Brainstorming the planet Swanmays

[Agemegos]

I'm starting a new campaign on Saturday, in which the PCs will be secret "effectives" for Human Heritage (the interstellar NGO that is concerned with protecting Art and preserving artworks), performing special and secret operations on a series of 'planets of the week'. Most of the character-players will be new to my GMing and my interstellar-SF setting. So I want the first 'planet of the week' to be strange and difficult enough to be worth going into SF for, but not so bizarre and perverse that the PCs are disabled by their players' disorientation. So I picked Swanmays, where the tech level is about that of Old Earth in the 1950s, and people's behaviour is not too hard to fathom.

So here's a draft briefing on Swanmays. Apart from being long, how is it? Is anything wretchedly implausible? Does it cohere? Are my hobby-horses showing? Is anything too blatantly analogous to current affairs? Are the borrowings from history obvious? Are the parallels offensive? Does anything cut too close to the knuckle for the likely sensibilities of the young, modern players I am likely to have recruited on an Australian RPG Discord server?

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Swanmays

Star: HD 205286, K2 V. 94.0 LY from Sol in Cygnus, (Andromeda Sector).
Planet: IV
Diameter: 12 092 km 0.95 D♁
Gravity: 9.4 m/s² 0.96 g♁
Day: 30.1 hours
Year: 179.0 local days 0.615 a♁

Atmosphere: 0.63 bar Oxygen: 0.14 bar
Scale height: 9.1 km
Oceans: 77% water Tidal range: 1.5 m
Climate: 23 °C (warm) Obliquity: 25°
Illuminance: 127 klx 119% as bright as Earth

Spaceport: scale 3, ground facilities
Escape speed: 11.0 km/s
Low orbit: 156 km Period: 87 minutes

Population: 5.41 billion Density: 52 /km²
Urban conglomerations
Households: gerontocratic extended families
Social unit: “Planning unit” (local congregation)
Social quirks: Established religion (Recovery)
Values: Pious devotion to Recovery
Loyalty to family, filial obedience
Hard work; athletic prowess
Taboos: Nudity (waist to knees)
Adultery, incest
Homosexuality or sexual “deviance”
“Withholding” from family or Recovery

Economy: crony capitalism
Development: 5.0 (Electronics Age)
Inequality: Drastic
Currency: chilo kS 1 = SVU 1.0 PPP
1,000 stivers = ₢ 0.29 exchange

Government: federal parliamentary republic
Head of state: Supreme Chief Planner
Chief exec: Principal Advisor
Legal quirks: Trial by “planners”, who receive the fines
Death penalty for rape and murder, indentured servitude for lesser felonies, fines for misdemeanours
Adultery, fornication, sodomy, pornography, and public indecency banned
Innumerable licence requirements and public order offences
Capital: Lohengrin


HD 205286 IV is an Earth-like planet with a warm climate. Despite the effect of ample oceans in moderating the heat of the tropics, a broad equatorial belt is too hot for permanent settlement. 23% of the surface is covered by land, mostly consisting of an isolated continent in the southern temperate zone and a gaggle of connected land masses sprawling from the arctic to the southern tropic. The colony, Swanmays, has spread throughout the cultivable land; it is urbanising rapidly, and both metropolises and regional cities are encroaching on their agricultural surroundings.

The best land of Swanmays is covered by family plantations, which have mostly been converted to modern high-biotech crops but still use labour-intensive artisanal methods. Manufacturing in the cities struggles to achieve an efficient scale owing to inadequate infrastructure, feeble institutions, and the privileges of inefficient locally-integrated firms. After two generations of progress, economic development has stalled at the printed-circuit stage. Swanmays’ economy has suffered a “lost decade” that has lasted twenty local years, and is beset by inflation and unemployment.

Swanmays is nominally governed by a hierarchy of technocratic “planning boards”, each of which elects a “chief planner”, who in turn makes appointments to the board. In practice planner-ships are reserved to a theocratic aristocracy with no real expertise, and are more or less hereditary. Chief planners are obliged by convention to act at the direction of an “advisory committee” drawn from the majority of the (elected) legislative council.

When they lost their control of policy and public funds the planning boards retained their judicial functions, their right to the revenue of fines, and a range of licensing fees reminiscent of feudal reliefs, such as marriage and inheritance fees, stamp duties, etc. When felons are condemned to a term of servitude the relevant planning board (which is to say, the court that tries them) generally sells the indenture for profit.

The usual households in Swanmays are extended families, each enjoying inalienable tenure of a homestead that might, in the country, include a sizeable farm. Traditionally, the formation and organisation of households was at the direction of the local chief planner, whose permission was required for marriages, and who assigned newlyweds to the bride’s or the groom’s household, or approved a new family. In conservative areas the chief planner’s assent and blessing is still required for such matters, but mostly their role is reduced to performing a ceremony, registering the arrangement, and charging a fee. Where the planners have lost control of marriages and household formation a custom is emerging for a couple to join the man’s household, and for younger sons to found new households at marriage or when their fathers die.

Social values are strongly family oriented. Members are expected to obey the head of their household and to support the family with their efforts, earnings, and any privileges they obtain. Any Swanmaysian in a position of trust or authority is expected to use it nepotistically; to refuse would be viewed not as virtuous but as callous. To be head of a household, or at least the spouse of the head, is pleasant and socially prestigious. Persons of all sexes dream of, and may intrigue for, the status.

Society on Swanmays is intensely prudish. A strict exposure taboo covers everything from the waist to the knees, besides which women generally cover their breasts and men wear a kilt or skirted coat to conceal the form of their genitals, buttocks, and thighs. Adultery. “sodomy”, and prostitution are crimes even with consent, “sodomy” including oral and anal sex besides all homosexual contact. Other non-marital sex is “fornication”, disreputable and technically a misdemeanour, but not prosecuted unless blatant. Pornography, sometimes construed to include “indecent” art, is banned, and works may be summarily destroyed.

Workers on Swanmays work two five-hour shifts in each (30.1-hour) day, one before and one after lunch and siesta, four days in each five-day week. The fifth day is set aside for “planning”, when the people of each neighbourhood “planning unit” congregate in the morning to hear a sermon about current events, the utopian condition of “Old Earth”, and the program of “Recovery” that will restore it by and by. They perform a series of ceremonial drills, which may develop into ecstatic dancing. Some participants experience trance states; a few people may be possessed by spirits from Old Earth to deliver exhortations, messages, and prophecies. After Planning there are communal banquets, and (after siesta) an afternoon of sport and recreation. Even people who believe in Recovery neither as a spiritual exercise nor as an economic program attend Planning for the sake of the social events that follow.

Access to network information services has only lately become widespread; it has enabled the spread of several radicalising conspiracy theories. Old Earth Denialism holds that Recovery is superstitious mumbo-jumbo used by Planners to justify their inordinate wealth; it calls for revolution. Renewal asserts that the ceremonies performed at Plannings have effectually restored the supply of high-tech goods from Old Earth, but that the cargo is being misappropriated by a conspiracy in the government; it calls for a purge.

Attractions

Monsalvat Palace in Lohengrin is a collection of ceremonial spaces, administrative offices, residences for global planners and their staffs, auditoriums, galleries, and gardens, on which supreme chief planners have lavished money and the work of the greatest architects, sculptors, and painters of a world for more than two centuries. It includes the Global Planning Centre, a ceremonial hall of vast size and staggering magnificence, notable for a masonry dome 45 metres wide. People undertake pilgrimages to Monsalvat to perform planning in the Global Planning Centre.

Bodiam is a large port city on the Gulf of Golf. famous because the city planning board (a) will impose a fine for any lifestyle crime only once per culprit per year and (b) has not indexed its penalties for sodomy, fornication, or prostitution since 5,000 stivers was a significant sum of money. The annual plannings after which gay and lesbian couples, prostitutes, and libertines parade in fancy costume to court to pay their fines have developed into a famous carnival and demonstration of pride.

A resonance in Parzifal Sound produces diurnal tides with a range up to twenty metres, with racing currents, maelstroms, and colossal tidal bores that allow surfers marathon rides. At one point on the shore the current through a narrow gorge produces a so-called “Horizontal Waterfall” with a drop of six metres, which thrill-seekers traverse power-boats.

A Swanmaysian family epic

A rambling series of seven long novels follows the Alexandra family through four generations and a maze of vicissitudes. First the widow Anna holds the family together through the turmoil of the 540s, sacrificing her children’s loves and ambitions for the good of the family, only to be revealed before her death as having treated the whole family as her possession. Her children disperse, leaving the household to her gentle, weak eldest son Eggar, while the selfish and acquisitive Athol goes into trade and the spiritual Lele trains to become a planner. Eggar bungles his finances, gets embroiled in a financial scandal, and is reduced to indentures as a common criminal. In the third novel Athol rises to wealth as an unscrupulous banker, and inveigles the well-born Jocindi Jaiz into an elopement; their marriage however is miserable. In the fourth Athol buys Eggar’s indenture (saving him from a term of servitude) and restores the family’s fortunes, but he usurps Athol’s place at the head of the family. Lele gives up her true love to marry into a family of planners. Athol’s and Eggar’s children enter into a rivalry that spirals down into madness, rape, and suicide. Lele’s grandson, a regional planner, spoils his prospects in a torrid love affair with Eggar’s and Athol’s grand-daughter. And so on.

Imperial presence

First contact with Swanmays by Survey in 538 ATD shook the doctrine of Recovery and the credibility of the planners, who were forced by protests and threat of revolution to submit their government to the elected legislatures. Elements of the population are hostile to the Empire, wherefore the garrison on Swanmays is two companies of Imperial marines, with a cruiser, two destroyers, and eight monitors in orbit, and a captain IN as senior naval officer.

Imperial Spaceways operates four busy ground-ports, and the Eichberger Trust bases chalcophile mining operation on a moon of the gas giant Zamie (planet VII) here. The Economic Advisory Service, Technology Transfer Assistance Service, and Public Information Service have hundreds of staff, and ILEA has 24 badged investigators led by a chief inspector. The Imperial resident holds the rank of minister plenipotentiary.

 

[Agemegos]

So anyway, the PCs in my new campaign work for Human Heritage, an interstellar non-profit non-government organisation that is dedicated to protecting Art and preserving works of art. Like most such prominent NGOs, HH has members, offices, and employees on most populous developed worlds. But these are seldom skilled enough to do anything difficult, resolute enough to do anything strenuous or dangerous, or bold enough to confront opposition. NGOs therefore employ skilled and daring “effectives” as field agents, troubleshooters, and sometimes clandestine operators. The PCs are such effectives.

Now, this is the first adventure of a new campaign, and two of the three character-players are new to the setting and my GMing. Therefore I think it's best to establish the characters' situation and expectations by showing the players their characters doing what they do. So this adventure ought to be more straightforward than my usual fare. The PCs ought to arrive on Swanmays to discharge a task that arises naturally out of the social peculiarities of the place, and that the locals won't do because the needful thing goes against their mores, defies their elites, requires a very particular set of skills, or (preferrably) all of those things. I want to show the new players that they can get the key to their characters' adventures by understanding the societies in which they occur, that motive, means, and opportunity are peculiar to social structures and values. I don't think I ought to expect them to be so oriented to my approach that they can recognise what will be obvious after they have seen the elephant.

So. The straightforward and obvious problem for Human Heritage on Swanmays is that some art is threatened with destruction on the grounds of obscenity. Saving a large piece of architecture or urban design doesn't lend itself to boppy adventure unless the half-baked visigoth who threatens it is a singularity and decisively defeasible, which is not the case for art-burning wowserism on Swanmays. So we're looking at a piece or collection of portable works of art. Also, it has to be valuable or important enough that Human Heritage will send effectives from off-world, so we are talking about either some large collection, the work of a major Swanmaysian artist, or something from off-world.

Now, I am afraid that this is going large out of the gate, but my idea is that the piece at stake is a relic from Old Earth. It won't be a major piece, because little great art of Old Earth was exported during the Age of Migration — migrants who owned major artworks generally sold them to finance their migration and re-establishment, the great works stayed in museums and wealthy mansions, and it was all burned when Earth was destroyed. However, any piece with provenance to Old Earth is very valuable now.

My idea is a Leda and the Swan. They are a subject that has long had trouble with accusations of obscenity — most of the great Sixteenth-Century examples seem to have been destroyed by the prudish widows and successors of various erotica-loving kings of France. The players may mistakenly suppose that prudes on Swanmays would be particularly incensed by pornography involving a swan because of the "knight of the Swan" theme of the original settlement, or because of the bestiality angle. But in fact the deeply offensive aspect is that an erotic artwork from Old Earth impugnes the Swanmaysian version of Eden and the Kingdom of God as tainted with eroticism. A conservative planner would find an erotic painting from Old Earth especially offensive for the very reason that Human Heritage would consider it especially precious.

So the McGuffin is an oil painting something like this:

Spoiler: Leda and the Swan by Sylwia Makris, NSFW

Now, if the owner simply wanted to destroy it it would just be destroyed. So it must have been seized by a planning board for obscenity, and their intention of burning it must be held up by an appeal or injunction, Human Heritage's obvious move is to organise an off-world sale and mollify the authorities with an assurance that it will never be shown on Swanmays again. But that won't need effectives. Either the owner must be refusing to sell, or the authorities must be so outraged by it that they ache to see it destroyed. And the key to that, I believe, is that they must consider it not just obscene but blasphemous.

Okay. So the owner has a collection of erotic art, including a number of treatments of Leda and the Swan, one of which is an oil painting from Old Earth that Human Heritage is exercised about. HH wants to rescue the one oil. The owner wants to win in court and save their whole collection. The planning board that is about to rule whether the works are art or pornography is heavily influenced by one member whose religious sensitivities are offended by the implication that there was erotic on Old Earth and will be again when it is restored.

The conservator (HH representative on Swanmays) has a plan. She has painted a copy of the painting in her studio in Bodiam. She wants the PCs to take it to Swanstone where the original is held, break into the evidence lock-up, and substitute her fake for the original.

Somewhere along the way I want to put this thing in, a first-century BC Roman terracotta oil lamp:

Spoiler: NSFW

Purists in Human Heritage would sniff at it: not real art but a cheaply moulded piece of homeware, little more than tat. But on the antiques market on Tau Ceti 606 years after the destruction of Earth, worth a bomb.

So our persons in the conflict are:

• The Conservator on Swanmays, whose noble paln to save Art happens to end up with her in possession of an art treasure that no-one else realised has been stolen
• The owner of a collection of swan-themed erotic art, who wants his whole collection restored, not just one painting saved.
• The chief planner of Swanstone, who is mortally offended that there is erotic art from Old Earth, and wants taht piece in particular destroyed and all the disgusting people who say it is a relic punished. Condignly!
• At least one off-world buyer, or an agent, who hopes to pick up a valuable piece in a distressed sale.

There is a very valuable little Roman oil lamp in the collection, not much appreciated by anyone who knows it is there.

The PCs could perhaps mollify the chief planner by doing the substitution and then revealing the substitute as a locally-made fake. Then he might feel so triumphant as to no longer care about destroying the rest of the collection.

The PCs have opportunities either to act nobly, or to end up with either or both of two very valuable Ledas without anyone knowing.

Any suggestions or comments?

 

[Nobby-W]

I'm not sure what this says about OP's avatar ...

 

[Agemegos]

I'm not sure what this says about OP's avatar ...

In Googling for images to illustrate this adventure I did come across some Ledas with black swans, but they weren’t trashy enough for what I wanted.

 

[Agemegos]

One thing that I did come across that I actually like is a sort of Fauvist-Cubist Leda and the Swan by André Lhote:

Spoiler: Artistic nudity

It's still a nude, and very plausibly a lot of people would still find it indecent. Perhaps I ought to put off until later in the campaign the suggestion that some accepted Art is really just erotica or even pornography with good composition and use of colour.