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Post by allie on Jun 18, 2023 1:00:41 GMT
Since it's become a thing we're talking about, I have some thoughts on Alderberg in general and how to play with it. But first I'd like to bellyache about lore à la Böse Strand being böse. One of the tiny little details of Alderberg is that the Monastery of St. John the Baptist is officially a Dominican institution. That doesn't really work because Dominicans don't have monasteries; they'd call it a priory instead, and if St. John the Baptist was a priory it'd lead to a lot of administrative headaches. (Off the top of my head: women belonging to two coequal and largely autonomous institutions with separate hierarchies.) If it hasn't gone to print yet, could I suggest St. John the Baptist be adjusted to a Benedictine double monastery (à la Kiersau from Pentiment) instead? It'd change next to nothing and fix a lot. (A side effect of this would be "Abbess Helen Dolores Rich, a nun of the Second Order of St. Dominic" gets changed to "Abbess Helen Dolores Rich." Dominican nuns don't use the title Abbess, Benedictines don't have a Second Order, and in context she'd be at least second-in-command at the monastery - someone who would be in charge of administration.)
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Post by Pawel on Jun 18, 2023 6:05:13 GMT
Since it's become a thing we're talking about, I have some thoughts on Alderberg in general and how to play with it. But first I'd like to bellyache about lore à la Böse Strand being böse. One of the tiny little details of Alderberg is that the Monastery of St. John the Baptist is officially a Dominican institution. That doesn't really work because Dominicans don't have monasteries; they'd call it a priory instead, and if St. John the Baptist was a priory it'd lead to a lot of administrative headaches. (Off the top of my head: women belonging to two coequal and largely autonomous institutions with separate hierarchies.) If it hasn't gone to print yet, could I suggest St. John the Baptist be adjusted to a Benedictine double monastery (à la Kiersau from Pentiment) instead? It'd change next to nothing and fix a lot. (A side effect of this would be "Abbess Helen Dolores Rich, a nun of the Second Order of St. Dominic" gets changed to "Abbess Helen Dolores Rich." Dominican nuns don't use the title Abbess, Benedictines don't have a Second Order, and in context she'd be at least second-in-command at the monastery - someone who would be in charge of administration.) Goodness me, the density of specialist knowledge here scares me. I will pass the note over to Biohazard Games! Many thanks, Allie!
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Post by michaelsd on Jun 18, 2023 12:28:41 GMT
I agree with Allie about the changes.
Altough, the Benedictines do not use the expression Second Order, but only because it did not exist at their creation, and thereby they are not a Mendican order. It is a rather technicallity though, therefore I would not get into such a detail in the book.
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Post by allie on Jun 24, 2023 15:32:50 GMT
Because I'm a nerd, I spent a bit of time with neil 's AD-to-Colonial calendar converter (absolutely incredible) to crunch out Alderberg's church year. Wanna know what day to buy Christmas gifts in Haven? Here you go. My basic assumptions are as follows: - Fixed feasts, where it falls on the same day every year, are synched to Earth.
- For liturgical purposes a day's a day regardless of length. (Ash Wednesday is 46 days prior to Easter, not 1,104 hours.) This means that movable feasts (defined in days relative to Easter) often don't sync up with Earth; by Earth standards Ash Wednesday comes almost two weeks early. I've noted the discrepancies where they exist.
- Poseidon doesn't have weekdays, so Sundays might be calculated as movable feasts relative to Easter. Or they might not. The math is messy and I'm going to assume that no Blue Planet campaign will care.
- A few observations, listed in italics, are celebrated primarily by the Monastery of St. John the Baptist if they're Benedictines. Other orders (Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, etc.) have different feasts instead, which I'm not calculating here. If you want to know, ask me and I'll figure it out.
Based on these assumptions, 99 SP's major feasts look something like this. 001.99 Planetfall is not a church holiday 004.99 Epiphany 032.99 St. Scholastica036.99 Ash Wednesday (Earth's is 045.99) 061.99 St. Joseph 066.99 Annunciation 075.99 Palm Sunday 079.99 Maundy Thursday 080.99 Good Friday 081.99 Holy Saturday, eve of Easter 082.99 Easter Sunday 122.99 Ascension (Earth's is 113.99) 132.99 Pentecost (Earth's is 121.99) 139.99 Trinity Sunday 140.99 St. John the Baptist 143.99 St. Peter & St. Paul; Corpus Christi (Earth's is 130.99) 153.99 St. Benedict161.99 St. Mary Magdalene 181.99 Assumption of Mary 192.99 Beheading of St. John the Baptist 217.99 Michaelmas 242.99 eve of All Saints 243.99 All Saints 244.99 All Souls 253.99 All Saints of the Benedictine Order273.99 Immaculate Conception of Mary 286.99 Christmas 292.99 St. Mary, Mother of God (1 January 2200) 296.99 Epiphany 322.99 Ash Wednesday (Earth's is 331.99) 324.99 St. Scholastica
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Post by Pawel on Jun 24, 2023 15:41:21 GMT
Because I'm a nerd, I spent a bit of time with neil 's AD-to-Colonial calendar converter (absolutely incredible) to crunch out Alderberg's church year. Wanna know what day to buy Christmas gifts in Haven? Here you go. My basic assumptions are as follows: - Fixed feasts, where it falls on the same day every year, are synched to Earth.
- For liturgical purposes a day's a day regardless of length. (Ash Wednesday is 46 days prior to Easter, not 1,104 hours.) This means that movable feasts (defined in days relative to Easter) often don't sync up with Earth; by Earth standards Ash Wednesday comes almost two weeks early. I've noted the discrepancies where they exist.
- Poseidon doesn't have weekdays, so Sundays might be calculated as movable feasts relative to Easter. Or they might not. The math is messy and I'm going to assume that no Blue Planet campaign will care.
- A few observations, listed in italics, are celebrated primarily by the Monastery of St. John the Baptist if they're Benedictines. Other orders (Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, etc.) have different feasts instead, which I'm not calculating here. If you want to know, ask me and I'll figure it out.
Based on these assumptions, 99 SP's major feasts look something like this. 001.99 Planetfall is not a church holiday 004.99 Epiphany 032.99 St. Scholastica036.99 Ash Wednesday (Earth's is 045.99) 061.99 St. Joseph 079.99 Maundy Thursday 080.99 Good Friday 081.99 Holy Saturday, eve of Easter 082.99 Easter Sunday 122.99 Ascension (Earth's is 113.99) 132.99 Pentecost (Earth's is 121.99) 139.99 Trinity Sunday 140.99 St. John the Baptist 142.99 Corpus Christi (Earth's is 130.99) 143.99 St. Peter & St. Paul 153.99 St. Benedict161.99 St. Mary Magdalene 181.99 Assumption of Mary 217.99 Michaelmas 242.99 eve of All Saints 243.99 All Saints 244.99 All Souls 253.99 All Saints of the Benedictine Order273.99 Immaculate Conception of Mary 286.99 Christmas 292.99 St. Mary, Mother of God (1 January 2200) 296.99 Epiphany 322.99 Ash Wednesday (Earth's is 331.99) 324.99 St. ScholasticaOh wow, you weren't joking about spending "a bit" of time on this! I'm sure all GMs and players that will venture here, who find themselves needing to flesh out Alderberg's holy calendar, will find this useful. Well done, Allie!
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Post by allie on Jun 24, 2023 16:00:27 GMT
...and of course in the time it took you to quote me in full I realized I missed a feast. 🥴
A lot of those holidays are specific to Alderberg, but by no means all. Christmas only began as a Christian holiday; by the early 21st century it had become a capitalist one too, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Incorporate are trying to introduce it as such on Poseidon.
And also, some of the ideas I was talking about in the first post involve Alderberg being less introverted than they're made out to be...
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Post by allie on Jun 24, 2023 19:00:19 GMT
...which I guess brings me to what I was gonna talk about when I started this thread. As written, Alderberg is self-contained and doesn't have much interaction with the rest of the game, but it doesn't need to be that way, and I've got some thoughts on how it can be integrated while staying faithful to the spirit of canon: Radio Stella Maris. Give Alderberg a high-frequency broadcast tower. (Also streaming live on CommCore, but HF radio will stay broadcasting even if CommCore collapses.) The programming is usually niche and incredibly dry - theology, lectionary readings, reminders about upcoming holy days of obligation, carefully-reviewed talk about life on Alderberg, the usual cyclonic storm alerts, some Gregorian chant for variety - until someone who can't get satellite coverage calls in on backup radio and the station becomes the first responder to an emergency that could be anywhere on the planet. Not even they know their audience size, but if you flip through the comm channels in your jumpcraft you'll always end up flipping past it. HIST distance learning. Lore has never really explored that Alderberg's one of the most educated places on Poseidon; most of its residents have advanced degrees, often on top of seminary education. They've been around academia, they have provable credentials, and the abbey has bills to pay. So what can they do? Offer their services through HIST. Not all of them, of course; they've got praying to do, and physical work, and also lots of weird research that's not part of normal monastic life. But some of them (worth noting: this job is where monks and women are most visible), a few times a week. If your average unchurched Poseidoner is aware of Alderberg as all, it's because they took a class with someone with a name like Sister Scholastica Mary Obasanjo. And their general vibe is that Catholics are really, really smart. Friars. Alderberg's had mendicants associated with it since '97 (as of writing it's still run by them!), but mendicants aren't sworn to geographic stability. Their job is to go where they're sent, and Poseidon's got the best of the best. The Medical Missionary is far from the only idea of what these guys look like, just the most TTRPG-oriented one. Since Blue Planet now has campaign archetypes, the obvious spots I can see friars showing up would be everyday-level games; they're generally friendly in Newcomer, deeply ambivalent at best in Azure, and not necessarily hostile but a complicating third party in an insurgent, criminal, or maybe Incorporate story. Two things bear mentioning. First, Poseidon doesn't have much Catholic infrastructure in place; friars are doing a lot of begging (they're supposed to), and their priors are constantly having very polite gentle turf wars so they don't step on each other's toes. The second thing is that they do have priors - and are regularly reporting back to Alderberg. Chaplaincies. Poseidon doesn't have a lot of Catholic churches yet, but it does have lots of organizations whose associates need supporting through grief, trauma, and sometimes death. Military bases, GEO Patrol precincts, and ERT stations are obvious places that might want a chaplain, but far from the only ones. (One very important one, off the top of my head: Prosperity Station's hospital wards.) In campaign archetype terms, an Alderberger NPC can fit into an Operation Polypod or Shenley ERT campaign with no trouble, and maybe Chrome or Nightshift with a bit of creativity - but those are far from the only places that'd have chaplains. Chaplains also work as backup/guest PCs; they usually stay on base but can get sent along if needed, and they're educated enough to keep up. It goes without saying that their work's not purely selfless. If you call a hospital chaplain in Prosperity Station, they'll probably point you to a planetside congregation; then they'll alert the congregation so it can reach out to you as soon as you're off the Jumbo. Also, much like friars (and there's a lot of overlap), chaplains are Alderberg's eyes and ears; the quiet little abbey on Salvador Island knows a lot about what's going on in Poseidon, sometimes before it's public knowledge.
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Post by Pawel on Jun 24, 2023 19:23:43 GMT
One of Blue Planet's many strengths has always been its sandboxy (waterboxy!) aspect, allowing for just about any colony to sprout out in the middle of nowhere and develop into something unique. That of course is most evident in the Belt, indeed both asteroid belts, but to an extent on Poseidon too. So yeah, grabbing one of the planet's less prominent settlements (or creating one's own!) and focusing on it is an awesome way to play this game! Canonically I can't imagine Catholicism being much of a thing on Poseidon anywhere outside Alderberg, but hey, a campaign for futuristic missionaries spreading the capital W Word on an alien planet where the dominant religion involves ultrasound singing would definitely be fun. You're building a very detailed campaign archetype here, Allie!
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Post by allie on Jun 24, 2023 19:37:28 GMT
Canonically I can't imagine Catholicism being much of a thing on Poseidon anywhere outside Alderberg, but hey, a campaign for futuristic missionaries spreading the capital W Word on an alien planet where the dominant religion involves ultrasound singing would definitely be fun. You're building a very detailed campaign archetype here, Allie! I wasn't even thinking about a missionary campaign! Just like how these guys fit into the world around them. Westerns have preacher men and Mafia movies have confessional scenes, you know? And parties need healing, sometimes months of it. Catholicism definitely isn't a major thing outside of Alderberg... yet. But the Monastery of St. John the Baptist is named in his honor for a reason: they're forerunners who go before the Lord to prepare his way. (No idea if Jeff Barber thought of that when he named it, but it works really well.) Even more than the lore lets on, the Church knows its future is on Poseidon, and they're not gonna let it get away.
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Post by neil on Jul 2, 2023 8:23:23 GMT
A couple of random observations.
Modern WEIRD people are pretty non-religious, and that culture seems to be spreading across much of the urban populations of the world. But during the Blight, I could imagine that a lot of people would turn to religion as a source of comfort, strength, and community. It could be that missionaries on Poseidon would have an easier job than they would in, say, modern London or New York.
Regarding dates, I'd _really_ like someone to check my working on that. But also, Jeff mentioned that he's not nailed down dates of solstices on Poseidon; it's not fixed when Haven's midsummer day is. Just putting that in as an observation, as it makes Christmas even more adrift from the midwinter feast of old.
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Post by Pawel on Jul 2, 2023 8:31:25 GMT
A couple of random observations. Modern WEIRD people are pretty non-religious, and that culture seems to be spreading across much of the urban populations of the world. But during the Blight, I could imagine that a lot of people would turn to religion as a source of comfort, strength, and community. It could be that missionaries on Poseidon would have an easier job than they would in, say, modern London or New York. Regarding dates, I'd _really_ like someone to check my working on that. But also, Jeff mentioned that he's not nailed down dates of solstices on Poseidon; it's not fixed when Haven's midsummer day is. Just putting that in as an observation, as it makes Christmas even more adrift from the midwinter feast of old. At some point in the future we'll reach the stage of the Kickstarter's development where those player aid apps will be looked at. But until then, and for the past countless year, your converter is and has been the only - and hugely appreciated - calendar authority, neil ! You rule, sir! ...and I do very much hope, when it comes to this, that you'll be involved in the making of the new app!
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Post by lupmet on Jul 2, 2023 15:13:25 GMT
I think we should define a new term, as sandbox doesn't work on Poseidon; fishtank is already taken, so how about "puddle" or "lagoon"? The latter is very Posiedon and also allures the mind to the very concept of a fishtank – there a big fishes and small fishes and it is all about how they all interact. (As someone once mentioned: there is always a sandbox at the bottom of a good fishtank.)
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Post by Pawel on Jul 2, 2023 15:15:52 GMT
I think we should define a new term, as sandbox doesn't work on Poseidon; fishtank is already taken, so how about "puddle" or "lagoon"? The latter is very Posiedon and also allures the mind to the very concept of a fishtank – there a big fishes and small fishes and it is all about how they all interact. (As someone once mentioned: there is always a sandbox at the bottom of a good fishtank.) Haha, I think Blue Planet offers a slightly bigger playground, than a mere puddle, so lagoon is probably a better choice!
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Post by allie on Jul 2, 2023 17:22:44 GMT
Modern WEIRD people are pretty non-religious, and that culture seems to be spreading across much of the urban populations of the world... Now that you mention it, the Blight was intensely deurbanizing! I haven't thought about that before. Something I've been thinking of, as a university town resident: newcomers are variously described as pioneers, settlers, colonists, and Despoilers, but they're also immigrants, with a lot of the dynamics of immigrant communities in play. Immigration is often lonely; if you're not Incorporate or GEO personnel it's possible to touch down planetside knowing like a dozen people tops, especially if you've got an identity more specific than "generic English-speaking GEO." A lot of immigrant churches in America are built on the fact that as long as they proactively reach out and have enough people, more will show up regardless of whether they actually believe or not; the dynamic's a bit different on Poseidon because the newcomers don't have a mainstream to assimilate to and haven't formed a coherent identity yet, but the strategy is sound.
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Post by allie on Jul 2, 2023 17:31:55 GMT
Speaking of which, I'd be shocked if Haven DOESN'T have at least one cult specifically preying on newcomers before they can develop any outside connections; but that's one for Undercurrents.
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