takes about a second and doesn't require any particular effort. If you want it to take a hundredth of a second, you need to toss it harder, swat it harder, and then cancel out the force when you catch it.

Then imagine swinging a gun into position. You not only need to apply an impulse, you need to accurately cancel that impulse when the weapon is in the correct position. Slam. Slam. The faster you move, the harder the impact. The slower your brake, the longer it takes.

The mass you're moving is also a factor. It's a very human reaction, when two boats are about to bonk into each other, to reach out to push them apart. Can work for canoes. Does not work for yachts. That's how you lose a hand.

The speed of your servos (which includes biological muscles, motors, handwavy nanofibres, etc.) needs to be balanced with their strength. Strength, of course, being a vague term correlated to mass and scale; how strong (in human terms) is a flea? The material you're moving through also matters. Around here, water is around 1,000x as dense as air. It's why airplane propellers are fast and big and boat propellers are (relatively) small and slow.

So there's a cap on speed, tied to mass and strength. It's still significantly faster than human muscles, but it's fast. I wouldn't bet on humans in a human vs. robot fencing or ping-pong contest.
 

Choice

Where >#c excels is choice. Do you go left or right. Draw your sword or your hammer? >#c gives you time to weigh options.. without any extra information. Without information and properly formed heuristics, all speed gets you is wheel spin and pointless analysis. Hyperactivity is not productivity.

Weapon-wise, a generic sci-fi plasma gun is a good example for >#c units. Adjustable rate of fire, spread, burst, intensity, and range. All values you can adjust on the fly. And all, mercifully, ones the GM doesn't need to adjudicate; just assume the optimal case.

Humans have a built-in "safety valve" for decision-making. It's obvious in chess. You sit there thinking "Do I move my knight or my queen? If I move my knight, my opponent will.. [long branching chain of events].  But if I move my queen, my opponent will... [another long branching chain of events]. And both options look equally bad, no matter how you analyze them. Time is running out. Knight or queen, knight or queen. And so you move your bishop without any analysis at all.

Humans are weird that way.

Basically, choice A [move knight] has accumulated a heavy negative weight from all the analysis you performed. Choice B [move queen] has an equally heavy negative weight. And so, when a third choice presents itself with no negative weight, you jump at it, even though it also has no analysis. You can imagine a badly programmed chess computer following the same process. For any given board state, give all legal moves a positive score (based on the average of games from a database or magic or whatever). Take the move with the best score. Analyze the subsequent chain of moves (again, by database or magic), deducting points if the move leads to a poor board state. Knight starts off with a high score, but analysis drops it until it reaches queen's score. The program switches back and forth between knight and queen until both scores drop below bishop. Then, time's up. And a suboptimal move is made.

Heuristics and Fuzzy Logic

To quote David Mitchell, "If I knew how I knew everything I knew, I'd only be able to know half as much because it'd be all be clogged up with where I know it from."

The more time you spend analyzing how you arrived at a decision, the less time you have to make a decision. Heuristics (i.e. rules of thumb) are very handy. If you drop a kitchen knife, you can spend time analyzing its fall and preparing to catch it, or you can use the heuristic "a falling knife has no handle" and jump backwards and out of danger. If you use the heuristic "loud popping sounds means people are shooting at me and want me dead, I should get into cover", then you're likely to not get shot... and also skip the local firework displays.

But heuristics might make a paranoid AI (or a paranoid human) uneasy. To mangle a quote, adopt a heuristic and you adopt the beliefs of its creator. Bias creeps in. Logic and control go out the window.

Isomorphism is another double-edged sword. Humans interact with unknown systems using isomorphism. If some element of an unknown system can be mapped to a system we know, we will immediately become more comfortable, even if the isomorphism later proves misleading or useless. To put it another way, we like stories. Image recognition is a form of isomorphism, and can easily lead to dangerous misunderstandings.
 

Cyborgs and Hijacks

Ideally, you want #c software on #c hardware. Sticking a hyperadvanced AI into a concealing shell of meat sounds great in theory, but it's like being soaked in treacle. Muscles are comparatively slow. The human eye is a wobbly mess of averaging, interpolation, blind spots, and blackness. If you want to get optimal results, replace all your hardware with something that can handle your new speed.

Then again, there's no particular reason parts of human frames can't operate at >#c for limited periods. 

Moore's Law

If you want to think fast, you need mass. Read-write speeds are the only real limitation, and locally those are currently well beyond 1c.

But a transistor/logic gate/ fancy quantum nodes have a minimum size. I'm willing to imagine small-molecule transistors on a surface; a handful of atoms at most. Current gates are in the 2nm range, so it's entirely plausible. But there's still a limit. We know that it's possible to simulate a human brain using an instrument approximately the size of a human brain (since we do it all the time), so that's a handy benchmark. Does the human body count as the support system?

Modern chips need to be cooled to be effective. It's easy to make a computer blowtorch-proof. It's hard to make it blowtorch-proof and portable. Flash memory is sturdier than spinning discs and magnetic tape, but a bullet-sized kinetic impact will still make a mess of delicate circuits.

I tried a few Fermi estimates to get approximations for scale-to-speed conversions, but the results varied too widely to be useful. Will the hardware needed to run a 1c AI be the size of a pebble, a brick,  a person, or a house? Darned if I know. If in doubt, the general trend is to aim small.
 

Sidebar: Folding Laundry

Current laundry folding robots look like photocopiers. Feed a cotton t-shirt into the tray and it gets folded. Not too impressive. More generalized laundry-folding robots require very specific and controlled conditions... and fold slower than a surly teenager on a Saturday evening.

A laundry-folding robot needs to identify edges in a mixed mass of material of varying colours and textures. It needs to then manipulate the fabric without damaging it, orient it correctly, identify axes, fold, and store the item. It needs to pair socks, deal with fitted sheets, and untangle some of the more complicated undergarmets. These are very difficult tasks. Cars, faces, and road signs are nice and predictable. Laundry is a mess.

I can imagine people fighting ambulatory AI with weighted tarps or sheets covered in misleading dazzle camouflage, false folds, and Möbius edges. Toss one over the robot and watch it struggle to get the thing off. Edge detection, flummoxed. Strength turned against itself (by pushing here, one might apply pressure there, and if the sheet is strong enough the robot could tear its own head off by accident).

It's difficult to imagine a superintelligence that would be flummoxed by a folded sheet, but blind spots or suboptimal tasks could still exist.
  

Impairment and Contract Law

Can humans meaningfully consent?

Currently, humans are the upper end of the local intelligence spectrum. Concern about consent runs backwards, towards children, animals, drunk people, etc. It doesn't run uphill because the adult human,
it is assumed, is already at the top of the hill.

But imagine a being that sees chess the way we see tic-tac-toe.  To quote that old post:

Scale 3, the scale I think is probably closest to true, says "On the scale of possible problem solving abilities, humans, dolphins, and cats are pretty much the same. If aliens exist, there's a very good chance our ability to solve problems looks like a worm's ability."

Thought Experiment 1
Imagine you are an explorer in a soft sci-fi setting and, at the same time, a decently moral human. You land on an alien planet. The Ooblecks that live there are willing to trade 1 bar of gold for 1 kg of salt. This is, for all involved, a reasonably fair deal. But you discover that if you put on a green floppy hat, the Ooblecks will trade 100 bars of gold for the same 1 kg of salt. This is not a fair deal.

• Do you investigate why?
• If you discover that the Ooblecks have a deeply held belief that anyone who wears a green floppy hat is a supernatural figure with divine powers (which you do not possess), do you wear the hat?
• If you decide not to wear the hat, do you try to tell the Ooblecks that their belief is likely to lead to terrible trade deals?
• Do you tell anyone else about the Oobleck and the hat? Do you sell the information?

Thought Experiment 2
Imagine you are a human in business on the present-day planet earth. You are aware that many recent studies show gift-giving, even of small and inconsequential gifts, biases decision-making and creates positive bonds.  You are also aware that businesses you want to have positive relationship with have rules preventing their employees from receiving substantial gifts.

• How closely do you adhere to the spirit of those rules? 
• Do you still provide gifts that fall below the threshold? 
• Do you ignore the thresholds and hope the selected employees are either ignorant of their company's rules or sufficiently discreet?
• How exactly does a business lunch differ from a bribe of equal value?
  

Buck Godot
The website is down, but many archives are available. It's standard Foglio stuff.

 

Humans are terrible at pretty much everything. Long-term planning. Matching goals to methods. Working together. There are notable exceptions, but from an outside perspective, human history probably looks like an appalling shambles. There's no need to invent psychohistory to see that any interested superintelligence could probably play humanity like a fiddle. Figure out the drives, then steer with a hand concealed behind six layers of obfuscation.

But in direct dealings - trade, diplomacy, etc, assuming those are even possible or desirable. - a superintelligence is faced with a problem. Humans might sign a contract trading gold for salt. They might think they're getting a good deal. But the superintelligence might know otherwise. Even if the consequences are explained, humans might not be able to understand the explanation, or have the necessary mechanisms to grapple with the results.

Presumably, other superintelligences can go "oh for fuck's sake Garthrax, you're exploiting the lower beings again. Give the salt back and say you're sorry." Contracts are agreements of understanding, and if one side clearly doesn't understand, the contract does not exist.

The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings (1882)

Summary

• No matter how quickly you think, physics caps physical movement speed. Tradeoffs are required.
• >#c cognitive speeds give more time to analyze choices, but not all analysis is useful. Information can be bottlenecked. 
• Heuristics are necessary but potentially dangerous.
• Cyborgs are a poor compromise.
• Intelligence still requires mass. Superintelligence may or may not be easily portable. The human brain is a decent order-of-magnitude size benchmark.
• Humans may not be able to meaningfully consent when higher-order intelligences are involved.

GMing a >#c NPC

• Spend a lot of time between sessions thinking.
• Rely on vagueness and hints.
• Don't try excessively complicated plans. Pick one good twist or scheme and pile on layers of misdirection.
• Stories are useful hooks. Convince humans they've discovered a story and they'll follow it to the conclusion they expect, ideally in the wrong direction.
• Players like thinking they're clever. They like succeeding. It's rewarding, and infuriating, when they find out they're being manipulated. They will want revenge.
• Kill your darlings. 
• Pop-culture superintelligence, like Hannibal Lecter, Sherlock Holmes, or Jeeves, can sometimes border on magic. Coincidence, not competence. A chain of events that works for story reasons, but doesn't hold up to examination. Try to avoid that. Ideally, the players should be able to follow the sequence from start to finish and be deeply impressed, not skeptical.
• Superintellgience isn't about boasting or monologuing. It's about results. If speaking helps, speak. Otherwise, act.
  
  

Playing a >#c PC

• All of the above.
• Rely on "given time, optimal outcome" tools. E.g. rather than describing exactly how your abilities allow you to precisely hit targets in a gunfight, just deal max damage (or equivalent). Save time, assume full competence.
• Don't monopolize the GM's time. Broadly describe your goals. Think inside your own head.
• It is still possible to be fooled. Work with your GM to describe your character's potential weaknesses.
  
• Nobody exclusively plays one PC in an RPG. Other players can help suggest optimal schemes, even if their PCs can't.
•  Always have at least 3 goals in view, justified with at least 3 levels of "why".
  

OSR: Hireling Morale and Fear

I reread Verbruggen's The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages during my holiday. It drove home just how critical morale is to combat, and how poorly OSR games implement NPC morale.

Julia Zhigadlo

Part 1: Hirelings

Morale

Morale can mean two things: morale as in mutinous or morale as in terrified.

The "we've had time to think about it" morale, the kind that damp socks, cold food, and confusing war goals can affect, is fairly easily handled by most OSR-type games. Obtaining and motivating hirelings is relatively straightforward: high pay, bullshit and lies, and not doing anything too disreputable or dangerous in front of them.

Modern D&D-type games assume the PCs are a competent group of local heroes out to save the world and/or get rich. Hirelings are so far behind the power curve, and so at odds with the narrative structure, that they rarely enter into the equation, unless it's a "rescued" goblin or someone to mind the stronghold.

Whether by straight-up capitalism, feudal relationships, mercenary contracts, obtaining combat hirelings is not difficult. Keeping them in line when a fight starts is the tricky part.

Shame and Love

When faced with imminent death, only two things can keep a person from giving up and fleeing: fear of shame and a desire to protect the person next to them.

As death approaches, high-level human thought stops completely. Fear, in some ways, provides immense clarity. It's deeply wired, hard-coded when our ancestors were still worms. It has root access to every biological system in the human body, and when death approaches, fear makes use of all of them.

Abstractions won't help. The only thing that can defeat fear are two equally deeply rooted emotions: shame or love.

Shame:
Fear of being thought a coward. Fear of ostracization. The nebulous sense of being cut off from the stream of the life you know. Anathema. Cast out. What will your family think? What will your country think? What will your fellow soldiers think?

Love:
I am fighting next to my family. I must protect them, as they would protect me.

Military training, modern and ancient, seeks to reinforce these pathways. "Come back with your shield or on it." I.e. having fought and then carried the bloody heavy thing home, or dead. Don't cast it aside and run. Stories of heroism. The fate of cowards. The visible rewards of victory.

In some military forces, a fighting unit was the community. You fought next to people you'd known your entire life, who shared your experience, who you knew and (hopefully) trusted. Failing that, long and difficult training breaks down existing social structures and builds new ones, ideally forging a unit that occupies the place of family in the conscious mind. Unit leaders become parental figures.

The third option, a poor substitute for shame or love, is training. Training can allow a person to act without thinking, even when terrified out of their wits. The spinal cord doesn't need wits. But all the training in the world won't help because fear can creep into every limb and strangle even well-honed instinct.
 

OSR Hirelings

-Have no particular loyalty or bond to the PCs.
-Will not suffer any shame from leaving some lunatics to die in their magic murder-hole.
-Have no training in common with the PCs.
-May not share a community, values, or social structures with the PCs.

Typical Dungeon Combat Includes

-Narrow hallways
-Poor lighting
-Unknown enemies
-Reaction times measured in seconds

Lack of Tools

Matt Colville

It's not the only problem, but it is a problem. Dungeons are weird places. Generic medieval foot soldiers are trained (and not very well) for a very specific role. It was hard enough to get them to perform that role on a battlefield, let alone in a strange and highly dangerous space.

You can hire people who might have those tools, but you can't make them immune to fear.
 

Magic Immunity to Fear

Ok, maybe you can make your hirelings immune to fear. That spell or ability is now more important than light or cure wounds, because the moment it drops and a fight starts, morale will break, and the hirelings won't be prepared for it by many smaller shocks and close calls.

Soldiers Don't Fight

In medieval warfare, large decisive battles are rare. Sieges are common. Raids, for economic damage or just to make an enemy force spend time and money getting an army together, are constant. Nobody fights unless they absolutely have to.

And in a decisive battle, combat is also surprisingly rare. The classic heavy cavalry charge smashing into a forest of pikes sometimes did happen, but usually after a few mock-charges or tests. Being charged is terrifying, but even the bravest knights in sturdy armour had difficulty launching themselves at full gallop towards a wall of steel and wood.

Battles were long and deliberately exhausting; an exhausted enemy is easy prey for fresh and rested reserves.

In comparison, dungeon combat is short, sudden, and deadly. How often does combat run more than ten or twenty rounds? A single battlefield engagement might take hours; dungeon combat is decided, one way or another, in a few seconds.

Dungeon combat is also unpredictable. A battle takes a few hours to set up after days of marching; a dungeon conceals death around every corner and behind every door. A battle contains a few predictable units. Dungeons contain immortal skeletons coated in jelly, giant spiders, sentient pie-selling pigs, etc, etc.

An army is the wrong tool for a dungeon if you want to avoid mass casualties and panic. A small group of highly trained professionals, each capable of acting independently and without orders, is ideal.

Chris Austin

Morale Tests

Now that we've established that the morale of hirelings will be constantly tested, how should this test be implemented?

The usual approach is as follows:
-give hirelings, individually or collectively, a numerical Morale value.
-create a table of when to test (if outnumbered, after X casualties, etc.)
-create a table of modifiers (allies surviving, proximity to a holy day, etc.)
-roll some dice and compare numbers. If the numbers are bad, the hirelings flee. If the numbers are good, the hirelings do not flee.

The AD&D 1E DMG has some short tables on pg. 67. AD&D 2E has some longer and fiddlier tables on pp. 69-71.

The method works, but it requires looking at tables and doing math in the middle of a tense situation.

Alternative Morale Rules

Morale is, in a sense, how effective a hireling is in combat. Will they run, freeze, or fight? Can they be trusted to hold the line or carry out a plan?

Hit points are already an abstraction. They're not meat points - effects that drain HP don't necessarily need to cause physical damage, merely degrade a target's ability to avoid a fatal blow. 0 HP doesn't necessarily equal death, but does mean the target is out of the fight. Morale can easily be rolled into the same abstraction. Why have a separate system?

A Knight's charge deals 2 automatic damage; hirelings have 1d6 HP. A Lich's fear effect deals damage instead; anyone reduced to 0 HP instead ages 2d100 years and is driven insane, etc In a large formation, fear and disorganization (especially under cavalry charges) can lead to trampling or crushing death as soldiers are herded together. Trampling in a dungeon corridor seems feasible, if a bit strange to describe.

Most of the time, I roll 2d6 compared to 7 minus the number of terrible things the hirelings can currently see (dead comrades, manticores, etc.). If they roll over, they panic. If they roll under, they hold... for now.

https://www.wiktenauer.com/wiki/Gladiatoria_(MS_U860.F46_1450)

How To Avoid Morale Failure

It's possible to hire or obtain a coherent, well-trained unit that can resist fear. Small medieval mercenary warbands were capable of extraordinary feats when cornered because they knew they were fighting for their lives, alongside people they lived with and relied on. Peasant levies, ordinarily treated as fairly useless blocks, developed alarming confidence and competence as they developed a sense of community.

A single lance (an archer, a page, and a knight, or equivalent) is one of the smallest coherent units you can reasonably hire.

Acolytes

Medieval armies are comprised of what Bret Deveraux calls "retinues of retinues". Stacked tiers of obligation. Great lords have little lords to bite 'em, and so on, down to a lone farmer-knight with a spotty page and a tired old horse, who is obliged to round up a levy of 2 when his lord puts out the call to war.

A typical D&D party is an (often leaderless) retinue. Even in my most medieval-inspired games, where people from the Second Estate carried considerable social power, they were rarely the people who decided what the group should do next. RPGs are a collaborative experience.

Each PC can have a retinue. Some games tie the number of hirelings and followers a PC can support based to a PC's charisma score. This makes some sense - Charisma is an underused stat and it makes sense - but it really shouldn't be the primary limiting factor.

AD&D differentiates between hirelings (who get paid a fixed rate) and Henchmen (who get a share of loot, gain XP, and act as backup PCs). These specialists are treated as valued members of the party (and can therefore potentially benefit from the shame/love motivations described above). They've got a vested interest in keeping everyone alive. They are members of the same unit.

Giving someone a proper share of the loot is a big investment for most groups. Players tend to err on the side of greed and avoid hirelings, but if they do pick up a few, I make sure they roll Save like PCs (see below).

Downtime Training Camps

If the PCs need more help than a few acolytes can provide, running a training camp to prepare masses of hirelings for dungeon activities could be fun. Paper monsters, obstacle courses, lessons in identifying common traps and magic items, etc. In some settings it could even turn a profit.
 

Inspiring Speeches

They help and they're fun too, if your players like that sort of thing.
 

Uniforms, Unit Names, and Standardized Equipment

Also helps improve long-term morale and effectiveness. Players sometimes enjoy picking a colour scheme, banner, and organization name.

Daniel Landerman

Part 2: PCs and Fear

The GLOG has Saves against Fear. This isn't Fear, the supernatural spell-like effect of AD&D, but regular emotional fear. In properly terrifying situations - the sudden appearance of an unexpected vampire, the explosive rebirth of a hydra, the sight of a friend immolating after drinking a potion - I have the PCs to save against Fear. If they fail, I tell the player "your character is afraid. What do they do?"

Some people treat this like an abominable heresy. The GM is allowed to poison a PC, alter their appearance with a potion or mutation, change their alignment (if applicable) with a curse (though this isn't really common anymore), add plausible details to a backstory, tell a player their PC thinks an object or person looks suspicious, but describing an emotional state goes too far!

Seems arbitrary to me. And Saves against Fear work out fairly well in play. Reminding players that their characters are still human and still subject to fallible responses is useful. Players, in turn, often make remarkably realistic and interesting choices when their PCs are afraid. 

A very small number of abilities won't work if a PC is afraid, but otherwise, there's no mechanical effect. The PC can still fight effectively if the player decides they can. But most of the time, since the player has a decent grasp of their character's motivations, they do something entirely sensible, like running away, freezing, hiding behind an ally, or vomiting into a bucket.

And yes, if a PC is a notorious vampire hunter and the sudden appearance of a vampire is more of a "hooray, bonus time!" situation, their player is free to object and automatically pass the test. It doesn't come up often.

OSR: The Bendyblunderbus: Post-Apocalyptic Public Transit

Everyone thought the Apocalypse would bring the total collapse of civilization.

They were mostly correct. Banking, personal hygiene, and concrete all crumbled.

People expected the Apocalypse to divide the world into arbitrary zones. They expected delays, horrible smells, raving hooligans, arcane symbols, crumbling infrastructure, creeping ennui, and furious driving.

They didn't realize the implications until it was too late.

The Bus, Paul KirchnerThis is a plausible story.

The busses survived. Perhaps they will be the Earth's true inheritors. Ancient bus routes criss-cross the land, controlled by rival gangs of piratical lunatics in tattered uniforms, their busses turned into mobile fortresses of gunpowder and rope.

Paying passengers - warlord or slave, dirt-grubber or bullet-farmer - all are welcome on any Bus, provided they have a valid ticket or pass. The ancient laws are still respected. No fighting, save with rival Busses (or fare-dodgers, for all's fare in love and war). Ultraenvironmental engines and the sheer force of tradition keeps the busses running. Exact change only.

Luka started this. Sleep deprivation finished it off.
  

Busses of the Wasteland

The Doubledecker Bus-of-the-Line

The grand capital ship of the transit fleet, the Doubledecker carries stiff-necked Vice Admirals and other pseudonaval types into battle. In the empty parking lots and scoured motorways, lines of Doubledeckers pass by, firing wildly as their crews reload dozens of smoking cannons. As the bus routes are fixed, some battles are repeated daily or weekly until detours can be arranged. Ready the pneumatic boarding ramps!

The Bendyblunderbus

Dread and fear the Bendyblunderbus, for it can deliver a broadside to both beam and stern! It flanks, it slithers, it swipes and darts!

Blue Murder at St Trinian's (1957)

The School Bus

Permitted by ancient law to snatch up any truant children (on weekdays, excluding holidays), the School Bus is half prison, half brawl, and half mad. Stuffed into uniforms and given a variety of ancient sports implements of uncertain use, the feral children soon learn vital life skills for the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
 

The Charter Bus

Given a Letter of Marque, the Charter Bus can freely pillage behind enemy bus lines, unbound by the ancient laws of road and sign. But who grants the letters? And why do they always seem to meet terrible fates?
 

The Metropolitan Omnibus

Pope of the busses.
 

The Bus Replacement Service

When there's no more rails in hell, the trains will roam the earth. Wheels screaming and spinning, they inch across the withered face of the world, smashing buildings and churning fields to mud. All trains that still move are declared busses "for the duration."

Loathsome Rivals

The Rank Taxis, who dart and plunder, and the Wraith Ridershare who follow in their wake. The Immortal Tram. The Ice Cream Van.

No private cars. No standard post-apocalyptic panoply of jalopy-tanks and gun-trucks. Just a whole bunch of busses.
 

Your Mission

Acquire a bus, then fend off rivals and former allies. Let your line grow strong. Collect fares, assist with their problems. Track down the highwayman Dick Turnstyle, whose fare-dodging exploits are legendary. Seek the source of the Plague of Scooters.

Explore the tunnels of the Subway, which (in an ill-advised pre-apocalyptic franchise experiment) also connects to the ruins of identical sandwich shops found every few blocks.

Locate the fabled Bus Depot, which lurks at the End of the Line, where all service shall cease, and all lines terminate.

What is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!
Implet in the Corn and High
Terror me Motoris Bi:
Bo Motori clamitabo
Ne Motore caedar a Bo—
Dative be or Ablative
So thou only let us live:—
Whither shall thy victims flee?
Spare us, spare us, Motor Be!
Thus I sang; and still anigh
Came in hordes Motores Bi,
Et complebat omne forum
Copia Motorum Borum.
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!

-Alfred Godley

Sci-Fi: Galactistandard

Back from vacation. Hooray!

Here are some notes on a general-purpose language for sci-fi games. Obviously, to avoid tedium, translating texts into your real-world language of choice is wise, but it's an interesting thought experiment. What would a truly universal language look like, given a generic medium-soft sci-fi/space opera setting? A setting where all sorts of species exist, not just humans in rubber suits.

I'm not an expert in conlangs. It's a fascinating field, but for RPG purposes, it's mostly background information.

Peter Elson

Newly contacted species are encouraged to adopt Galactistandard. It's not mandatory, but since everyone else is doing it, it makes a certain degree of sense.

Galactistandard is a constructed language. It was designed to facilitate and standardize communication between vastly different species. Operating on the theory that language shapes thought to some degree, Galactistandard also promotes collaboration, formality, and patience.

Galactistandard consists of 100 characters, including numerals and punctuation. Each character corresponds to:

• A written character (grapheme) capable of being drawn in a 10x10 binary (black-and-white) grid. Light- or pattern-based signalling of Galactistandard can be thought of as an "unrolled" sequence of character grids, with gaps.
• A sound (phoneme) described as a waveform. Since not all species that make sounds can transmit or receive the same frequencies, the character set repeats in harmonic blocks. Radio transmissions of Galactistandard Basic use the same waveforms. Each character has one and only one waveform/sound, and does not modify preceding or following sounds (i.e. it has perfect phonemic orthography.) Humans have to whistle and click some characters, and have significant trouble vocalizing a few others.
• A unique small molecule. This variant is rarely used; few species can both synthesize and survive the required molecules. Releasing a mixture of benzene and peroxide is a Galactistandard distress signal.
• A series of programming hardware operations (a machine code). Most sensible programmers use a higher-level language interpreter that converts readable instructions into base-level Galactistandard code.

Adaptations and translation programs exist. Sentient creatures with extremely limited or obscure means of communication might have to carry 100-key "Galactistandard Keyboards" and type out their messages. Additional gestures, patterns, etc. can be used to emphasize speech. Some diplomats carry flickering subtitle boards.

Galactistandard has a reference library of several million character strings (words) and grammatical structures. New species are encouraged to study it.

Charly Barrera

General Notes

The first 10 characters in Galactistandard are, if you follow the formal guide, 2x more common than the next 10, etc. Everyone agrees that you can probably get away with using the first 50 characters if you're willing to put in extra work.

Galactistandard is written linearly, but the direction (left to right, top to bottom) doesn't matter. It is always transmitted in grammatical order.

Names take the form [species] [individual designation] [secondary designation (if known or relevant)] [title(s)].

Galactistandard does not include gendered pronouns for obvious reasons. Formal Galactistandard requires all nouns to be declared in a sentence, but allows for individual, individual-abstract, collective-group, collective-abstract, and collective-hive/species pronouns. Most of the time, translating 3rd person Galactistandard pronouns as "they" works perfectly.

Nouns, verbs, etc. are usually followed by modifiers, adjectives, adverbs, etc.

Punctuation is extremely basic. Tone is indicated by a sentence prefix (Request, Question, Declaration, etc.) which can be modified (Request Polite, Question Imperative, etc.). End-of-statement characters are present and usually vocalized, to prevent interruptions. Sarcasm, a concept not easily translated to all species, has its own prefix, but informal Galactistandard also uses "sway from side to side while speaking" or "change harmonic tone" to indicate humour or sarcasm... sometimes with limited success.

Galactistandard does not include terms for colours (as photon perception varies enormously). Wavelengths (e.g. 600nm for orange, 510nm for turquoise) or invented words are sometimes used.

Galactistandard uses a base 10 numeral system (conveniently for humans) and has a series of units and related quantities similar to the SI system, but based entirely on universal values such as the speed of light and the Planck constant. It also has a timekeeping system. A Galactistandard "Week" is, coincidentally, close enough to an standard Earth hour.

Galactistandard also specifies details such as connector size, voltage, cable diameter, etc. for universal applications. In theory, if a species uses Galactistandard blueprints, the base level of their technology will be widely compatible. If machine-code operations are compatible, programs running on one system can be used on another. In practice, no species is perfect. Security concerns keep most critical systems proprietary. Prestige manufacturers also use proprietary designs, which can lead to serious maintenance issues. "One third of every ship is adapters" is a common phrase.

Paul Pepera

Informal Galactistandard

Only a handful of species (including the Kahl Velt) and some AI use pure Galactistandard for all interactions.

Dialects, slang, new words, abridgements, and adaptations are incredibly common. Every species has an accent. Every species has information they would like to communicate that Galactistandard cannot easily convey.

Both vocal music and poetry are difficult to convey in Galactistandard. Several workarounds, including melismas, are used.

Examples

• Formal: "Request: Speaker to Parthscob Milwinga Engineer, give wrench 9.8mm crescent to speaker."
• Informal: "Request: Speaker to Milwinga, give wrench to speaker."
• Very Informal: "Wrench" (accompanied by an extended limb retracting towards the speaker).

• Formal: "Question Imperative: Speaker to Human Andrew Maxwell Diplomat, time until detonation of tanks storage antimatter on station Ryza."
• Informal: "Question Imperative: Andrew, time until detonation."
• Very Informal: "Question: time until detonation."

• Formal: "Statement Sarcasm: Speaker to all present, Star-Empire of Horms consists of two worlds in one system."
• Very Informal: "...the Star-Empire of Horms..." (accompanied by swaying side to side).

OSR: Magical Industrial Revolution - US/NA Copies

Even more goods news! Print copies of the acclaimed Magical Industrial Revolution are now available in the US / North America region. Check out Indie Press Revolution's store.

For a variety of reasons, the US postal system is in turmoil right now, so expect delays, unusual costs, etc. These are interesting times. Be prepared to pay an interesting price. For UK/EU copies, check out the SoulMuppet store.

Sci-Fi: Alien Scale in Space Opera

In most space opera settings, aliens are human-sized. A "giant" alien might be all of 9' tall; small ones tend to bottom out at 3'. In media with budget constraints, this is fine. You need to be able to fit an actor into the rubber suit. But RPGs have no budgets.

For reasons of convenience, humans might associate with similarly-scaled aliens (with similar atmosphere, gravity, pressure, etc. requirements), but there's no reason that has to be the absolute limit. "Bleeds green blood and has two hearts" is barely weird biology.

Note: the obscure string of letters and numbers attached to each species is explained in this post.

The inspiration for this post was a comment from Nobodi12.

But this categories face the challenge of " If everyone has to wear miniature spaceships to visit each other, it's not space opera. "

If we can't survive in the same atmosphere the kicks one get out of aliens are much minor. As a player I would have less fun due to limited interaction with aliens. It makes barriers and making interesting NPCs is already hard. Worse if they have to be PCs. Size as well, anything more then 1 order of magnitude different then a human becomes a McGuffin/Boss monster and not something you routinely interact with.

And they are right. Anything significantly bigger than a human is a threat, or at the very least unnerving. (Dragons, whales, etc.) Anything significantly smaller is adorable or possibly creepy (spiders, mice, butterflies, etc.). We're very focused on our own scale.

Let's look at a few examples from the 1c (1 cognitive-speed-equivalent to human, i.e. people you can carry on a real-time conversation with) range. How could a GM use them as NPCs? How could they use them as PCs?

divamp

The Central Vreen

G - H2 - -100/200/600oC - 0/0.02/0.3atm - 0/2/5g - N# - 1000m - 1c - IS - BR5
The Central Vreen resemble transparent sea jellies. A typical mid-life roving unit (as opposed to a juvenile, an instar, or a sedentary late-life retirement unit) is around 1km long. They are therefore at the upper end of individual-social life in general. (Colony-units, vacuum-dwelling film-envelopes, and some geomorphs can grow to orders of magnitude larger.)

They are very wealthy for three reasons. First, any Central Vreen ship is, by necessity, enormous. Decommissioned personal shuttles are occasionally used as bulk transports or space stations. Second, they live for a very long time by most galactic standards, and can molt to a previous stage if the situation requires it, giving them effective immortality. They build structures, both political and economic, to last. And third, they have a knack for social adaptability, fitting their requirements to the needs or biases of other species.

(A fourth theory, put forward by a few eccentric xenobiologists, states that the Central Vreen like to acquire and cultivate smaller life forms as a throwback to their original forms as the backbone of living gas giant "reef systems". A healthy "reef" has many "fish".)

Their size and atmospheric requirements make face-to-face meetings with most species impossible. They communicate primarily via radio, with colour-shifting skin patterns for emphasis. The Central Vreen use telepresence screens. Their "faces" are a familiar sight to most diplomats, who occasionally forget that the face on the monitor is the size of the average cargo ship.

But they also use drone-units (known as ROVs or Waldoes). They metallic build to-scale replicas of the species they intend to visit, then pilot them via a distant virtual reality dome. Some use telepresence screens to project the Central Vreen's face, others have featureless masks or simple indicators.

As PCs
A Central Vreen PCs using a Waldoes is, effectively, driving a robot, usually with 360 degree vision (the Central Vreen have full-body photoreceptors) and a tendency to misjudge distances and respective sizes. There's plenty of room to put a human-scale ship on the outside of a Central Vreen hull without anyone noticing, but a Central Vreen ship is comparatively quite fragile.

Melvyn Yeo

The Orlo

G - O2 - -40/30/90oC - 0.1/1.3/3atm - 0/1/3g - P# - 10m - 1c - IS - B

The Orlo are thousand-limbed pale blue beetles the size of a car. Eight gem-like eyes in two rows of four, truly alarming manipulator mouthparts (hidden by a veil), and decorative horns. They are social among their own species, but only after formal introductions and a strict hierarchy is established. Some xenoanthropolgists classify them as forming "#-sized indivisible units" instead, because crews and diplomatic missions can fail completely if a member is removed or added unexpectedly. Other species, thankfully, do not trigger this response.

An Orlo can fit in most human-sized habitats, but smaller space stations and narrow corridors present a problem. They excrete cat-sized semi-parasitic sensory grubs to investigate difficult spaces, then devour them upon their return. The grubs are slightly intelligent, can speak, and can manipulate objects with their mouthparts.

As PCs
An Orlo PC is large, armoured (to a certain extent), and used to biting their problems to death. The exact limitations of a sensory grub are up to the GM.

Finnian Macmanus

The Kursleck

G - O2 - -40/10/30oC - 0.2/0.9/1.1atm - 0/1.4/4g - P# - 0.1m - 1c - IS - I

Kursleck are melon-sized spheres of dense black prehensile hair with two extensible sensory stalks. Upon joining galactic society, they were chagrined to discover most of the species sharing compatible environments were considerably larger than them, and often completely immune to the sound-based stealth tactics the nearly blind Kursleck took for granted. Still smarting from a few ill-advised wars, the Kursleck are slowly finding their place in the galaxy.

To avoid being trampled, modern Kursleck are suspended beneath floating grav discs. The sight of a black furball with a halo, hovering at head height, and sniffing the air with two antennae can be alarming, but seeing eye-to-eyestalk has advantages.

As PCs
A Kursleck PC has massive silent movement bonuses (except against sight) and, if they've got a hover-disc, can fly. Terrible eyesight but excellent hearing, and the ability to hold up to 60 ring-sized objects.

Ariel Perez

Humans

G - O2 - -20/20/40oC - 0.3/1/1.3atm - 0/1/3g - P# - 1m - 1c - IS - B

Humans are slightly smaller than average, prefer slightly more gravity, and slightly lower temperatures than their their assigned atmosphere-temperature-gravity band. They are well within the centre of the bell curve; over a hundred species can directly interact with human structures and vice-versa, with a further three hundred species capable of interaction with limited adaptation (extra insulation, limited exposure, scale issues, etc.).

As relative newcomers with a limited technological base, humans tend to use telepresence for most scale-differential interactions, though they can adapt to Waldo piloting fairly easily. Some of their smaller ships are configured to interact with larger gas-giant species directly. Humans have broadly porous social groups, and assign human-like characteristics to inimate objects and non-sentient creatures. If they find a conceptual handle for a new species, they rapidly work out how to interact with them. This can result in disaster, but on average tends to work out positively.

Davesrightmind

Vague Ideas

1d8	Smaller to Larger Interaction Methods
1	Appropriately scaled manipulator suit or mini-craft.
2	Suspensor platform or hoverchair.
3	Natural flight and quick turns.
4	Coordinated assembly-stack. Highest ranked on top.
5	Stoic acceptance, vivid communication, and high speed.
6	Dedicated porter-species. Possibly a host.
7	Hired porters and local guides, possibly unaware of their role.
8	Holographic adjustable communication-form.

1d8	Larger to Smaller Interaction Methods
1	ROVs/Waldoes. Uniform models, custom-built, or off-the-shelf adaptations.
2	Telepresence and distant guidance.
3	Extremely dangerous temporary dimensional compressor.
4	Dedicated interpreter-species. Possibly mind-linked.
5	Juvenile forms sent to live among other species, growth halted via medicine.
6	Growth into starship- or -transport forms. Live inside one.
7	Temporary budding or subunit/organ detachment.
8	Extruded sensory goop.