Primitive

Main > Rules > World Statistics > World Tags > Primitive

The world is technologically primitive. Their societies may be quite sophisticated in cultural, artistic, or aesthetic terms, but they lack the raw materials or expertise to move past the muscle-powered stages of technology. Few such worlds can support centralized governments or large numbers of non-farming specialists, and social organization tends to be oriented toward stability and survival. Far traders who can bring in tech to unlock formerly-inaccessible resource deposits or jumpstart an industrial base can unleash drastic changes on these worlds. The natives often lack the experience to recognize these impending changes before their world has transformed around them.

Leaders:
^{Who might be encountered while conducting business}

• Confused local autocrat
• Unrelentingly hidebound guildmaster
• Local official with wildly inflated expectations about far traders
• Local grandee unable to understand that her authority is not universal

Enemies:
^{Who might be encountered who opposes the group}

Official privately determined to drive the offworlders away

Local crime boss desperate to steal offworld goods

Local demagogue bent on extorting the offworlders

Far trader who really dislikes competition

Complications:
^{How might the situation on the world be more complicated}

A local priestess has cynically duped the locals into thinking her far trader partners are holy figures

The world is on the cusp of an explosively disruptive industrial revolution

The locals are Luddites for a reason that is or was rational

The last far trader to come through left chaos in his wake

Things:
^{What items might be found on the world}

Colony-era pretech parts that are useless to the locals

Amazingly refined art or liquors

Exquisitely-bred and trained warbeasts

Papers proving ownership of local serfs or slaves

Things:
^{What regulations might complicate things}

Offworld tech use is restricted to the native elite

Tech use is relegated to a tightly-policed underclass of laborers

Tech use is permitted only after dangerous purification rites

Tech use is considered a declaration of rebellion

Tags: Lotech, Trade