Schadenfreuda
2019-04-04, 10:21 PM
One of my favourite places to get new ideas for what's possible in a world of few or no limits is Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which describes the effect of nanoengineering on society and culture. The Diamond Age Earth is a world of tribes, where every city has enclaves of many cultures and nations as small sovereign units, the result of technology that makes manufacturing, industry and much in the way of co-dependence between societies largely irrelevant.
In the Tippyverse, meanwhile, teleportation and other magics are taken to their logical extremes, creating a world where most of humanity (and other demi-human mortals) lives in megacities bound together by teleportation circles that facilitate safe, instant trade, and ruled by immortal demigod-like mage-kings.
The Tippyverse describes a world divided into sovereign city-states, but given the difficulty in creating anti-teleportation wards on the scale of megacities (RAW at least), I think a more fractured world might make more sense. In a world where instant communications in the form of both radio and telepathy, where teleportation makes distance irrelevant and magic makes manufacturing easy, it might make more sense that humanity (mortality?) was divided not merely into cities but into small tribes concentrated behind more easily defended enclaves within those cities. Tribes would emerge along the same lines they would in the real world, along those of race, religion, language, and so forth. Tribes would still likely be ruled by castes of immortal demigod-like archpriests and archmages, sort of like the Draenei prophet Velen from Warcraft.
This system of organisation also allows for smaller enclaves, since a small enclave or base out in the wilderness is easier to ward with than a megacity, and the many individually-defended wards of a city would give it the defence in depth that a Tippyverse megacity lacks. An army can 'port in to a city, but all that means is that they're in one enclave among many in a giant city and have no good access to any other enclave, each of which has its own army that can teleport to defend whatever enclave is threatened anywhere in the world. Every enclave would also like a real-life embassy or consulate also serve as a base for spies to look in on those of other tribes.
This settlement pattern would create the need for some kind of international law. In the Diamond Age, this took the form of the Common Economic Protocol, the CEP, which works to ensure that the wealth of the various nations is respected, and involves itself primarily in inter-tribal property disputes. I do not know if Emperor Tippy himself has created some kind of organisation to foster inter-city cooperation, especially for aid against the barbarians at the gate and the monsters of the wild, but such would be an excellent flavour addition to Tippyverses, especially those where technology is as advanced as it is in our world and mass communication and an information economy are present.
In the Tippyverse, meanwhile, teleportation and other magics are taken to their logical extremes, creating a world where most of humanity (and other demi-human mortals) lives in megacities bound together by teleportation circles that facilitate safe, instant trade, and ruled by immortal demigod-like mage-kings.
The Tippyverse describes a world divided into sovereign city-states, but given the difficulty in creating anti-teleportation wards on the scale of megacities (RAW at least), I think a more fractured world might make more sense. In a world where instant communications in the form of both radio and telepathy, where teleportation makes distance irrelevant and magic makes manufacturing easy, it might make more sense that humanity (mortality?) was divided not merely into cities but into small tribes concentrated behind more easily defended enclaves within those cities. Tribes would emerge along the same lines they would in the real world, along those of race, religion, language, and so forth. Tribes would still likely be ruled by castes of immortal demigod-like archpriests and archmages, sort of like the Draenei prophet Velen from Warcraft.
This system of organisation also allows for smaller enclaves, since a small enclave or base out in the wilderness is easier to ward with than a megacity, and the many individually-defended wards of a city would give it the defence in depth that a Tippyverse megacity lacks. An army can 'port in to a city, but all that means is that they're in one enclave among many in a giant city and have no good access to any other enclave, each of which has its own army that can teleport to defend whatever enclave is threatened anywhere in the world. Every enclave would also like a real-life embassy or consulate also serve as a base for spies to look in on those of other tribes.
This settlement pattern would create the need for some kind of international law. In the Diamond Age, this took the form of the Common Economic Protocol, the CEP, which works to ensure that the wealth of the various nations is respected, and involves itself primarily in inter-tribal property disputes. I do not know if Emperor Tippy himself has created some kind of organisation to foster inter-city cooperation, especially for aid against the barbarians at the gate and the monsters of the wild, but such would be an excellent flavour addition to Tippyverses, especially those where technology is as advanced as it is in our world and mass communication and an information economy are present.