Got a Real-World Weapon, Armor or Tactics Question? Mk. XXV

[Knaight]

Oh yeah agree...not like everyone with a really long prison sentence is some kind of slavering cartoon monster.

Particularly when a lot of them aren't actually guilty, because the justice system that incarcerated them is deeply corrupt. That doesn't necessarily mean political dissidents either - private prisons run by corporations with enough lobbyists to both secure large payments and round up prisoners could work just as well. Which in this particular case probably means overt bribery and the like.

I think it's also important to point out that not all violent criminals are the same - generally speaking, an armed robber, a serial killer and a cartel enforcer would all behave differently. Some of them could even integrate into the calmer groups.

It's also worth noting that the behavior of people in particular environments is influenced both by who the people are and what the environment is - which can be seen with prisons in particular, where different prisons holding basically the same sort of people can end up with vastly different rates of violence, both because of simple variation in conditions due to economic factors, and more notably different standards of allowable/encouraged/participated-in violence on the part of the guards. There's also the matter of how captivity in general has its effects.

I'm not saying that the planet would be pretty, but that there's a pretty good chance it ends up significantly less violent than the prisons a lot of people here have seen portrayed/heard stories about.

[Raunchel]

First of all, I really want to thank you for your help with my question about music in battle.

Secondly, I have found myself with another question. While looking into arms in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, I came across this manuscript image:


I was under the impression that at that time, the norm for shields was that they were more triangular in shape (like heater shields), but here, someone has a round shield that I would generally associate with earlier periods. Does anyone know if round shields till were in use around 1350 in Europe?

[Knaight]

I was under the impression that at that time, the norm for shields was that they were more triangular in shape (like heater shields), but here, someone has a round shield that I would generally associate with earlier periods. Does anyone know if round shields till were in use around 1350 in Europe?

Round shields stuck around well past 1350 - take the Spanish Rodeleros in the 1500's (though that's not the best example, given that it was to some extent the deliberate revival of an older style of combat).

[Clistenes]

Why not have both? The GULAG had scum of the earth in the system as well as people who said the wrong thing or just were in the wrong place when Stalin was writing his hit lists.

That's the point: If only non-violent political disidents or non-violent conmen and similar are sent to the planet, isn't as effective a punishment... yeah, the living conditions would be hard, but they would eventually, slowly get better...

If you send a large amount of really violent criminals too, it becomes a veritable hellhole and an effective deterrent against political disenters...

[Galloglaich]

That's the point: If only non-violent political disidents or non-violent conmen and similar are sent to the planet, isn't as effective a punishment... yeah, the living conditions would be hard, but they would eventually, slowly get better...

If you send a large amount of really violent criminals too, it becomes a veritable hellhole and an effective deterrent against political disenters...

Going back to living in Neolithic conditions if you come from a tech-age society is fairly significant punishment regardless, at least in terms of comfort and safety. Usually the goal of such marooning ala Botany Bay is just to get rid of excess (and undesirable) population.

On the other hand if it's not too high of a mix of murderers etc. then presumably there is also scope for rehabilitation. Which may or may not be part of the States agenda (usually it isn't sadly)

G

[Raunchel]

One important consideration to keep in mind with using Australia as an example is that many of these criminals were people driven to it by poverty, not people who had much in the way of other options. That means that you get a quite different population from what you would get when you look in modern prisons where you will have a higher proportion of mentally disturbed people.

[Max_Killjoy]

One important consideration to keep in mind with using Australia as an example is that many of these criminals were people driven to it by poverty, not people who had much in the way of other options. That means that you get a quite different population from what you would get when you look in modern prisons where you will have a higher proportion of mentally disturbed people.

Many of those sent to the old prison colonies were literally being cleared out of debtors' prisons, and their only crime had been having debts they could not pay.

[Knaight]

One important consideration to keep in mind with using Australia as an example is that many of these criminals were people driven to it by poverty, not people who had much in the way of other options. That means that you get a quite different population from what you would get when you look in modern prisons where you will have a higher proportion of mentally disturbed people.

That's not particularly different from modern prisons in a lot of places. It's also likely a pretty good analog for the likely justice system of the people operating this system.

Many of those sent to the old prison colonies were literally being cleared out of debtors' prisons, and their only crime had been having debts they could not pay.

This also seems like a case where the Australia analog is, if anything, better. This is also a case where the difference between this and a lot of modern day systems aren't necessarily that huge, where a minor traffic offense with a fine is added to the debts that can't be paid. Or where people are arrested for a bounced check.

[VoxRationis]

My understanding of Australian history is fairly surface-level, but wasn't development of the Australian colonies a desired goal, though? The British didn't just sail up and literally kick people off the side of the boat. There was effort in making Australia a vaguely serviceable part of the Empire.

[Kiero]

Many of those sent to the old prison colonies were literally being cleared out of debtors' prisons, and their only crime had been having debts they could not pay.

Along with pretty much any kind of petty crime. Transportation was a step down from the usual punishment for virtually everything at the time, which was death by hanging. Children could be sentenced, which tells you all you need to know about their approach to jurisprudence back then.

If it's Australia-style, demography won't be a problem, though it'll be a tithe of the poor and unlucky for the most part.

[Carl]

Just want to highlight this point as the others have already been covered - Nargrakhan can correct me, but aside from an off hand reference to the endgame being in command of a Max Max style city state, there's nothing in the brief that says the planet is an irradiated hellscape or a single biome desert planet like Star Wars' Tattoine.

What i meant is they're going from a high tech society to a much lower tech level, for most people thats going to be a severely unpleasant shock to the system.

Also, they would have trouble getting people to listen to them in a society in which the pecking order is established stabbing each other faces with sharpened bones or bashing each other brains with clubs and stones...

Thats kind of the problem, a society like that doesn't work, at least not conventionally, (start bringing magic and gods into it and some other stuff and you can start making it work), The problem is such a disorganised society has no well, organisation, that means even a small group of organised people can deal with considerably greater numbers of disorganised people. Not every attempt at an organised group will succeed, but on the whole organised groups have all the advantages that mean they will quickly become the dominant social construct.

The person who used civilisation games as a jockey comparison was actually more or less on point. With one key exception. A large part of the difference between our earlier beginnings and the modern day is that our concept of how a society should be organised has changed with time. These prisoners might be dropping in without our modern tech, but they have a much different idea of how a society should be organized, that's going to be influenced by the nature of the people who are dropped in, why they got dropped and of course the the nature of the society they're coming from, but you've also got issues with them being on the wrong end of the existing system, thats going to bias them against it to some degree. Certainly you'll then see these initial groups go off in a lot of different directions in terms of how they grow from there. But they're going to be organised very differently from a traditional early farmer tribesmen.

That's a generational effort at a minimum and quite possibly a trans-civilization effort. Digging an escape tunnel is hard, but it can be done with sticks or even bare hands, potentially. Building an escape combat-capable spacecraft is another thing entirely. Hell, even an escape aircraft is tricky. If you told the inmates of a prison in the US or another developed country that they could have total legal amnesty if they could process (generously provided) raw materials into a working rocket and used that to get over the walls, using only the knowledge they have memorized, I'm guessing they would get nowhere. Most of them wouldn't know where to begin. A selection would have some very basic theoretical knowledge of how it would work, but wouldn't know how to begin applying it. The people with applicable knowledge would have learned how to apply it in the context of a broad industrial base and would be helpless outside of it (e.g., your welders would just be used to having welding gear when they need to weld things and wouldn't know how to make, or even approximate, said gear). That's to say nothing of the fact that the people who know the really in-depth technical things tend not to be put in prison in the first place.

Here's the thing, much o our advances in technology down the years has been built on better understanding of physics, biology, chemistry, an the application of mathematics and the written word to those things. We've had a lot of bad science down the years. That puts the drop in's in a much better position than IRL civilizations at a given level of tech. Your average high school graduate knows more in most of those fields than many of the more learned people of yesteryear. APplying that knowledge is going to include some trial and error and a lot of work, but they're in a position to improve their technological base very rapidly because they understand far more of the underlying principles and experimental method needed to apply them. People of yesteryear weren't stupid, but the level of knowledge they possess had not benefited from as many centuries of advancement and work.


As far as some of the other society factors raised goes. I think the key thing to allways remember is that unless they're deliberately sending the worst of the worst there and nothing else most of the people in prison on long sentences are not innately severely violent. Most severe end crimes are either committed by people close to the victim in the heat of the moment or by organised criminals. The true lone wolf nutcase who does awful things for kicks and giggles is pretty rare IRL, (they certainly exist ofc) . Thats going to work in the favour of stability. If the drop in includes political prisoners that goes many times more.

[Galloglaich]

Also a lot of the violence in prisons is at least in part because of having so many people - some with rival gang, or cartel, or just ethnic affiliations - crammed so close together in such tight, literally confined spaces.

In a place like Australia, or North America, there is a lot of room to spread out. This is a good way to ease tension - if you don't like the other prisoners trek further out into the wilderness to make your own settlement or separate community. If you can claim your own land and hold on to it, especially if it is "good" or productive land, your descendants will have a chance of moving upward socially and economically.

Of course historically a lot of people who got banished or 'transported' to the New World or places like Australia were sent because they were of some unpopular religious sect, or just because they were poor or for very petty crimes like stealing a loaf of bread. On the other hand, I wouldn't totally discount the predatory element. There are a lot of very bad people out there - it's a smaller subset of even the prison population but not that small.

In modern times a lot of bad / criminal behavior is driven by addiction. What would addicts do if they got free in some wilderness but perhaps didn't have access to their drug of choice? Probably find the closest local equivalent they could. Just like in prison you can make 'wine' out of fruit and so on, in a new planet you would undoubtedly have some plants with psychoactive or narcotic effects.

Drug addicts can be easy to control if you control the source of the drug. That would be a mechanism by which armies or feudal hierarchies could be put together. You see this with some of the armed groups for example in Congo or Sudan.

G

[Nargrakhan]

Wow. This topic went a lot further than I possibly imagined.

To be honest, I didn't put that much foresight into the idea or think it could evolve into such depth.

However I really, really, really enjoy all the information and discussion provided, as it gives me a lot to think upon and resolve in case the players reach similar conclusions. As such I was against responding back to this thread, because I wanted it to continue without tainting it's direction. However I felt it would be dishonest of me to do something like that.

All that being said... while I don't want to make the planet a complete crapsack world - outside the notion that being on a low-tech prison world is crapsack enough - the information provided here will be used to make escape from the world as close to impossible as possible. As mention prior: the end goal of the campaign isn't leaving the world. It's more towards somehow making it better, carving out a warlord empire, or creating a legendary name for one self.

Of course if the players want to spend time and resources towards planetary escape, I'm not going to stop them. And of course I'm not against the idea of providing such a final reward if they REALLY do a good job at role playing and remaining focused at the task. They're the player characters, so it makes perfect sense if they're the ONLY people to ever achieve that legendary feat.

Nonetheless, the more I see loopholes in how "anti-electronics plot-onium" can be subverted, the more I'm stacking the deck against such opportunities. (Such as restricting access/availability to natural resources such as mining metals and exploitable biofuels - a resource exhausted world).

I do like the social aspects of prisoners unifying - if only temporarily and in isolated locations - to escape the planet. But I want such a feat to have only happened once, if it ever happened at all, before the player characters arrive. Perhaps the escape never did happened, and is just a legend passed down to instill (possibly false) hope.

***EDIT***
I also did not consider the impact of generational descendants. To be punished for a crime your great, great, great grandfather committed.
Perhaps having prisoners sterilized before planet drop is an answer. It certainly is a morality issue, but then, so is having a prison planet to begin with.

[Galloglaich]

To prevent electronics / electrical tech from developing, you could have a satelite or spaceship that periodically drops EMP bombs -just something to flash an EMP which would zap all functioning electrical devices etc. Say once a year or every 10 years or whatever.

G

[Carl]

Wow. This topic went a lot further than I possibly imagined.

To be honest, I didn't put that much foresight into the idea or think it could evolve into such depth.

However I really, really, really enjoy all the information and discussion provided, as it gives me a lot to think upon and resolve in case the players reach similar conclusions. As such I was against responding back to this thread, because I wanted it to continue without tainting it's direction. However I felt it would be dishonest of me to do something like that.

All that being said... while I don't want to make the planet a complete crapsack world - outside the notion that being on a low-tech prison world is crapsack enough - the information provided here will be used to make escape from the world as close to impossible as possible. As mention prior: the end goal of the campaign isn't leaving the world. It's more towards somehow making it better, carving out a warlord empire, or creating a legendary name for one self.

Of course if the players want to spend time and resources towards planetary escape, I'm not going to stop them. And of course I'm not against the idea of providing such a final reward if they REALLY do a good job at role playing and remaining focused at the task. They're the player characters, so it makes perfect sense if they're the ONLY people to ever achieve that legendary feat.

Nonetheless, the more I see loopholes in how "anti-electronics plot-onium" can be subverted, the more I'm stacking the deck against such opportunities. (Such as restricting access/availability to natural resources such as mining metals and exploitable biofuels - a resource exhausted world).

I do like the social aspects of prisoners unifying - if only temporarily and in isolated locations - to escape the planet. But I want such a feat to have only happened once, if it ever happened at all, before the player characters arrive. Perhaps the escape never did happened, and is just a legend passed down to instill (possibly false) hope.

***EDIT***
I also did not consider the impact of generational descendants. To be punished for a crime your great, great, great grandfather committed.
Perhaps having prisoners sterilized before planet drop is an answer. It certainly is a morality issue, but then, so is having a prison planet to begin with.

Bear in mind even a resource depleted world still has tons of exploitable resources and many types of material are the next best thing to impossible to eliminate because they're so incredibly common. In normal industrial operations and normal usage we choose materials to manufacture with and to extract resources from based on their cost efficiency. Most common resources and more than a few rare ones have sources that are technically usable, but not worth the cost. And many technologies can substitute one material for another relatively readily, doing so just introduces a lot of extra expense and other problems. But create a situation where that is the only way and people will move to alternatives.

[Carl]

To prevent electronics / electrical tech from developing, you could have a satelite or spaceship that periodically drops EMP bombs -just something to flash an EMP which would zap all functioning electrical devices etc. Say once a year or every 10 years or whatever.

G

The problem is you can shield electronics from EMP's or make them proof against them relatively easily. It's just that the time, cost, and effort involved in doing it isn't justified.

[Hazzardevil]

Round shields stuck around well past 1350 - take the Spanish Rodeleros in the 1500's (though that's not the best example, given that it was to some extent the deliberate revival of an older style of combat).

I've seen depictions from the 1600s of standard bearers and other soldiers who aren't regular sorts carrying a shield for reasons other than it being the default style of the time.

There's also sources that I know of as late as the 1600s from fencing masters with at least some instructions on how to use them. Marco Diochillini is one I haven't studied, but I'm fairly sure he has them. As do some of the Bolognese styles.

Here's an article on round shields called a rotella.
https://elegant-weapon.blogspot.com/...7-rotella.html

[Saintheart]

My understanding of Australian history is fairly surface-level, but wasn't development of the Australian colonies a desired goal, though? The British didn't just sail up and literally kick people off the side of the boat. There was effort in making Australia a vaguely serviceable part of the Empire.

Correct. The French in particular were also engaged in the Civilisation colony rush building of territory in the South Pacific and elsewhere. Literally a few days after the first Australian colony at Botany Bay (Sydney) was founded -- 25 January 1788 -- the Astrolabe and Boussole arrived, commanded by La Perouse, who'd been conducting exploration in the area. He wouldn't have claimed Australia for France, that wasn't his mission, but it illustrates how busy that part of the world was at the time.

The Botany Bay colony had a primarily convict workforce to establish it, but what they generally forget to tell people is that many of the convicts were skilled tradesmen or farmers already, which is why they were put on the ship - they had generally been sentenced to 7 years' transportation, and most were pardoned prior to the end of their sentences and become free settlers. The first free settlers to Australia turned up five years later, 1793. Even the British Empire didn't have the money to ship convicts halfway around the world for that reason alone, and the British explorers (Cook, and Banks the botanist under him) had targeted Australia as an excellent site for settlement and expansion, and Sydney Harbour was a superb natural anchorage for the British fleet. That's the primary reason it was founded.

The reason it didn't grow anywhere near as successfully as, say, the US, was primarily because the British had misunderstood the land. Australia's basically the oldest continent on Earth in the sense that the land has been exposed to the elements for longer than anywhere else. One of the reasons Ayers Rock is so red, like much of the earth around it, is because of its sheer age. The soil's had most of its fertility knocked out of it and such fertility as there was tended to dry up and blow away when the British applied European methods of agriculture to it, i.e. clear-felling everything in sight and putting water-thirsty and nutrient-hungry European crops on it. That's one of the reasons Botany Bay almost starved when it was first established. You can make the land work - if you're prepared to introduce plants that tie moisture to the soil and make sure that your waterways are always shaded - but not if you farm it the way the English did, at least to start with.

As Australia had more colonies established, the convict contingent diminished and eventually disappeared. In the south, Adelaide was founded solely on free settlers, not one convict was ever sent there by way of sentence.

[Epimethee]

So I have resolved my computer issues after too many days and trips to the shop... and the tread moved on and he move so fast. I'm not sure what topic is worth pursuing.

Nevertheless, as it was mentioned again (a fews days ago, catch up...), I have a few things to share about ritual places in early metal age. I won't talk about Scandinavia, I haven't got time to read more about this part of the world and I have certainly a lot to learn (Tobtor, I warmly wish you haven't taken our conversation the wrong way, I really enjoyed your knowledge and I'm more interested in falsifiable hypothesis than in winning an argument.)

But I learned today about a very recent discovery in England. I haven't see any scientific paper yet, as the place is currently under work, so everything is to be taken carefully. The place seem clearly ritual, as ancient as the neolithic but used till medieval time.

"When the timber trackway was originally laid, the site had already been important for 500 years. A causewayed enclosure with a bank sheltering the slope and its springs is probably early Neolithic, built around 4,800 years ago. This was then reinforced by a later Neolithic ring ditch, which was then enclosed by a bronze age enclosure, which was then itself enclosed by an early iron age ditch. The archaeologists found Roman ditches clipping the edge of the site, and traces of Saxon buildings, but the site remained almost unchanged for centuries until the slope was filled and levelled around the 11th century – which had the effect of burying the springs level and preserving the timbers."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/...ite-in-suffolk

As much as I understand, the place is interesting because the springs were channeled to surround a platform. Object appear to have been dropped from this platform into running water, including an auroch skull far older than the place and maybe tied at one time to a pole. Objects dropped in running waters... At first it seem to be the classical scenario. But some stuffs need to be explored. The continuous use of the site is very curious, as much as the lack of sources about it.
It should be noted that springs are a very common place of ritual activity and it is not unusual to see them occupied for quite a long time, even evolving into christian pilgrimage. The most common ritual is a kind of fertility rite where pins were dropped. We have occurrences till the modern age but in some places we find Iron Age pins in sources. It is unclear if the meaning of the pin is the same but the continuity of the object used is startling.

I'm very curious to learn more about the place, to have a better chronology of his use. The general layout is also surprising and I wonder how it can connect (or not) with other places across Europe. For example skulls fixed to a pole seem also attested in La Tène were their meaning is disputed. But the chronology is too unclear to say anything seriously for the time being.



On a related note, and to share another spectacular, strange and mysterious place, I wanted since quite some time to talk about the lesser known but spectacular site of Le Mormont-La Sarraz. Again, it has certainly something to do with ritual acts. Again, understanding what happened there is really difficult. But a short presentation is in order.

We are in the Swiss plateau, a huge plain between the Alps and the Jura Mountains. Le Mormont is a rocky hill on the limit between the Rhone and the Rhine bassins. A few miles to the north is the Lake of Neuchâtel. A few miles south the Léman lake.

The hill is flat on top, and was used for centuries to extract stones. They are still extracted today. The archeological survey was made before a new stone pit would be opened.

On top of the hill, archeologist found more than 350 pits. They reach the underlying rock. A few were even dug trough it. The pits, from 80 cm to 5 meter deep, were filled with a curious assortment of objects: tools, crockery, jewelry, money, grindstones, but also a lot of humans and animals bones...

The site was used for no more than a few generations between the second and first century BC. The scientist refer to it as a "sanctuary", because obviously, but a lot of thing are problematic and it is in my opinion a good illustration of the difficulties of interpreting an archeological find. The first problem is the hugeness of the place for such a short period of use. It is more usual for a sanctuary to be in a fixed location and some of them remain places of worship even after the fall of the religion that used them first. It is not unheard of offering in random places, like the offering were the lightning strike in Rome, but the size of this place make it exceptional and unlikely to have been random. The reason of the use of this specific location are unclear. The find was surprising as most of the important Iron Age places are not really close to le Mormont. They are also not far, the Swiss plateau is not that big, but the place is still away from the known locations.
Then we go to the objects found...

The most spectacular are the human remains. Isolated bones, mainly skulls, but also long bones, arms, legs, some manipulated and cut. Even stranger, some body parts, like an entire arm, some torso, severed heads. And then you have body deposed in unusual positions: lying on their face, thrown head first in a pit, suspended or scenarized in a pile of rock...

Two adult and a child were found on a pit with burning marks by a fire no warmer than 400 degree celsius. This is the usual temperature of a grill. The adults are incomplete, only the torso, the heads and the severed left limbs were found. Also both adults have the same burning marks, they were exposed in the same fashion to the fire. Nothing compare to that in all the Celtics finds.

The human remains are sometimes mixed with animals remains. Those are also cut and present burning marks. It seem to point to an offering but what about the missing part? What was their use?

We have also a lot of body parts, from heads (we are certain they were still heads and not skulls before they were dug) to legs that show markings, coherent as much with the aftermath of a fight than with tampering after the death of the subject. In the case of a young girl, the mandibles were severed from the head. Those manipulations were made shortly before or after death but it is impossible to give the exact process and to assert exactly which wound was fatal, if that was even the case.

The animal remains are also quite interesting. It should be noted that the domesticated Celtic animals were smaller before the roman conquest. In le Mormont, some of the beasts (30 on about 250) were actually bigger than the usual animals and at least two horses were clearly imported from the south. This can have major implication for the study of domestication in Europe.

Again, the most striking part is the disposition of the bones. Some of the pit are full of bones of eaten animals, but the size of the deposit seem to imply a huge feast. The quantity of meat prepared was clearly too much for a single family. Disturbingly, among those remain of meal, human remains were found.

Some of the pits seem more ritually oriented and were filled with a mix of human and animals remains, mostly skulls and horns, or mandibles of cows. The wild beast were pretty rare, only 9 different find, but were most notably composed of a bear skull and teeth, and a wolf head.
Some pits were filled with entire beast. Horses, cows, sheep and pigs were found in the pits, sometimes thrown head first. A cow seem even to have been suspended above the pit and decomposed, dropping the bones in the process.

A lot of objects were also found, from kitchen utensils to tools like axes and hammers. And more than a hundred grinding stones. But quite interestingly no weapon at all.

You have here the first report of the archeologists who made the dig. In French again but look at it if only for the pictures.

I love this kind of places, were saying ritualistic is akin to saying mysterious. The main layout of the place scream of a religious use but what kind of deities could have been adored in a place like this? Some activities are undocumented in any other places. It is tempting to ascribe every find to a ritual purpose, even when they could be mundane. As an illustration the rests of the meals could equally be the witness of ritual practice or of the huge number of peoples present. Were the pits the result of an enormous one time offering or a repeated activity for a few generations? In any case it would have drained a lot of the local efforts and the purpose is really unclear.




Then about blue... Really the history of colors, of sensibilities, of mentalities, made huge leaps forward in the last half century. Guys like Gladstone, and Nietzsche, ( Morgenrothe 426)were exploring the greek world from the outside, like XIX century peoples with their idea of objectivity. Since then, with the like of Eco, but also if some lesser known scholar like Jacques André, we know that naming and perceiving are two different things.

First for the metaphor of the wine-dark sea. The point is more about the deep of the sea compared to the deep of the wine. The relevant metaphor is not about the color. On a lot of drinking cup you could find picture of ships and dolphins, mixed with the god of wine and his more usual symbols like grapes, like in the illustration below. Dionysos has tie with the sea, he use a boat, he is even trailed on a boat around Athens, he is called the mariner, the lord of the liquid element (kyrios tes hygras physeos), among is many names. I won't go to long on Dionysos as a god of the dark deep, as covered and revealed by the sea and the wine, but I think the famous line has more to do with something like that than with the color of the sea.

Spoiler: spoiler

Show

That's really difficult to understand, that the colors can be seen differently in another cultural frame. Thus the "they don't see it" hypothesis, that is something of a joke today among anthropologist and cultural historians. Nevertheless, it's easy to say that they think differently but it's hard to appreciate the consequences of such saying. And of course the culture is not the only thing to consider, bluntly " the sea is blue" may be the least meaningful thing to say on a boat, and clearly, talking of historical societies, you need to be careful.
Again, my main references on those subjects are in French, but since some of you read that, here are two articles that I find quite interesting on the subject of colors in Greece , or more precisely on the color of the sea here: https://journals.openedition.org/pallas/187 and on Dionysos and the sea here: https://www.persee.fr/doc/rhr_0035-1...num_199_1_4750
(I love the work of Maria Dark btw)

As the start of the conversation was about medieval blue, I would like to try another way to make you understand how alien the medieval understanding of colors are and more generally their way of looking at the world.

Have some of you ever looked into a bestiary? An original bestiary? Like this one (albeit they are more spectacular examples).
Look at the animals pictured, their colors, the stylized depiction... It clearly contrast with for example the more realist depiction of the Renaissance. If you read the bestiary it is even stranger: the bear lick his child to finish him because he is born incomplete, the pelican share his blood with his children... Every story is more crazy than the last. But the medieval peoples were surely closer than us from the natural world. They can see birds and animals every day, even a monk in his monastery. They know how a fox, a hen, a dove live but they rarely offer something close to our natural history to describe them. Why do they write about them in such a strange fashion?

We have to understand that they use another grid to engage the world. They see the same colors, the same animals as us but they notice different thing because they need different informations in their cultural world. Umberto Eco illustrate this brilliantly, in the Name of The Rose, as Baskerville arrive in the monastery and describe and name the horse of the abbey to the surprise of the monks. He read the signs of the world but understand also the frame of mind of the peoples he face. (you can read the extract here, pp. 25-27).

In the same passage, Eco give a good start to any reflexion about the philosophical and intellectual frame of medieval thinking:

"Alanus de Insulis said that
omnis mundi creatura
quasi liber et pictura
nobis est in speculum
and he was thinking of the endless array of symbols with which God, through His creatures, speaks to us of the eternal life."

The world in medieval thinking is like a collections of symbols that speak of eternal life. The important point is not to discuss natural history but to understand the ways God speak trough his creation. Of course, that's the view of an educated monk in the words of a modern professor. And I'm close to talking about religion, am I? Ah... I never intended that and I don't want to break any rule but it is hard to speak about medieval mentalities without at least acknowledging christianity. Let's just say that when they were depicting the world, or writing down what needed to be remembered, they were more concerned by a symbolical and theological order than by a natural one.
That doesn't mean people were blind to the natural order, they used it as much as us. But they used a different set of informations to classify the world and thus they saw other meanings in the same signs than we see.

We have something close with colors. We know the rules of optic since Isaac Newton so we tend to think about color along those lines. It is possible for Suger and Bernard of Clairvaux to argue about the color in a very different way. For Suger it is light and thus divine, for Bernard it is matter and thus terrestrial and impure. In cistercians abbey, you have only stone and white walls. On the other hand, Suger was the abbot of St-Denis (were the kings of France are buried) and was instrumental in his renovation. Among other things, he was one of the first to use a large amount of blue on the stained glass of the basilica.This blue was later known as the blue of Chartres and widely used on a lot of cathedrals.
Interestingly, at the same time the Virgin Mary became a major figure in the christian faith and the king of France started to use a coat of arm with lys and blue, and thus linked again to the Virgin Mary. (Also broadly the coats of arms were adopted at the same time, during the XII century.)
From the XII to the XIV century, at least among the rich and famous, and following the king of France, the blue was more and more promoted across Europe. The black became more fashionable around the 1350-1380, after it was prohibited in Rome to wear blue and red, considered too opulent at the time of the Black Death.

It's a long reply for a rough outline of a complex subject. But I'm not following the thread closely and it is maybe far from the main topic. I promise to better myself next time. Would it be right to follow one or both discussions, the archeological places of offering or rituals and the perception of colors in historical times, on other threads? I'm not sure it is worth starting a new discussion as we have already discussed a lot of things, but maybe someone would like to go deeper.

[Clistenes]

One of the reasons Ayers Rock is so red, like much of the earth around it, is because of its sheer age. The soil's had most of its fertility knocked out of it and such fertility as there was tended to dry up and blow away when the British applied European methods of agriculture to it,

Soil fertility has nothing to do with the age of the continent, since soil is lost and recovered constantly...

I don't know about the climate of Botany Bay, but soil like you have described usually mean some hot, wet months every year, which rots away all the nutrients...

[gkathellar]

To prevent electronics / electrical tech from developing, you could have a satelite or spaceship that periodically drops EMP bombs -just something to flash an EMP which would zap all functioning electrical devices etc. Say once a year or every 10 years or whatever.

G

I think a lack of certain resources could also accomplish that. On a planet with very little available silicon, for instance (yes, I know that's unlikely), you wouldn't be able to develop the microchip. A planet without a long history of biological life wouldn't have access to fossil fuels. There are lots of barriers you can put in place that aren't hard stops on development, but would slow it down significantly if only because settlers would have to find ways to skip to third- or fourth-generation tech.

Soil fertility has nothing to do with the age of the continent, since soil is lost and recovered constantly...

Yes and no? It really depends on local factors, including how the land formed and what it's been through. Young landmasses can have fertility problems on account of homogeneous composition, lack of rivers, etc. Old landmasses, especially those lacking in rivers and/or local volcanism, may simply be depleted to the point where basically all of the available nutrients are found in the topsoil. In a lot of climes, topsoil can take a long time to accumulate and is very fragile; without local plants to hold it down, topsoil may simply blow away in the wind. If you go and read up on some of the national parks in Utah or other parts of the American Southwest, one thing they stress is staying on the paths, because even walking on the topsoil can disrupt it catastrophically.

[Mr Beer]

Soil fertility has nothing to do with the age of the continent, since soil is lost and recovered constantly...

Australia's extremely geological age and stability negatively affects its soil fertility because its been continuously weathered and leached over aeons. Its not the whole story but it's certainly part of it.

[snowblizz]

The human remains are sometimes mixed with animals remains. Those are also cut and present burning marks. It seem to point to an offering but what about the missing part? What was their use?

Oh that easy, cannibals!

Disturbingly, among those remain of meal, human remains were found.

Ah, I see we got there anyway.

Let's just say that when they were depicting the world, or writing down what needed to be remembered, they were more concerned by a symbolical and theological order than by a natural one.
That doesn't mean people were blind to the natural order, they used it as much as us. But they used a different set of informations to classify the world and thus they saw other meanings in the same signs than we see.

IIRC Galloglaich often points out that there's a lot more in eg medieaval writing and pictures than we see. I know it's often brought up in stuff I read. It's hard to understand people who are basically aliens from our cultural viewpoint yet we imagine we understand them becasue we are effectively their descendants so they must have been just like us...

It's a long reply for a rough outline of a complex subject. But I'm not following the thread closely and it is maybe far from the main topic. I promise to better myself next time. Would it be right to follow one or both discussions, the archeological places of offering or rituals and the perception of colors in historical times, on other threads? I'm not sure it is worth starting a new discussion as we have already discussed a lot of things, but maybe someone would like to go deeper.

I think you'll find speciality threads live short, unfullfilling lives. That's why we tolerate tangents on this thread. Also ofc we are all very interested in various stuff.

All that being said... while I don't want to make the planet a complete crapsack world - outside the notion that being on a low-tech prison world is crapsack enough - the information provided here will be used to make escape from the world as close to impossible as possible. As mention prior: the end goal of the campaign isn't leaving the world. It's more towards somehow making it better, carving out a warlord empire, or creating a legendary name for one self.

Of course if the players want to spend time and resources towards planetary escape, I'm not going to stop them. And of course I'm not against the idea of providing such a final reward if they REALLY do a good job at role playing and remaining focused at the task.

Slight problem. That will mean you and the players are going to be playing on vastly differnt teams in the game. Also, it's kinda, erm two-faced to say players have a choice but then do everything in your power to deny them that choice. I think you are setting yourself up to be mentioned in the worst DM ever threads.

Nonetheless, the more I see loopholes in how "anti-electronics plot-onium" can be subverted, the more I'm stacking the deck against such opportunities. (Such as restricting access/availability to natural resources such as mining metals and exploitable biofuels - a resource exhausted world).

I do like the social aspects of prisoners unifying - if only temporarily and in isolated locations - to escape the planet. But I want such a feat to have only happened once, if it ever happened at all, before the player characters arrive. Perhaps the escape never did happened, and is just a legend passed down to instill (possibly false) hope.

Be careful with applying the plebotinum. If you end up layering it too thick you'll either choke the players or they'll swim up using it as a meidum. You don't want to end up in an armsrace with the players.

One of the worst DM/gamers experiences I've ever seen described on these boards stemmed from a DM creatively trying to mess with laws of nature to keep players down and tied to the DM's plot.

I also did not consider the impact of generational descendants. To be punished for a crime your great, great, great grandfather committed.
Perhaps having prisoners sterilized before planet drop is an answer. It certainly is a morality issue, but then, so is having a prison planet to begin with.

North Korea does this. Frankly if you're going to have a never-leave-prison planet why be squemish?

I'll also bring up a logical problem. Prisons are temporary things. If you want to get rid of people you kill them. The whole point of a prison is that there is an eventual "out". When your prison is just a drawn out death sentence you are going to end up with some pretty spectacular blowouts. Ie "I'll take them with me before I go". Not in all cases but still. This is a major concern for current prison systems.

And of course if the goal you see is a Mad Max empriebuilding what purpsoe does all this window dressing off stuff you can't have serve other than to frustrate the players?
If you want to run low tech don't start with super high-tech and try to cut away parts.

[Kiero]

The "prison planet" thing works better for political prisoners and the like, rather than as a general policy. Like people have said, you don't go to all the trouble of imprisoning people unless you intend one day to release them.

As mentioned, if you have criminals who are simply dangerous, an empire without qualms should be killing them. Or else going the Dune route and using them as recruiting material for elite soldiers/killers.

The reason you keep the political prisoners alive is that they're also hostages for the good behaviour of their families/allies.

[Deepbluediver]

The "prison planet" thing works better for political prisoners and the like, rather than as a general policy. Like people have said, you don't go to all the trouble of imprisoning people unless you intend one day to release them.

How does that stack up against the historical use of penal-colonies? Australia was the most famous but I know there were others

[Saintheart]

How does that stack up against the historical use of penal-colonies? Australia was the most famous but I know there were others

Again, the idea of using prisoners in colonising Australia was because they were prisoners with useful skills. They didn't just throw random people on the First Fleet, they generally chose prisoners who were already tradesmen or skilled farmers - generally with sentences of 7 years transportation for minor offences. They were basically a convict labour workforce, and towards the end of their sentences often pardoned or given ticket-of-leave to become free settlers once their sentences were over. Most of these prisoners had close to nothing back in England and were offered land, which is not to justify the policy, but maybe explain why it was popular among those prisoners who stayed in the colony. That said, it wasn't an offer tempting without exception: in other Australian colonies, large fractions of the convict workforce left at the conclusion of their sentences and returned to England.

[HeadlessMermaid]

How does that stack up against the historical use of penal-colonies? Australia was the most famous but I know there were others

France sent both political prisoners and common criminals to New Caledonia, near Australia. Thousands of people were hauled there after the suppression of the Paris Commune (including Louise Michel, most famously), though later an amnesty was issued, and most of them came back.

Their other penal colony was on the Salvation's Islands, off French Guiana in South America. That one was notoriously brutal, especially Devil's Island, and was preferred for political prisoners, from Alfred Dreyfus to Marius Jacob and a whole bunch of illegalists and anarchists and assorted revolutionaries. But it wasn't exclusive to them either, murder could also get you there, if you were really unlucky.

Now, internal penal colonies are a different sort, sometimes the term "(internal) displacement" is used instead of "exile", these are common in totalitarian regimes of all stripes, and are often exclusively for political prisoners. Don't think only large countries that can sent you somewhere far away in the middle of nowhere, Greek dictatorships would send people to tiny islands, very close to the mainland, but effectively as isolated as in the middle of the ocean.

And we should also note Guantanamo, if nothing else because it combines a physical construct (a big prison) with a legal construct ("enemy combatant") invented precisely to bypass both due process for civilians and those pesky PoW rights per the Geneva Conventions. I believe that legal constructs are a crucial overlooked feature, that any prison dystopia could benefit from.

[Kiero]

How does that stack up against the historical use of penal-colonies? Australia was the most famous but I know there were others

As people have said above, it wasn't a "life sentence" and they still executed lots of people for a range of crimes.

[Storm Bringer]

And we should also note Guantanamo, if nothing else because it combines a physical construct (a big prison) with a legal construct ("enemy combatant") invented precisely to bypass both due process for civilians and those pesky PoW rights per the Geneva Conventions. I believe that legal constructs are a crucial overlooked feature, that any prison dystopia could benefit from.

your missing the third ingredient of Guantanamo, which is its funky legal status as a US controlled site, outside of the US (and the jurisdiction of US civil courts), and not under the jurisdiction of the local civil courts (as Cuba's official stance is the based was forced upon them at gunpoint, and they call it illegal and want it back).


also, the lack of protections for non-state combatants was a semi-deliberate feature of Geneva. The idea was to encourage rebels to create a unified, recognisable, and negotiable entity, and to encourage them to use some sort of uniform or other marks of distinction to separate themselves form the civil populace (for example, the red/white armbands worn by polish fighters in the Warsaw Uprising).

[Epimethee]

I like the idea of a prison planet. A lot was already said but I will add a few things. Some topics were discussed at length but I'm a bit late and anyway I may stumble upon something fresh.

And also this, by the great Franquin at his darkest:

Spoiler

Show

So you have three main things to organise. The way the warden watch upon the inmate, the power structures among the inmates and the interactions between the planet and the intergalactic society. Each will have an impact on the other and the decisions you make here are essential.
I don't think the penal colonies are the best example, as they were colonies and supported by the metropolis. They were intended to advance the power of empires so the comparison is interesting but not really accurate. The aim of a penal planet is different. You are in my opinion closer to a totalitarian society. Everything should be designed to stuck the inmates in their place. That's your one and only goal. So you need a society on the planet, and you want to have it well organized to satisfy this aim.

The layout of the planet is important, but only as your background. Of course, the easiest way to stuck your inmates in some low technological level is to make the planet a true nightmare to survive, like Fenris in 40k. The bare necessities of survival are too much to allow fundamental research.
In any other case you will need an active intervention from the warden to check the planet. They are many possibilities to limit the technological advances of a society but each implies a direct or indirect contact.

In my opinion, those interactions may be the most interesting playground, like the political dynamics of the inmates.

The interactions between the inmates and the galactic society encompass many things: who are the inmates, why are they here, but also how are they brought on the planet. Some aside should be considered, like the knowledge about the prison of the galactic society, their opinion, and eventually the allies that inmates may have in the galaxy. Later on, it will also include actual interactions, but you should decide about that later, when your planet is better shaped.

The idea of political prisoners is fine, and may explain the difficulties of the society. Look for example at the Great Leap Forward in China. Overqualified peoples can't use their competences. They are under qualified for the task at hand and so the entire society suffer and local communities may even collapse.
It is also easier to imagine the children of the losers of a civil war still stuck on a backward planet generations after the facts. Of course that's evil but every other feasible option is. You could go for something like humans are an evil race and must be separated from the galaxy or like a huge experiment but that's equally vile. A more humanist choice, like petty criminals, implies regularly to drop new inmates. Also, as pointed above, petty criminals should probably have legal options to be taken out. (BTW, not to make the debate here where I don't judge moral positions, some societies could be against death penalty and go a long way not to use it. Also there could be reasons not to kill the guys, like opinion in the galaxy, as for Napoleon who was exiled because of the political cost of his death. The planet could have the same use on a larger scale.)

The main problem you have with too many new arrivals is that you need more steps to suppress technologies and knowledge and thus the actions of the wardens will be more visible. Each new intervention will multiply the potential of mischief from the inmates so a warden want to be as invisible as possible. I'm not against new arrivals but they should be limited not to impact the technological level. A few every generation seem the most reasonable quantity.
In my opinion, a first dropping for political prisoners then some news arrival every generation on a very little scale may be a realist option, as you have the best of both world, a local society well established and some regular interactions between the warden and the inmates.

Here the politics of the inmate are relevant. As much as the physical planet, a backward society should be a prison for a galactic citizen. From the point of view of the warden, it is easier to engineer a society than a group of inmate. What I really want is a society made as much as a trap as the planet I choose. Time is less a problem for a galactic society, and I have as much potential inmates as I want, considering the size of the galactic population.

So I start by dropping a huge population, hopefully mainly of young and old people, and as few people with farming experience or hunting or the like as possible. They could be a political faction, the losers of a war or something like that and their fate may be as tragic or justified as you like. Maybe they are the families of an evil order, or they are just a displaced society of oppressed peoples. Anyway, they will be the basis of my brave new world.
Then I let boil for a few generations. I try to suppress as much writing as possible but I let the people do their things. I can reasonably be sure that they will organise at some point, and I can let that happen. It is unlikely that the first generation should be able to use their knowledge and I need at some point to have political entities to play with. Hopefully, they will fight a bit for limited ressources before they organise, all the better for me.

Thus my attack on knowledge. It would be hard for the inmates to write anything down and easy for me to destroy the supports. (It is also easier to make it as discrete as possible, a fire, a flood, a strange moisture... the ancient can say "peoples in the sky" did it, as long as the young have no proof, it just plant the seeds for the next step.) In any case, they are unlikely to have the necessary infrastructure to support the knowledge needed for space, let alone intergalactic travel. Education would be limited to the basic, because of the necessities of survival.

My aim is to uproot the inmates, to dissolve their knowledge. They will have memories, oral tales with limited context. Each generation will lose a bit of these knowledge. I'm confident that the technological infrastructure will crash down rapidly. Even something simple like the steam age technology is dependent of a huge net of universities, laboratories, usines and so on. So I can concentrate on the humanities, on making uncertain and rare the historical archives. I try to get as close as possible to a blank state. Relatively soon some cultural differences will start to appear.
By this point I can start engineering.

As I said, they are many possibilities by this point. The easiest is to build a society opposed to the idea of technological advance. Religion is of course an useful tool. The memories of space civilisation will help me. With my technological superiority, it should be easy to appear as a supernatural force. It also frame my next interventions.

By this point I have many options: corrupting and manipulating leaders, framing and reframing the culture and education of new generations, using something akin to the inquisition so the inmate are their own warden regarding technology... If I need a more direct intervention, I will use the cultural references of the inmates to reinforce my narrative. I can even have some warden as agent on the surface to direct the course of history.

By this point, a few galactic citizens could be dropped sometime without disruption to my prison. The society of the inmates will be like a huge shackle: technology would be seen as evil, the knowledge of the news inmates as heretical and so on. So I have a nice place to drop political opponent, and some criminals too dangerous to be kept elsewhere.

By this point the planet has a lot of interesting dynamics to explore as a player. The galactic citizens versus the warden and the other inmates, the journey of an inmate to discover the lies around the world were he is born are self-evident plots. But the society of the warden, certainly as complex and alien as the society on the planet, is also quite interesting.

So as I said I encourage you to think about the planet as a totalitarian society. It may give you another perpective on the situation.


To snowblizz: Thank for the niceties. This thread is really engrossing and the path of discussion are endless. Not to mention the very interesting people who share their knowledge.

About cannibalism, yeah, it's the first thing that come to mind. And that's the problem also. In other cases, clear marks of ingestion were found, like broken bones to eat the marrow. Here we have no clear evidence and the remains are still to be studied in laboratory. Without clear evidence it should be said with a grain of salt.
Another problem is the lack of other occurence for something like that. Nothing compare among the Celts and even the lack of respect for human remains is unusual.
Even then, the idea of human sacrifices is contentious for the Celts. Some will point to roman sources like Cesar, Ciceron, or Lucan, but they should be taken as the rewriting of Poseidonios, like Diodore and Strabon, the plea of a great advocate and a poetic vision respectively.

So again I think you should be careful not to be blinded by the first hypothesis. It's tempting because then you have an explanation and you can fit the discoveries in the frame but you should try to go the other way around, building a frame with the precision of your elaboration on the objects.