The Campaign Builder's Guild

Wow this has been gathering dust for a long time. Anyhow, some recent thoughts...

I've always wanted the planet itself to be an adversary as much as anything, and as the desert world is slightly played out, even though its still fantastic, I thought of taking the opposite route. Having a world just slightly further in orbit its star than Earth is, so that all the planet, save for a temperate strip around the equator, would be nonarable, uninhabitable dry, cold desert and great glacial wastes. And as much as I cringe when I see the Star Wars-esque single biom planet, I have an image of nearly all the land along the equator being low, rolling hills, not unlike central Asia. Also, with all the the glaciers to the north and south, I would figure that many rivers would cut through the land as well, creating many canyons and gorges of various depths. Also, have a thought of bordering the known world on the west and east by seas, making the known world large enough to be plausible, but still contained enough that a single base culture would flourish throughout.

As for that culture, I have a single thought: conservative, traditional family clans.

Also thinking about putting this world right at the cusp of widespread firearms and chemical weapons, although obviously in a different way than Earths history.

so Ive had another thought about, on one hand, bumping the base technology level this setting to 11, while on the other, using social taboos and cultural and political development to keep other things on a very, relatviely, low-tech level, mostly things relating to war.

I'm not sure whether to expand the scope of this setting to a single system or quasi-galactic size. But that may be for another time.

Anyhow, this is what I'm thinking about as an explanation for the the low/high technology contrast:

As mentioned before, humankind would have settled this world, however long ago, at an already advanced level. This also creates the issue that humanity began its existance on this world as a unified race, knowledgable race, as opposed to our history, where mankind developed in many different places and many different ways, more or less isolated from each other for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. This inturn would make a general culture shared by all humans plausible, if not more than likely. But anyhow, as I've also mentioned, humans, in absence of developed states, would organize themselves into family clans (which I think I will call Vos, or Vosi in plural) of varying sizes, strengths, and specializations.

Sometime in the fairly distance past (2,000 years, more or less) a massive and exceptionally brutal and bloody war broke out amongst the Vosi at the advent of chemical-based weapons and firearms. Lasting for hundreds of years and decimating generations, the Great Pact was eventually reached by the leaders of the most powerful Vosi that would go something like this:

1. Strict Rules of War. The Vosi agreed that wars should be fought only between warring Vosi, that no neutral Vos or civilian populations would be involved in these vendettas. Vendettas would have to be requested and presented before the newly formed Archamid, the Vosi Council. and lastly, and most importantly, weapons of war would be limited to those that would do the least amount of collateral damage and those that lacked an ability to kill indiscriminately: the Peace of Knives. In a word, war and its practice would be forever frozen in the ways before the advent of firearms and chemical weapons.

2. The Banning of Certain Technologies. These would primarily be focused in any realm that could shift or threaten the Peace of Knives. So while other fields would continue to advance: medicine, transportation and flight, computer sciences, etc., others would be severly crippled or outright banned.

3. The Agreement of all the Vosi of the Archamid to unite without hestitation against any particular Vos that would threaten any part of the Great Pact.

4. The Vos Volathi. The "Ghost Clan", or the Vos Volathi, would be an invisible, landless Vos that would have the unique advantage of allowing members of other Vosi to join. The Vos Volathi would be the invisible police and spies amongst the Vosi, seraching for anything threat to the Great Pact and, if needed, silencing any particular individual that did so. Members of the Ghost Clan would be recruited, secretly, and could be anyone from a simple layman to a power-broker in any particular Vos.

Throughout the history since the Great Pact, there would have been several attempts to upset the balance, mostly through a breaking of the Peace of Knives, but all attempts were foiled to on extant or another and nearly all the Vosi follow the rules of the Great Pact to the letter.

So there is my explanation for why spaceships and swords co-exist.

I hope that wasn't too wordy and made sense.