I am building a fantasy world for #Pathfinder, and the "main area" I am focusing on is culturally roughly analogous to Europe - since that is what I am most familiar with, and reinforces some of the main themes of the setting.
Yet I want to make clear that this is not the only culture on the face of the planet, and thus I will need to at least sketch out other regions of this world as well as their cultural groups - many of which should be counterpoints to real world cultures.
The trick is how to make these interesting places in their own right that can exist independently of the "Europe-analogous" area without resorting to all sorts of ugly and/or stereotypes which have been used by European/American authors writing about cultures which are not their own.
There has been quite enough of that in RPG spaces already - I am sure most of you could name quite a few examples.
I don't think it would be possible or practical to try and "invent" these other cultures whole-cloth, and expect them to be on par with your Europe-analagous area.
So, it would make sense to make the other cultures analagous to other real life cultural regions. Thus, your question is - how to treat them without resorting to ugly stereotypes.
Perhaps you could study sources from their own cultures, and see how they themselves write about their cultures.
Perhaps you could start by fleshing out just one neighboring culture - one which would have a lot more interaction with the region the players are in than others.
That could give you some idea of how much time and effort is involved, and help you figure out where to scale back for just a rough sketch of the others.
"Three young scientists travel around the country in the 25th century after the world has been ravaged by pollution. In their hi-tech RV (called Ark II), they study the land and help out those in need."
It really boils down to whether or not there's some fan base to tap into.
Like, they've been trying to bring back The Black Hole. Even though the movie is generally not regarded highly, and it was absolutely a financial disaster, there's still a certain fan base who remembers The Black Hole with fondness.
Otherwise, it's easier and better to just take inspiration from some of the better ideas and make up a new IP.
Eyeballing from @nyrath's table, my heroine hops in her butterfly ship and gets pushed at 1G by her home Dyson swarm for a year, then flips around and gets slowed at the same rate by the destination for a year and travels 1 ly. Doubling the trip time makes that almost 6 ly. https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/slowerlight3.php#relcalc
If you've got plenty of power - and a Dyson swarm does have plenty of power, then a laser sail at the destination can decelerate you just as well as accelerate you. (Actually better, due to both the doppler effect and the chasing effects working in your favor.)
It's going to depend on specifics of the overall system, but 1 gee of acceleration is possible. Two possible strategies is to have extremely high reflectivity with a visible or soft UV laser, or to have a sail material tolerant of high temperature (and this allows the use of X-ray or even gamma ray lasers - but this is not required).
With high reflectivity sails, you may need to be careful about doppler effects and the angle of incidence.
Cutty's ship is named RMS Essex, although "ESSEX" is just what's painted on the side. The original Essex was scrapped; its LH2 tank was converted into the crew compartment of Cutty's ship.
So, LH2 tank engineering is not trivial. If you want it to launch from Earth, then you have to confront icing and insulation. For various reasons, this works best with a single layer of structural tank, with insulation foam applied outside that and optional paint outside that.
But this becomes a problem if you have dreams of using these big LH2 tanks for a space habitat. Bits of foam breaking off becomes space debris - a hazard in LEO.
Thus, Essex was not allowed to operate in LEO, severely limiting its ability to bring in revenue. Besides, its avionics and various systems degraded and became obsolete, so Essex was scrapped.
Cutty's ship would be built around its LH2 tank, repurposed into a crew compartment. Spraying the outside with large cellulose bubbles both solved the problem of space debris and provided Whipple shield-like impact protection.
There's not much in common between this new concept and Daedalus. For one thing, it uses fission rather than fusion.
And the basic idea is wild ... take a gun-type fission bomb and make it so that the cylinder portion is reusable while the bullet portion gets super duper hot.
I'm no nuclear physicist, so I don't even know if that can even plausibly work.
@nyrath What's the proper size for the hero ship in a movie, TV series or RPG?
99% of the crew of the Enterprise seem to do nothing ever, not even react to the half-human.
In the three Star Wars movies the Millennium Falcon seems more a setting for interludes rather than part of the plot. As soon as the rookie gets the keys to an X-wing he's outta there. (In diapers?)
Traveller has two types of ships, depending on the types of missions the gamers are in to. With few if any NPC crewmembers.
When Republicans/former Republicans are saying they’ll vote for the Democratic candidate and leftists/young people are saying they won’t do that, I’m worried that it incentivizes the Dems to be more conservative, not to try and win back leftist voters.
To the extent that political parties are responsive to the electorate, they are responsive to what their reliable/likely voters want, not what irregular voters or nonvoters want.
You are correct, and in addition there's the problem that the "leftists" in question are being manipulated into thinking this way by the right, as well as Putin and such.
Those who are useful fools rather than conscious instigators think that they just need to do what The Tea Party did to the Republican Party, in order to take over the Democratic Party. But they're too stupid to realize they've been manipulated into doing the opposite of what they need to.
i got the new placeholder a* road builder working and integrated into the world generator. i plan to return to the ant trail inspired approach, but i can do integration work with this just fine.
So, the reason I was looking at Star Wars - and other games - was because I'm questioning the whole point of "Character Advancement" in games that aren't power fantasies.
There are many games where you're just a "normal" person or "Normal+" 😉
Why do so many of those games have "advancement" or "levels" or whatever? Is it just because it's become expected? If you're not playing a Power Fantasy then why do characters just gaining power and capability at an impossible rate?
I think it's really just habit, established by D&D. I mean ... D&D was ridiculously popular and it established all sorts of conventions.
Furthermore, D&D inspired a ton of CRPGs and RPG-like games (such as roguelikes). In those games, there wasn't really a capability to replicate the role playing aspects of D&D, but it was straightforward to replicate the numerical mechanics, such as leveling up.
A lot of people were introduced to RPGs via these games first, rather than tabletop.