As with all things Hiver, it is open to interpretation and revisionism.
I probably should have put the usual disclaimer in front of it, "we had
not made a decision, and if we ever felt compelled to put something into
print, this may not have been it," along with the additional disclaimer,
which I started to get at with the "sludge," but didn't take all the way,
"Any claim that ANY character, ESPECIALLY a Hiver, intended a particular
outcome is to be taken as an "in-game" piece of wisdom, and not objective
truth, in the tradition of Zhodani, psionic suppressions, Aslan not a
major race, etc." And the account below was definitely a case of my
"leaning forward" to "if I had to say today what it probably was, here it
is."
Your observation on H&I is correct, they definitely do exaggerate and
falsify, but they do attempt things, and revise their intents later on to
fit what happened. But H&I was not trying to say that the Hivers were
impotent and you didn't have to worry about what they were up to. It was
more to open up, "If we take seriously the claims made about Hivers, these
are the complex issues and consequences bound up within that." You should
come away from H&I with a sense of paranoia and mental illness, but not a
sense that the Hivers had been defanged because their net vector was 0.
These guys murder each other to cover things up and say, "huh, there's
that strange glandular deficiencies thing again, I wonder what causes
that?"
We do know the following:
1. DL/RC WAS a Hiver manipulation. Everything they do is, and they were
backing the DL/RC. Therefore there are innumerable Hivers trying for a
certain result to claim later, or preparing their claims to encompass what
they get. Besides, if it's not, there's no point in involving them in the
storyline anyway. Chekhov's rifle above the mantel.
2. We do know that DL/RC was pushed to go before they were ready. I'm sure
that was written somewhere, if not, it's so deeply embedded in everything
that I wrote about them that it might as well have been.
3. The concept of "inoculating the humans against violence" was something
that Frank and I discussed during the "who are these SV guys?" period. I
thought it was an interesting but fatuous notion, exactly the sort of
thing that someone would claim after the fact, "here's why we did this."
In other words, a Hiver manipulation claim.
While you are correct that strong emotions are beyond their understanding,
just because they don't understand something doesn't mean they won't try
to use a thing they don't fully understand and thereby screw it up. And
since any manipulation is literally an experiment anyway, they're still
learning, or claiming to be learning.
And I don't see the failure of the 12 DL missions to be playing off of DL
emotions (anger). It is playing off of simple pragmatic cause-and-effect.
"We have announced our presence here in 12 different directions. None have
returned. That means its worse out there than we thought, and no however
killed the 12 knows we're here, and is probably coming for us. We have to
get them, in bigger, better-armed numbers, before they get us, and keep
going. Because we keep announcing our presence bigger and bigger, which
will invite more response, so we have to keep pushing our frontier farther
and farther out, without pause to allow an opportunity for someone to hit
us while we are resting." If it's based on an emotion, it's fear, but
mostly it is pragmatic.
Is "Cosmic Fire" the mission that made the players go, "ewww?" We did not
commission an adventure to say, "make the RC look less-than-perfect," but
when it came in, it fit with the notion that warfare is awful and
imprecise, that the RC is going to have to get its hands dirty, and that's
part of why there are people in the future saying, "Star Viking." And it
was better than doing the Star Trek thing where, "the Federation never
does anything mean." Either that or Frank wrote it with that idea
deliberately in mind.
I think as I went on in the reply I was not distinguishing between "Hiver
manipulation" vs. "overall effect of RC as 'Star Vikings'" as in this
discussion the two were closely related.
So, was DL/RC a Hiver manipulation? Absolutely. They wouldn't have put all
the backing behind it that they did were it not. Is what I described above
actually what was going on? It's as good a "I must guess now" as anything,
and follows the necessary Chekhov rule: "if Hivers are involved you can't
say they aren't up to something or their help doesn't come with attempted
weird influences." Does my reply reflect what we would have published?
Almost absolutely not, because my intent was that for as long as GDW
existed we would never make an official statement on something like that,
because that kind of ambiguity and mystery is best left in the player's
minds, we must merely water and feed it every once in a while, and let
them draw their own conclusions.
> Epic reply Dave. I need to study this at length done, I'd not put in my
> compilation of your "best of" aka "DSB."
>
> I always took the point of H&I to claim the Hivers were more exaggerating,
> if not outright falsely claiming manipulations which they really had no
> control over, though I had decided MTU had it a bit more in the middle
> between their claims versus the reality. Strong emotions, especially the
> anger/rage/hate, but also pure altruism/love/sacrifice on the other end
> were clearly beyond their understanding and we're thus unable to
> influence,
> though many would perform manipulations to simply study them. I did have
> an
> idea for a colony of Hivers that were evangelized and formed human style
> nuclear-esque families near Turin.
>
> Definitely does some ambiguous situations where the Coalition would really
> benefit from some crucial piece of industrial infrastructure but would
> cripple the host world. Assembly votes to take it. Hammer assembles the
> mission... And the PCs are forced to either justify it or defy it. That's
> even more towards real ambiguity than Cosmic Fire...
>
> I did have a Federation battlegroup in the Stepping Stones as well as
> another to Rimwardthe would occasionally probe towards Cymbeline as well
> as
> studying various Vampire patterns and attempting to pull manipulations on
> Viruses (which included their own experiments on various strains similar
> to
> what was harrowing in the Regency). I don't think they'd stick their
> appendages out enough to shadow any of the 12 directly, though and
> certainly not any of the Coalition groups, though I do fond the idea
> intriguing enough to retcon.
>
> I think TL model works for what is most prevalent to the general public in
> the primary starport/economic center, but below "cutting edge" for what a
> government/megacorp, etc is capable of producing in limited quanitity at
> enormous expense which could be 1-2 higher in specific fieldsand sometimes
> with trade offs (bugs, etc). Similarly, rural areas works be lower
> (possibly much lower). I don't find that a problen wuth the TL system as
> much as reading to much into it.
>
> - Sent from my SM-N900T
> On Mar 23, 2014 12:59 PM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Eamon--
>>
>> (Either I lied/misspoke/changed my mind. You be the judge of my
>> character.)
>>
>> I'm going to get back to your Sufren question later (and finish my
>> longer
>> answer to Bardbear). Please remind me about Sufren if I don't get to it
>> in, say, a week.
>>
>> The answer to your question is a combination of the three bullets plus
>> the
>> Free Trader thing.
>>
>> Hiver manipulation, yes. But Hiver manipulation plays on tendencies also
>> present, like over-enthusiasm, as a basis. And also plays on data
>> available to the actors they are manipulating, your third bullet
>> (asterisk). That data will include data received from the FTs, your
>> fourth
>> (unbulleted) point.
>>
>> "Hiver manipulation," some points. If you take seriously the notion that
>> their highest aspiration is manipulating others, then they are all
>> constantly doing it to each other, which means that there are a lot of
>> cross-cutting manipulations going on, undermining/diluting each other so
>> that "big manipulations" tend to melt into an imprecise sludge. Better
>> manipulators are aware of this, and plan to allow for sludge. Think of
>> Asimov's psycho-history in the Foundation Trilogy, which also allows for
>> these. Also remember that all Hivers are "orphans," so are missing all
>> of
>> those developmental inputs for duty, hierarchy, structure to parents
>> that
>> humans start with. They spend all those years in the wilderness relying
>> only on themselves, periodically being exterminated by adult Hivers, so
>> what they learn is, "I can only depend on myself, everyone else is out
>> to
>> get me." All Hivers are essentially independent actor egoists (egoist in
>> the philosophical sense, not egotist, there is a difference), beholden
>> to
>> none, and that motivation "good of the hive/race" is such a porous
>> statement that it can be used to justify any action. Hivers are scary,
>> and
>> being a Hiver is scary.
>>
>> (Note, I am currently reading "The Hidden-Hand Presidency" about
>> Eisenhower. This book was published in 1982 and popularized the term,
>> "hidden hand." Compare this to other Traveller developments since then.
>> However, note that, aside from the applicability of the term, the way
>> Ike
>> practiced this is NOT the Hiver model per se. Ike practiced a human
>> version of this, where he cultivated an external "act" to aid the
>> accomplishment of his internal goals. That's obviously not unrelated to
>> things a Hiver might do, but not as sophisticated, because to his inner
>> circle, via his memos, etc., his goals were clear. A Hiver would have to
>> conceal even these until he was ready to go, "Ta-daaaa!")
>>
>> Since everyone knows that Hivers are manipulators, they need to have a
>> public (politically correct) rationale for their policies. With the RC
>> it's: "Stable polities on our border make for improved security,
>> elimination of chaos and vectors for attack, and allow profitable
>> trade."
>> Beneath that is the notion that the DL was not really ready to expand,
>> and
>> the Hivers are jump-starting that for two reasons: 1) the sooner we
>> begin
>> the re-expansion, the sooner we will have stability (public rationale),
>> and 2) the mechanism of the RC expansion was to "inoculate" humans
>> against
>> violence, i.e., doing the typical "we made the Ithklur less violent"
>> Hiver
>> thing (and we know that didn't really work) and to make them more
>> manageable by the Hivers.
>>
>> The idea is that RC and Regency expansion are fundamentally different.
>> The
>> Regency kept a "safe," reasonably robust economy so when they expand it
>> will be more deliberate, coming in and helping the locals, knitting them
>> into the Regency economy, etc. The Regency expansion is "growing the
>> pie,"
>> not fighting over slices of the pie. The RC doesn't really have an
>> economy. Their expansion is "the future is right now, right now, right
>> now," and depends on grabbing high-value assets which it repurposes to
>> their own use, i.e., fueling continued expansion. Their growth is more
>> zero-sum, fighting over pie slices, but incapable of growing the pie
>> organically right away. The way they grow the pie is by expanding the
>> radius that defines that pie and grabbing more of it. The Regency is
>> concerned with "hearts and minds," while the RC is, "we're doing this
>> for
>> your own good, we know you can't see it now, but someday you'll thank
>> us."
>>
>> Another way of thinking of this is something that is much more
>> politically freighted in 2014 than it was in 1991-1995, but the point
>> remains. The Regency is growing its economy much more slowly, BECAUSE IT
>> CAN AFFORD TO, while the RC is engaged in wholesale deficit spending,
>> balancing that deficit as best it can by grabbing more stuff to keep the
>> fires stoked, but in an ultimately unsustainable model. Now, re:
>> 1991-1995
>> vs. 2014, YOU SHOULD NEVER TAKE THIS as "one of them is
>> Republican/Democrat or Red/Blue, that was never the intent. Both are
>> responding to conditions around them: Regency has the luxury of its
>> approach, RC does not have that luxury, because the Hivers pushed them
>> into expanding prematurely, and once they got committed to that, they
>> were
>> riding the tiger and there was no getting off. Once you attract
>> attention
>> to yourself, you invite attack, so you have to push out and defend
>> forward
>> (best defense = good offense). However, I know that now that I've said
>> this, the Red/Blue meme is going to take on a life of its own because no
>> one is going to be able to resist it. (This is also a good way to spot
>> lurkers on this list, and where they're funneling their digests.)
>>
>> But anyway, Regency comes to your planet, topples your TED, and
>> immediately starts investing, buying up whatever crap you make, and
>> pulling you into the economy. On the other hand, RC comes in, topples
>> your
>> TED, kills a bunch of people in inevitable collateral damage, steals all
>> the cool stuff, and might not come back, except to steal other cool
>> stuff,
>> which may harm the locals who had depended upon it. Does the RC try to
>> help uplift the locals? Yes, but given their resources they can't do as
>> much of it as the Regency, it is much more shoestring, and oh, by the
>> way,
>> requires them to go steal more new stuff from somebody else to support
>> the
>> uplift project. Is what the RC is doing "for the greater good?"
>> Arguably,
>> yes. Is what the RC doing going to seem high-handed, violent, unfair,
>> and
>> capricious to the locals that the RC "preys on" to fuel the "greater
>> good"
>> economy? Yes, hence "Star Vikings." While the Guild may be the ones
>> running around teaching the vocabulary words, "Star Viking, Longships,"
>> the intent behind that capability is embedded in the Hiver manipulation,
>> with the goal that, "look at how much we had to suffer to recover to
>> where
>> we are now, let alone the war that put us there to begin with, this has
>> taught us that We Must Never Fight Again(TM)." The idea is that it might
>> be nice to be an omelette, but if you were one of the eggs that went
>> into
>> the omelette, you would not remember the chef fondly.
>>
>> There are other little clues to this throughout. There's an adventure in
>> S&G or PoT that players rightly regarded as chilling, where the RC took
>> some important thing that the locals needed. Also in S&G I put in a
>> quote
>> from Ritter, "I didn't say Smash and Grab, I said stash what you've got
>> and grab some more. I'll never hear the end of this." And Ritter is
>> right,
>> the title of the book is Smash and Grab, and that's another example of
>> how
>> the Hiver manipulation turned "reformation" into "Star Vikings." (As we
>> know, the actual Reformation turned into the 30-Years war, another
>> example.)
>>
>> Now, back to manipulation, we said above, "over-enthusiasm," which then
>> became, "oh crap, now we've called attention to ourselves." That
>> over-enthusiasm was caused by their astrographic isolation, and intel
>> they
>> were getting from the Free Traders? Yes. BUT, were there Hiver
>> battlefleets out there protecting the DL, allowing them to get to where
>> they thought space was kind of safe? Were some of the Free Trader
>> reports
>> coming in as Hiver intelligence digests: "We've talked to a bunch of FTs
>> the past year, and in summary they say XYZ."
>>
>> And a step further. Some of the DL ships that disappeared without a
>> trace,
>> is it because they were snapped up by a Hiver shadowing force to ensure
>> they didn't return? Where are those ships/crews now? Back to trailing in
>> some Federation Navy holding cell? Atomized to eliminate evidence? Do
>> the
>> Ithklur of "Hands Across the Truth" know about this and want to tell
>> someone? We clearly published somewhere that, "we are not going to
>> officially say what happened to all of these ships." I also know in
>> reality that whenever a publisher or TV show or movie says this, they
>> always eventually do in response to public clamor. So, while I knew that
>> it would eventually happen, either act of commission on GDW's part, or
>> act
>> of omission by failing to see that someone else published it (e.g.,
>> licensee), the intent was to NOT do that for as long as possible.
>>
>> The plan was NEVER to publish or officially establish any of that,
>> because
>> part of the mystery of Hivers and manipulations is that you allow them
>> to
>> remain the subject of speculation. I was going to expose "the
>> underbelly"
>> of Hiver politics through another means, in the epic adventure that
>> never
>> happened, which showed an earlier "Terminal Manipulation" which would
>> allow players to think, "whoa," and look over their shoulders more. But
>> just as introducing Yaskoydray made the Ancients boring, showing all the
>> Hiver puppet strings makes them less interesting then if you just wonder
>> about them.
>>
>> And here's the other thing to pull from that. The Hivers were backing
>> the
>> RC, not the Regency, and when the two met the Hivers would have some
>> opinions about that. Also, there was an established early strain of
>> psionic Hivers which would fit with advocates of the RC POV not being
>> present to argue historiography.
>>
>> Back to the FTs, as I said in an earlier post, we were clearly falling
>> behind in fleshing them out as well as we had initially intended, and
>> probably would not have caught back up.
>>
>> Re: DL tech, not sure what you mean by Tech/Starport backwater. If you
>> mean did their 1201 tech come from direct Hiver improvements? Yes, the
>> Hivers brought them up through various means. Here we run afoul of the
>> "Traveller TL model," which is at best murky and ambiguous, as it
>> clearly
>> does NOT mean that you can produce all you need there. There are all
>> kinds
>> of lo-pop worlds with high tech, and they obviously don't build all that
>> stuff there, but rely on trade. Economics is hard in this one real
>> world,
>> so expecting a game to have a perfect economic model for 20,000 worlds
>> 4000 years from now is silly. But the idea is that the Hivers could
>> provide key technologies, such as power plants, industrial tooling,
>> etc.,
>> which would have pulled DL up higher than they otherwise were.
>>
>> I think that covers it all, provides some food for thought, and perhaps
>> more questions.
>>
>> Dave
>>
>> > ...this is my only chance to post for a week.
>> >
>> > One thing we got to talking about on the TNE Sub-forum at CotI, was
>> the
>> reasons why the DL sent such woefully-unprepared missions out into the
>> wilds.
>> >
>> > If I remember correctly some ideas were:
>> >
>> > * Hiver Manipulation (Didn't rate this myself).
>> >
>> > * Over-enthusiasm.
>> >
>> > * Being astrographically isolated, and so having no ability to compare
>> home vs. wilds.
>> >
>> > Free Traders were a puzzle, in that you would think they'd provide
>> some
>> kind of heads-up to the DL - but if they're all local, then maybe not.
>> >
>> > Brings to mind a question about how rapid was the DL's advance in
>> technology - perhaps they were also a tech/starport backwater before
>> Hiver
>> > contact?
>> >
>> > Eamon, who is not posting any more tonight - honest!
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>
I probably should have put the usual disclaimer in front of it, "we had
not made a decision, and if we ever felt compelled to put something into
print, this may not have been it," along with the additional disclaimer,
which I started to get at with the "sludge," but didn't take all the way,
"Any claim that ANY character, ESPECIALLY a Hiver, intended a particular
outcome is to be taken as an "in-game" piece of wisdom, and not objective
truth, in the tradition of Zhodani, psionic suppressions, Aslan not a
major race, etc." And the account below was definitely a case of my
"leaning forward" to "if I had to say today what it probably was, here it
is."
Your observation on H&I is correct, they definitely do exaggerate and
falsify, but they do attempt things, and revise their intents later on to
fit what happened. But H&I was not trying to say that the Hivers were
impotent and you didn't have to worry about what they were up to. It was
more to open up, "If we take seriously the claims made about Hivers, these
are the complex issues and consequences bound up within that." You should
come away from H&I with a sense of paranoia and mental illness, but not a
sense that the Hivers had been defanged because their net vector was 0.
These guys murder each other to cover things up and say, "huh, there's
that strange glandular deficiencies thing again, I wonder what causes
that?"
We do know the following:
1. DL/RC WAS a Hiver manipulation. Everything they do is, and they were
backing the DL/RC. Therefore there are innumerable Hivers trying for a
certain result to claim later, or preparing their claims to encompass what
they get. Besides, if it's not, there's no point in involving them in the
storyline anyway. Chekhov's rifle above the mantel.
2. We do know that DL/RC was pushed to go before they were ready. I'm sure
that was written somewhere, if not, it's so deeply embedded in everything
that I wrote about them that it might as well have been.
3. The concept of "inoculating the humans against violence" was something
that Frank and I discussed during the "who are these SV guys?" period. I
thought it was an interesting but fatuous notion, exactly the sort of
thing that someone would claim after the fact, "here's why we did this."
In other words, a Hiver manipulation claim.
While you are correct that strong emotions are beyond their understanding,
just because they don't understand something doesn't mean they won't try
to use a thing they don't fully understand and thereby screw it up. And
since any manipulation is literally an experiment anyway, they're still
learning, or claiming to be learning.
And I don't see the failure of the 12 DL missions to be playing off of DL
emotions (anger). It is playing off of simple pragmatic cause-and-effect.
"We have announced our presence here in 12 different directions. None have
returned. That means its worse out there than we thought, and no however
killed the 12 knows we're here, and is probably coming for us. We have to
get them, in bigger, better-armed numbers, before they get us, and keep
going. Because we keep announcing our presence bigger and bigger, which
will invite more response, so we have to keep pushing our frontier farther
and farther out, without pause to allow an opportunity for someone to hit
us while we are resting." If it's based on an emotion, it's fear, but
mostly it is pragmatic.
Is "Cosmic Fire" the mission that made the players go, "ewww?" We did not
commission an adventure to say, "make the RC look less-than-perfect," but
when it came in, it fit with the notion that warfare is awful and
imprecise, that the RC is going to have to get its hands dirty, and that's
part of why there are people in the future saying, "Star Viking." And it
was better than doing the Star Trek thing where, "the Federation never
does anything mean." Either that or Frank wrote it with that idea
deliberately in mind.
I think as I went on in the reply I was not distinguishing between "Hiver
manipulation" vs. "overall effect of RC as 'Star Vikings'" as in this
discussion the two were closely related.
So, was DL/RC a Hiver manipulation? Absolutely. They wouldn't have put all
the backing behind it that they did were it not. Is what I described above
actually what was going on? It's as good a "I must guess now" as anything,
and follows the necessary Chekhov rule: "if Hivers are involved you can't
say they aren't up to something or their help doesn't come with attempted
weird influences." Does my reply reflect what we would have published?
Almost absolutely not, because my intent was that for as long as GDW
existed we would never make an official statement on something like that,
because that kind of ambiguity and mystery is best left in the player's
minds, we must merely water and feed it every once in a while, and let
them draw their own conclusions.
> Epic reply Dave. I need to study this at length done, I'd not put in my
> compilation of your "best of" aka "DSB."
>
> I always took the point of H&I to claim the Hivers were more exaggerating,
> if not outright falsely claiming manipulations which they really had no
> control over, though I had decided MTU had it a bit more in the middle
> between their claims versus the reality. Strong emotions, especially the
> anger/rage/hate, but also pure altruism/love/sacrifice on the other end
> were clearly beyond their understanding and we're thus unable to
> influence,
> though many would perform manipulations to simply study them. I did have
> an
> idea for a colony of Hivers that were evangelized and formed human style
> nuclear-esque families near Turin.
>
> Definitely does some ambiguous situations where the Coalition would really
> benefit from some crucial piece of industrial infrastructure but would
> cripple the host world. Assembly votes to take it. Hammer assembles the
> mission... And the PCs are forced to either justify it or defy it. That's
> even more towards real ambiguity than Cosmic Fire...
>
> I did have a Federation battlegroup in the Stepping Stones as well as
> another to Rimwardthe would occasionally probe towards Cymbeline as well
> as
> studying various Vampire patterns and attempting to pull manipulations on
> Viruses (which included their own experiments on various strains similar
> to
> what was harrowing in the Regency). I don't think they'd stick their
> appendages out enough to shadow any of the 12 directly, though and
> certainly not any of the Coalition groups, though I do fond the idea
> intriguing enough to retcon.
>
> I think TL model works for what is most prevalent to the general public in
> the primary starport/economic center, but below "cutting edge" for what a
> government/megacorp, etc is capable of producing in limited quanitity at
> enormous expense which could be 1-2 higher in specific fieldsand sometimes
> with trade offs (bugs, etc). Similarly, rural areas works be lower
> (possibly much lower). I don't find that a problen wuth the TL system as
> much as reading to much into it.
>
> - Sent from my SM-N900T
> On Mar 23, 2014 12:59 PM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Eamon--
>>
>> (Either I lied/misspoke/changed my mind. You be the judge of my
>> character.)
>>
>> I'm going to get back to your Sufren question later (and finish my
>> longer
>> answer to Bardbear). Please remind me about Sufren if I don't get to it
>> in, say, a week.
>>
>> The answer to your question is a combination of the three bullets plus
>> the
>> Free Trader thing.
>>
>> Hiver manipulation, yes. But Hiver manipulation plays on tendencies also
>> present, like over-enthusiasm, as a basis. And also plays on data
>> available to the actors they are manipulating, your third bullet
>> (asterisk). That data will include data received from the FTs, your
>> fourth
>> (unbulleted) point.
>>
>> "Hiver manipulation," some points. If you take seriously the notion that
>> their highest aspiration is manipulating others, then they are all
>> constantly doing it to each other, which means that there are a lot of
>> cross-cutting manipulations going on, undermining/diluting each other so
>> that "big manipulations" tend to melt into an imprecise sludge. Better
>> manipulators are aware of this, and plan to allow for sludge. Think of
>> Asimov's psycho-history in the Foundation Trilogy, which also allows for
>> these. Also remember that all Hivers are "orphans," so are missing all
>> of
>> those developmental inputs for duty, hierarchy, structure to parents
>> that
>> humans start with. They spend all those years in the wilderness relying
>> only on themselves, periodically being exterminated by adult Hivers, so
>> what they learn is, "I can only depend on myself, everyone else is out
>> to
>> get me." All Hivers are essentially independent actor egoists (egoist in
>> the philosophical sense, not egotist, there is a difference), beholden
>> to
>> none, and that motivation "good of the hive/race" is such a porous
>> statement that it can be used to justify any action. Hivers are scary,
>> and
>> being a Hiver is scary.
>>
>> (Note, I am currently reading "The Hidden-Hand Presidency" about
>> Eisenhower. This book was published in 1982 and popularized the term,
>> "hidden hand." Compare this to other Traveller developments since then.
>> However, note that, aside from the applicability of the term, the way
>> Ike
>> practiced this is NOT the Hiver model per se. Ike practiced a human
>> version of this, where he cultivated an external "act" to aid the
>> accomplishment of his internal goals. That's obviously not unrelated to
>> things a Hiver might do, but not as sophisticated, because to his inner
>> circle, via his memos, etc., his goals were clear. A Hiver would have to
>> conceal even these until he was ready to go, "Ta-daaaa!")
>>
>> Since everyone knows that Hivers are manipulators, they need to have a
>> public (politically correct) rationale for their policies. With the RC
>> it's: "Stable polities on our border make for improved security,
>> elimination of chaos and vectors for attack, and allow profitable
>> trade."
>> Beneath that is the notion that the DL was not really ready to expand,
>> and
>> the Hivers are jump-starting that for two reasons: 1) the sooner we
>> begin
>> the re-expansion, the sooner we will have stability (public rationale),
>> and 2) the mechanism of the RC expansion was to "inoculate" humans
>> against
>> violence, i.e., doing the typical "we made the Ithklur less violent"
>> Hiver
>> thing (and we know that didn't really work) and to make them more
>> manageable by the Hivers.
>>
>> The idea is that RC and Regency expansion are fundamentally different.
>> The
>> Regency kept a "safe," reasonably robust economy so when they expand it
>> will be more deliberate, coming in and helping the locals, knitting them
>> into the Regency economy, etc. The Regency expansion is "growing the
>> pie,"
>> not fighting over slices of the pie. The RC doesn't really have an
>> economy. Their expansion is "the future is right now, right now, right
>> now," and depends on grabbing high-value assets which it repurposes to
>> their own use, i.e., fueling continued expansion. Their growth is more
>> zero-sum, fighting over pie slices, but incapable of growing the pie
>> organically right away. The way they grow the pie is by expanding the
>> radius that defines that pie and grabbing more of it. The Regency is
>> concerned with "hearts and minds," while the RC is, "we're doing this
>> for
>> your own good, we know you can't see it now, but someday you'll thank
>> us."
>>
>> Another way of thinking of this is something that is much more
>> politically freighted in 2014 than it was in 1991-1995, but the point
>> remains. The Regency is growing its economy much more slowly, BECAUSE IT
>> CAN AFFORD TO, while the RC is engaged in wholesale deficit spending,
>> balancing that deficit as best it can by grabbing more stuff to keep the
>> fires stoked, but in an ultimately unsustainable model. Now, re:
>> 1991-1995
>> vs. 2014, YOU SHOULD NEVER TAKE THIS as "one of them is
>> Republican/Democrat or Red/Blue, that was never the intent. Both are
>> responding to conditions around them: Regency has the luxury of its
>> approach, RC does not have that luxury, because the Hivers pushed them
>> into expanding prematurely, and once they got committed to that, they
>> were
>> riding the tiger and there was no getting off. Once you attract
>> attention
>> to yourself, you invite attack, so you have to push out and defend
>> forward
>> (best defense = good offense). However, I know that now that I've said
>> this, the Red/Blue meme is going to take on a life of its own because no
>> one is going to be able to resist it. (This is also a good way to spot
>> lurkers on this list, and where they're funneling their digests.)
>>
>> But anyway, Regency comes to your planet, topples your TED, and
>> immediately starts investing, buying up whatever crap you make, and
>> pulling you into the economy. On the other hand, RC comes in, topples
>> your
>> TED, kills a bunch of people in inevitable collateral damage, steals all
>> the cool stuff, and might not come back, except to steal other cool
>> stuff,
>> which may harm the locals who had depended upon it. Does the RC try to
>> help uplift the locals? Yes, but given their resources they can't do as
>> much of it as the Regency, it is much more shoestring, and oh, by the
>> way,
>> requires them to go steal more new stuff from somebody else to support
>> the
>> uplift project. Is what the RC is doing "for the greater good?"
>> Arguably,
>> yes. Is what the RC doing going to seem high-handed, violent, unfair,
>> and
>> capricious to the locals that the RC "preys on" to fuel the "greater
>> good"
>> economy? Yes, hence "Star Vikings." While the Guild may be the ones
>> running around teaching the vocabulary words, "Star Viking, Longships,"
>> the intent behind that capability is embedded in the Hiver manipulation,
>> with the goal that, "look at how much we had to suffer to recover to
>> where
>> we are now, let alone the war that put us there to begin with, this has
>> taught us that We Must Never Fight Again(TM)." The idea is that it might
>> be nice to be an omelette, but if you were one of the eggs that went
>> into
>> the omelette, you would not remember the chef fondly.
>>
>> There are other little clues to this throughout. There's an adventure in
>> S&G or PoT that players rightly regarded as chilling, where the RC took
>> some important thing that the locals needed. Also in S&G I put in a
>> quote
>> from Ritter, "I didn't say Smash and Grab, I said stash what you've got
>> and grab some more. I'll never hear the end of this." And Ritter is
>> right,
>> the title of the book is Smash and Grab, and that's another example of
>> how
>> the Hiver manipulation turned "reformation" into "Star Vikings." (As we
>> know, the actual Reformation turned into the 30-Years war, another
>> example.)
>>
>> Now, back to manipulation, we said above, "over-enthusiasm," which then
>> became, "oh crap, now we've called attention to ourselves." That
>> over-enthusiasm was caused by their astrographic isolation, and intel
>> they
>> were getting from the Free Traders? Yes. BUT, were there Hiver
>> battlefleets out there protecting the DL, allowing them to get to where
>> they thought space was kind of safe? Were some of the Free Trader
>> reports
>> coming in as Hiver intelligence digests: "We've talked to a bunch of FTs
>> the past year, and in summary they say XYZ."
>>
>> And a step further. Some of the DL ships that disappeared without a
>> trace,
>> is it because they were snapped up by a Hiver shadowing force to ensure
>> they didn't return? Where are those ships/crews now? Back to trailing in
>> some Federation Navy holding cell? Atomized to eliminate evidence? Do
>> the
>> Ithklur of "Hands Across the Truth" know about this and want to tell
>> someone? We clearly published somewhere that, "we are not going to
>> officially say what happened to all of these ships." I also know in
>> reality that whenever a publisher or TV show or movie says this, they
>> always eventually do in response to public clamor. So, while I knew that
>> it would eventually happen, either act of commission on GDW's part, or
>> act
>> of omission by failing to see that someone else published it (e.g.,
>> licensee), the intent was to NOT do that for as long as possible.
>>
>> The plan was NEVER to publish or officially establish any of that,
>> because
>> part of the mystery of Hivers and manipulations is that you allow them
>> to
>> remain the subject of speculation. I was going to expose "the
>> underbelly"
>> of Hiver politics through another means, in the epic adventure that
>> never
>> happened, which showed an earlier "Terminal Manipulation" which would
>> allow players to think, "whoa," and look over their shoulders more. But
>> just as introducing Yaskoydray made the Ancients boring, showing all the
>> Hiver puppet strings makes them less interesting then if you just wonder
>> about them.
>>
>> And here's the other thing to pull from that. The Hivers were backing
>> the
>> RC, not the Regency, and when the two met the Hivers would have some
>> opinions about that. Also, there was an established early strain of
>> psionic Hivers which would fit with advocates of the RC POV not being
>> present to argue historiography.
>>
>> Back to the FTs, as I said in an earlier post, we were clearly falling
>> behind in fleshing them out as well as we had initially intended, and
>> probably would not have caught back up.
>>
>> Re: DL tech, not sure what you mean by Tech/Starport backwater. If you
>> mean did their 1201 tech come from direct Hiver improvements? Yes, the
>> Hivers brought them up through various means. Here we run afoul of the
>> "Traveller TL model," which is at best murky and ambiguous, as it
>> clearly
>> does NOT mean that you can produce all you need there. There are all
>> kinds
>> of lo-pop worlds with high tech, and they obviously don't build all that
>> stuff there, but rely on trade. Economics is hard in this one real
>> world,
>> so expecting a game to have a perfect economic model for 20,000 worlds
>> 4000 years from now is silly. But the idea is that the Hivers could
>> provide key technologies, such as power plants, industrial tooling,
>> etc.,
>> which would have pulled DL up higher than they otherwise were.
>>
>> I think that covers it all, provides some food for thought, and perhaps
>> more questions.
>>
>> Dave
>>
>> > ...this is my only chance to post for a week.
>> >
>> > One thing we got to talking about on the TNE Sub-forum at CotI, was
>> the
>> reasons why the DL sent such woefully-unprepared missions out into the
>> wilds.
>> >
>> > If I remember correctly some ideas were:
>> >
>> > * Hiver Manipulation (Didn't rate this myself).
>> >
>> > * Over-enthusiasm.
>> >
>> > * Being astrographically isolated, and so having no ability to compare
>> home vs. wilds.
>> >
>> > Free Traders were a puzzle, in that you would think they'd provide
>> some
>> kind of heads-up to the DL - but if they're all local, then maybe not.
>> >
>> > Brings to mind a question about how rapid was the DL's advance in
>> technology - perhaps they were also a tech/starport backwater before
>> Hiver
>> > contact?
>> >
>> > Eamon, who is not posting any more tonight - honest!
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>