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Post by neil on Jun 3, 2021 8:28:36 GMT
I'm reading _Roaring Camp_ (*) by Susan Lee Johnson at the moment, a pop-history book about the social side of the California gold rush of 1848. It's an even that could be a model for the Long John rush on Poseidon. A couple of bits of gaming fodder have come out of it. One is the range of people who were around southern California at the time. They included: - 1. Anglo-Americans from the northern US, the ones typically thought of as being the "49ers"
- Miwok natives, who were there for centuries and were happy to carry on living there. Some engaged in the market economy surrounding the gold workers, but many did not. They seemed to mostly live peacefully alongside but separate from the prospectors
- Sonoran Mexicans who herded cattle and horses across the area while California was still Mexican, and carried on doing that. As California became more populous and richer, some moved to stealing cattle and other banditry
- Anglo-Americans from the southern US, who came along with their Black slaves to look for gold
- Chilean patrons and peons, another type of group with an inherent difference in internal status
- Chinese immigrants, many of which had served on several ships and crossed many oceans before arriving in California
How to convert that to Blue Planet? It helps us see the range of people on Poseidon, and the range of people prospecting for Long John. You could have - individual prospectors booking passage from Earth to seek their fortune, perhaps sending money back home to support their family
- Natives, living off the land and not interacting much with the prospectors
- Colonists from after Recontact but before Long John, maintaining their homesteads, farms, or herds, butting up against the prospectors
- Incorporate citizens and groups of indentured workers
- Commercial or feudal groups from Earth, with some members being in charge and others not. It could be groups with a capitalist providing the funds to operate the group, or people with bonds based on duty and service
- Not sure there's an exact analogue here, but perhaps spacers, or a general stand-in for the breadth of cultures of Earth. On Wormhole scales, everywhere on Earth is the same distance from Poseidon. It's not just north Americans and western Europeans.
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Post by neil on Jun 3, 2021 8:29:42 GMT
One aspect covered in the book was the few women to travelled to California. Most of them were Mexicans, travelling with their families. The women often made a lot of money by selling food, doing laundry, and other domestic services for the men; some women earnt three or four times as much as middling prospectors. It seems there was little sex work! (*) tells of one group of prostitutes from Paris who arrived in California and quickly moved into providing domestic services as it paid better.
I don't think there's anything to be gained my making the background cultures of the World of Hurt as sexist as 19C Anglo-Americans. But it does point to the need for prospector communities, where people get all their services done. Some of the descriptions in the book of prospector towns being really vibrant places.
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Post by neil on Jun 3, 2021 8:30:36 GMT
The final element for the moment is about mining itself. Johnson makes the point that gold (and other) areas are first exploited by panners and the like. That can be done by individuals with very little money. As the easy gold is all taken, attention shifts to mining, with tunnels that follow the veins. Mining takes more people and equipment, and capital and corporations take over. That was apparently the pattern in northern California, but less so in southern California.
How would that pattern apply on Poseidon? From what we know of xenosilicate creation, there won't be seams of it to be extracted by large mines. That means the emphasis will remain on the small-scale prospetors, with capital looking for other ways to get involved. The small individual Long John finds will mean the prospectors will be moving from place to place, looking for the next node to exploit.
There's a couple of places capital can come in. One is xenosilicate processing. There's the Biogene facility at Cliffside; I'm sure there are others being built. The other is in the discovery of Long John.
Gold panners didn't need vast amounts of geological knowledge to find gold: it was concentrated in hard-to-identify features called "rivers". Long John is a different story. I don't think there are good geological markers for where Long John could be, making discovery a matter of luck.
You increase your chances of winning the lottery by buying more tickets. You increase your chances of a Long John find by looking in more places. I can see large swarms of autonomous drones, scouting the oceans, sniffing out sources of Long John. Prospectors would then pay for access to the data gathered and the chance to exploit the potential nodes found.
Suddenly, you have treasure maps again and all the adventures that revolve around them!
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Post by Pawel on Jun 3, 2021 9:35:00 GMT
Awesome work on listing all those analogies, Neil! Blue Planet is quite strongly fuelled by various Firefly-like western tropes, so your bullet points are a solid framework for prospector demographics.  Ha, and you've found a great example of the demand/supply dynamics of the service sector. This is such an important aspect of sci-fi worldbuilding, and one easy to overlook. I keep thinking that regardless of how well colonisation projects are drafted and planned and financed, once settlers reach Poseidon, things can often get messy and well mixed up. Independent newcomer boomtowns must be very organic creatures, some of them refreshingly equitable, some probably very capitalistic. Wow, this is an excellent book for a prospective Longjohn miner player (and GM running such campaigns!) so thank you very much for sharing all the info nuggets! |
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Post by Pawel on Jun 3, 2021 11:54:25 GMT
So yeah, as you say, one of the differences between the California golf rush and the Poseidon xenosilicate rush is the actual mining process. It doesn't really differ from prospecting much - extraction is relatively simple (and then refining is where the Incorp big dogs do have a clear advantage) so it's really all about scanning, scanning, scanning. Independent prospectors do it in small groups, Incorps do it with their huge indentured armies. It's about luck but also about covering as much ground (well, ocean bottom) as possible.
I imagine Incorps can be quite eager to jump at independent prospectors' node discoveries - and there aren't any fundamental differences in infrastructure type, just in its quality and quantity, which gives the big players quite a lot of agility to move around the Archipelago. So the xenosilicate rush race probably includes plenty of industrial espionage and counterespionage - and of course underwater gunfights to drive the node "owners" away and quickly snatch their bounty. Independents will always be underdogs in situations like this, but a carefully hidden secret and well planned transport route and refinery access can change a fledgling prospector settlement into an industrial and financial success in a matter of weeks.
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