Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

After the Flood: OTEC Cities

In the first chaotic years after nations ceased to exist, before the last of the land disappeared, many people would have set out on their own, by whatever means they could secure, to make a new life on the waves. These people would have formed small bands and taken whatever they could find on shore and off, and after they set out to sea they would have raided and fought and traded for whatever would make them better off. Over time the most successful of these survivors would have formed into communities, either static or mobile, who live as best they could as independent city states in the new world. These states survive by trading with strangers and defending themselves against anyone who would try to take what is theirs – or by amalgamating with other states to form new and stronger collectives. Not as stable or as strong as the pelagic kingdoms and dependent on trade with them for new resources, these independent kingdoms offer their citizens greater freedom than the pelagic kingdoms, but at the risk of a precarious existence that may be subsumed by raiders or sink beneath the waves at any time. If such a city-state does not have its own special property to trade upon, it will no doubt disappear, becoming living space for the pelagic kingdoms (who exterminate residents of any property they subsume to make way for their own suppressed masses) or losing its populace to other, more stable economies.Ocean Thermal Energy Collection (OTEC) platforms are one of the greatest possible prizes for such fledgling communities.

An experimental technology before the flood, OTEC platforms use differentials in the ocean’s heat to produce electricity. Anyone who could seize one of these after the flood has guaranteed themselves a tradable commodity – especially if they can somehow secure a supply of batteries to trade, or develop an industry in converting water to hydrogen and oxygen for fuel cells and combustion engines. City-states built around OTEC platforms will typically consist of many small ships, many no longer capable of independent movement, roped together to form a permanent floating colony based around their central power source. On the edge of the colony will be a few archaic patrol boats and the other mobile trade ships of the city, all converted to run on hydrogen-oxygen power and/or sails, and intended for trade and defense against attackers. The city itself trades on a special property that very few societies after the collapse can offer – abundant electricity. This means karaoke bars, game centres, concerts, and all the night life of a real city of old earth, all taking place across a wild and floating city of rafts, barges and yachts bound together and heaving and sighing on the wild deeps.

Such a community is a great prize for any pirates or conquistadors who want to add a stable source of energy to their possessions. As a result, these city-states change hands often, and defend themselves ferociously… or make very dubious deals with any neighbouring kingdoms in exchange for their security. They may also offer special deals to the Pelagic kingdoms in exchange for their independence and security, but more likely they will develop a strong close-defense navy, and possibly even a primitive air force, to ensure they remain independent. Adventurers may be employed to help defend a platform, or to infiltrate it and take it over, but the most likely role of a platform in a campaign is as a rest and recuperation city, a place where mercenaries from many communities meet to find work and to sell the ill-gotten gains of their dubious profession. Here, adventurers will likely find an environment free of repression, where they can cut dubious deals and find new and sinister work, and where a strong but morally flexible industrial sector is able to provide them with equipment suited to a range of morally dubious tasks.

In the world of the flood, OTEC cities hold one of the keys to power – energy. Life after the flood is determined by who has access to energy and who can control its use, and anyone who can find an OTEC city and make themselves useful to its leaders is guaranteed safety and success. This makes OTEC cities a much sought after location – and a dangerous nest of scheming, backstabbing vipers, to boot. The perfect adventure setting!

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10 responses to “After the Flood: OTEC Cities”

  1. Peter T Avatar
    Peter T

    Ok. How about the flood triggers research into genetic engineering to establish floating seaweeds (deep sea kelp etc) across the ocean as sources of food, and raw materials. Kelp-derived plastics are the base for solar power panels (and much else), which allows extraction of metals from seawater, fish, marine mammals and people (iron from people and other mammals and seabirds, copper from crustaceans and so on). The seaweed mat also damps the massive waves which would otherwise overwhelm floating habitats and provides fish nurseries, pollen and – in a few cases where it has become very dense, a precarious shelter and perhaps whole ecology (a floating forest?)

    The human ecology is one of fishers and hunters supplying groups of processing centres (sort of nomads and cities). Plus, of course, raiders, bandits, bootleggers and slavers looking to render you down for some precious metal.

  2. Paul Avatar
    Paul

    Rendering a person down to get a nail’s worth of iron sounds inefficient. Plus the net iron in the populace is going to stay stable (if the population does), otherwise everyone’s got low iron counts in their blood. Anyway, seaweed is rich in iron – you may as extract from that.

    I think a “rush of bioengineering” is going to be a key element in any such story, otherwise we’d hit problems like the lack of photosynthesis meaning a build up of carbon dioxide. So lots of things to promote unusual plant and types in the deep ocean is going to be required.

    The bright side of this is it opens avenues for bioengineering gone wrong to add opponents into the story and fantastical scenery caused by the new types of life.

    The downside is each solution that is proposed to a self evident problem in the setting is one more element that takes it away from a flooded modern world and into a fantasy/sci-fi world that could be set anywhere.

    Once you’ve accepted wholesale changes to the world and its technology you may as well say “This was an attempt to settle an alien water world, but the colony ship crashed and this is all that’s left of the settlement attempt.” This approach means that you don’t need to put up with people asking where 8 extra kilometers of surface material came from.

    Once we hit this point I’d suggest looking at the game Blue Planet which I believe is set on a water world colony. I’ve never read more than the back of the books, but it probably has some ideas that can be “contributed”.

  3. Paul Avatar
    Paul

    Yeah, the more I think of it, the more I prefer a less extreme setting.

    If the disaster was actually accelerated erosion or massive subsidence, then you could sink 90% of the worlds surface beneath the oceans leaving only a few islands. The entire ocean would be much shallower (say 500m to 2km instead of 8+km), promoting more undersea cities. The few remaining bits of dry land would be constantly fought over to support the city ships that were launched. Or paint them as paradise that only the mega rich can afford to see.

    This setting would have most of the same advantages, fewer logical objections and a better job of promoting a world view of adventure where hope is possible. A world with 8+km deep oceans is basically a Dying Earth novel – you’re stuffed and the best you can hope for is a decent party before the end.

  4. faustusnotes Avatar
    faustusnotes

    Another less extreme setting is to have the water settle below the peaks, so that there are small areas of accessible land – the highest points of the himalayas, for example, and then a reduced but still accessible kind of continental shelf.
    In his book, Baxter actually talks about bioengineering, and one solution he had in the first novel was a plant that turns slowly to a plastic-like substance as it absorbs seawater, and can be sculpted to form rafts and islands. The effect of the disaster setting though (as opposed to the colony ship crash setting, which is also very cool) is that the rush to escape the rising water means that technological solutions are incomplete – hence only one undersea base per major agglomeration of nations, and the limited availability of bioengineered materials. It’s really just a long narrative backdrop to enable the GM to limit the level and availability of tech that would help people survive. Which in turn is just a device to enable high-tech floating civilizations to live alongside barbarians. Which is fun.

    The floating seaweed farms is a good idea. Note that even if this were limited simply to producing seaweed strong enough to shape into floating fish farms it would be of huge benefit to the survivors – it doesn’t have to be some kind of chemical miracle that exudes pharmaceuticals or anything. Another option would be that the most advanced survivors have a few strains of bioengineered e. coli that can turn organic matter into a couple of key things – antibiotics, carbohydrate, biofuel, and a kind of soil like material that can be shaped and hardened, for example – but that this requires huge floating seaweed farms to produce the organic material. The e. coli is an enormously valuable trade commodity and the societies that have it are very slowly building up floating landscapes through the seaweed/soillike material combination. But that’s the limit of the biotech and no society has recovered far enough to be able to do further research.

    I’ll be posting up a few more examples of the lifestyle on this world over the next few days. I’m glad you guys are interested in it!

  5. Paul Avatar
    Paul

    “the rush to escape the rising water means that technological solutions are incomplete … It’s really just a long narrative backdrop to enable the GM to limit the level and availability of tech that would help people survive. Which in turn is just a device to enable high-tech floating civilizations to live alongside barbarians.”
    You can get that on a colony ship setting by just saying the survivors were initially scattered and had different resources. Now that they’re meeting up again 100 years later, they’re unwilling to start sharing as they all tend to blame the other groups for the initial accident (or whatever other reason you want to use, they may have been different ships, or splintered while en route to the planet).

    I think the setting is interesting, but the Baxter book is a poor background. It should be abandoned and just used as an inspiration for topics/solutions. Otherwise you’ve got to fix or ignore his various illogical details.

    Also, you’re after a survivalist feel, so the number of extreme solutions should be highly limited so people can imagine it as the world of next week. The tech should focus on things that we can already sort of do, i.e. tidal power generators that occasionally sink in storms (and can be salvaged via adventures), giant boats that are prone to rust when not dry-docked (leading to a feel of decay and desperation), highly limited bioengineering that is always just on the verge of a breakthrough that could change the world (so that you need to go steal it).

    Better yet, if you limit the tech and slowly dole it out then you can even play over the initial sinking and keep introducing new hooks that the players saw the start of (i.e. a biotech invention they stole has come into actual use, a boat they visited when first launched is about to sink due to decay, the tribe they established has lost its power generators).

    But despite that you need some element of hope. If this is a zombie game where you play till everyone dies (i.e. the Walking Dead) then why invest in your character? So there should be no really obvious points that say “The human race is doomed.” Because of the limits on the technology the problems also need to be sharply limited to be solvable with modern tech without handwavium.

  6. faustusnotes Avatar
    faustusnotes

    handwavium is sustainable resource!

    Once I’ve run through some of the other elements of the floating world, I’ll address some alternatives – hi tech, low tech, less extreme, more magical, etc (I usually like my apocalypses[1] to have a magical element and this is the first one I’ve ever considered that doesn’t at its base).

    I agree particularly about the need for hope. I don’t like nihilistic campaign settings and I think this might be doomed to such a feeling. I’ll have more to say on that too…

  7. Paul Avatar
    Paul

    I’ve actually thought of one piece of non-current tech that should be in the story despite my distaste for handwavium in the setting.

    There should be a device that allows the recording and replay of memories. The reason why is the players should come across such recordings from time to time which act as a message in a bottle. The players would then assume the role of the person recording the memory and play through a flashback to some past disaster.

    This should allow the GM to flash out the game world backstory by jumping back to key events from the point of view of participants. Plus you can keep putting the players in un-winnable situations as the pressure doors on their undersea cities cave in and kill each everyone, as the boats sink due to rust and as starvation and cannibalism sets in. By doing this you should be able to highlight the danger of the world and underline how lucky and careful the PCs need to be to survive.

    Any if your players do a great job in the recording, then you can have the people recording the events actually survive and then come back as NPCs later on.

  8. faustusnotes Avatar
    faustusnotes

    Even without the adventuring element, these kinds of recordings would add a nice tone of loss and risk to the setting, ensuring players remember what was gone before. You could also use them to imbue hope into the campaign: perhaps these memories weren’t stored because some rich folks wanted to be immortalized on a whim, but because the people storing them had something important to tell the future – about lost caverns, some technology that they had researched that they couldn’t quite finish in time, a complete undersea complex that couldn’t be populated in time, etc. So it gives an adventure impetus that offers a way to improve the lives of the surface people.

    I have some ideas for treasure hunting that I’ll put up later, and I think I’ll incorporate this piece of handwavium. Thanks!

  9. Paul Avatar
    Paul

    I’m seeing the recording tech as being cheap and easy to use. This way it’s not always critical information and it’s not always the idle rich.

    It’d probably receive multiple signals from people wearing recorder headbands then preserve the results on a central unit that can replay to the end users (i.e. the party). Multiple people would be needed so each person in the group can have a part to play when re-living past events. You could also experiment with concensus play by having the entire party play just one person in the memory.

    In the event of a disaster it can automatically release a recording with a buoy and transmitter. This tech was originally a form of “diary in the cloud” where people could just record their thoughts on the Internet. The disaster transmission protocals were grafted on as part of a rescue package during the early Flood, with the idea being that the recordings would make it easier to find people trapped in tunnels, etc.

  10. faustusnotes Avatar
    faustusnotes

    That would also be an excellent mechanism for constructing a world war z type reconstruction of the past in any post-apocalyptic novel. It’s also the conceit Robert Silverberg used in on of his Majipoor novels to explore random smatterings of the history of his imagined world. It would be an interesting narrative device for role-playing generally. I remember Ars Magica had a model of adventuring where there were more PCs than players and you chose the PCs appropriate to the adventure. If a GM had a world they wanted to explore and just gave the PCs an outline of the history of the world, they could construct a collaborative history for the whole world by having the players enter these memories and play through a part of the history of the world that they declared for the GM in advance. Then the GM sets either a starting point or ending point that is fixed, and the adventure sees the PCs involved in that. Of course over time they might discover that their entry into the “memories” was actually changing the world – or they might find later memories they entered seemed to have an awareness of their previous entry, and realize that they aren’t looking at memories at all, but at an entire virtual world (or a parallel universe or …)

    That would be an interesting campaign!

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