Theles Spinner

[Joseph Hewitt]

I am now working on Theles Spinner. As some of you may remember, this one is also known as "The Meatyard". It's where exiles from the other spinners often end up. Human life is cheap here, and it can be bought and sold like any other commodity.

This is the first city in the game to feature the "Dystopia" tag. It's taking a while because it doesn't follow the normal city pattern. Nearly every building has custom content. I have to add some "Dystopia" content and quests, as well. There also needs to be a quest whereby the PC can earn access to the upper level, and find out what lies beyond.

I need to flesh out some of the NPCs so there's more details about exactly what's going on here. The dilapidated apartment building needs a guaranteed NPC who can explain some of the locations in town. The L5Law officer at the spaceport needs to explain about the Theles technocracy and the general lawlessness in the lower level. I also want to add a personal scale arena here, similar to the one in Ironwind Fortress in GH1.

The "Dystopia" tag is meant to indicate a location which is completely, irredeemably scifi evil. A nightmare city. A place so bad that even most cities on Luna won't get this label. It's a place where life doesn't matter much, where people have no hope, where exploitation on all levels is the norm, where unexpected death isn't all that unexpected. In other words it's just like a story from "2000AD".

Note that some dystopias may be marked as "safe"- these will be places like the city in Logan's Run, the Village from The Prisoner, Earth in WH40k, and so on. Other dystopias, such as Theles Spinner, will be marked as "dangerous"- at least here most of the threats should be out in the open. Examples of dangerous dystopias include Alpha Complex, Hive Pimus of Necromunda, and Scrap Iron City from Battle Angel.

You can select Theles Spinner as your hometown. Later on, when I get the unlockable content system in place, Theles will be a locked location that only gets unlocked after the player visits.

[Francisco Munoz]

mmm I'll be waiting for the scale 0 death-match arena... A place where you can also bet (even in your own matches)

[Claudio]

Howdy (I'm a new user, but I've been lurking around GH for two years now).

Were you thinking of giving the player the option to buy slaves? I'm not sure if it could be simply a "buy a cheap low quality lancemate", or rather some kind of plot, but meh, you get the picture.

You could trade slaves in your starship (or use them as crew - if they were special lancemates this could be done with a dialogue option that would switch their status to simple "cargo" once on the ship, not sure if it would be easy), get some flak from the police for it...
A Slaver's Guild, if done, should definitely have a forehead tattoo.

Well, just throwing my ideas around. I'm having programmer's block right now with some AJAX crap =(

[Keiseth]

Ajax, ow!

Love the idea of a Dystopian setting. There is something special about a Dystopia; it's so much easier to accept then a Utopian setting. No one ever questions a Dystopia; it is what it is, but if someone were to run into a Utopia they would most certainly attempt to pick it apart. What's going on in the backround? What aren't we being told?

Any chance of getting illegal weapons/mecha here? Bet a lot of items will have <BRUTAL> on. Or be poisoned. Or on fire. Or all three.

[JohnnyDmonic]

Quoting: Keiseth

Or be poisoned. Or on fire. Or all three.

The bar should totally offer Napalm-X Jello shooters.

[Hud]

Loving it. Especially the slave trading! :*

[Frumple]

*looks up from reading his Shadowrun book* Frumple approves heartily!

...

Beyond that, it sounds awesome -- dystopia settings tend to be where the really big brawls-of-doom can be found, often for no particular reason beyond havoc for havoc's sake, which... yeah.  Blood for the Blood God, et al.  I tend to like big fights (in games, at least), especially if there's more than two sides involved.  It's always better when you can pick off the stragglers, teehee.

Sounds like it'll be the an interesting place to visit.  I'm kinda' curious, though... if it's a really "bad" place, will we get the chance, at some point, to make the decision to go all righteously shortsighted and scuttle the place For Great Justice (ignoring the millions added to the death-count, hee.)?

[Keiseth]

I have a feeling this is going to be my favorite spinner. Oh! Not to LIVE in of course. =) I imagine there will be lots of cyberware doctors and such. Probably bad ones, seeing as how there is no need to have a proper certification...

Yeaaah, I'm not getting my eyes replaced in Theles Spinner, sorry. =P

[Albijoe]

Like all places given over to the scum of the area, it probably is
1) hideously run down / in control of someone powerful, and
2) VERY resilient, since these people have NO other place to live.  the FGJ attacks would quite possibly fail, unless there are ressurrected super-nukes / Wave-motion cannons / other 1-shot, 1-kill items on the asteroid (or greater) scale.

[Keiseth]

It's terrifying. Take the resilience of the people who live in a dystopian setting, and find a way to change it into offensive power and you would have an unstoppable force.

I think Theles is going to have the most culture and atmosphere out of all the locations thus far. Markheim Fortress had a similar feeling in GH1 and I always liked that place the most. It wasn't a dystopia but it had incredibly harsh conditions.

[Joseph Hewitt]

There will actually be no slave trading here- but rest assured that they take the concept of "life can be bought or sold" very literally. Slaves would be pretty useless for the PC anyhow, since they wouldn't be legal outside of Theles.

The spinner itself is divided into layers. The bottom layer is where the workers live; this area is almost completely lawless. The second layer is where managers and the security forces live. It is separated from the first layer by security towers. Above that is the layer where the technocrats live; it is possible to earn entrance to this level, but those who go there never return to the city bottom.

People are not forced to stay in Theles, but there's nowhere else for most of them to go. It takes a lot of money to purchase a residence permit for another spinner, and those people who have been exiled from elsewhere might not even be eligible for the permit. People born on Theles typically dream of either moving to another colony or earning access to an upper level. Most of them will die in obscurity without ever accomplishing their dreams.

Despite being lawless, it's difficult to purchase weapons in Theles Spinner. The goods manufactured by the factories are all for export. Many items are prohibited from being sold in the lower level in order to keep the violence within manageable limits.

(I'm just rambling from my notes here, but cleaned up this information could probably go into the wiki)

Crime is typically low within the spinner colonies. No large scale prisons exist here; instead, people convicted of serious crimes might be subjected to psycho-surgery, executed, or exiled from the station. In addition to the big crimes one would expect (murder, rape, robbery) it's also possible to be exiled/sentenced to death for crimes which would be minor (or not even crimes at all) on Earth. Examples include incompetence, fraud, failing to contribute to the well-being of the spinner, and causing damage to the spinner/life support systems. The reason for this is that in space, any of these things could endanger the lives of the rest of the colony. Resources are scarce and nobody can be given a free ride.

Most non-violent first time offenders can fairly easily find another colony to move to. If they have a lot of money, some exiles can flee to the asteroids or even to another world. For everyone else there's Theles Spinner.

Theles has a policy to accept nearly all exiles who request entrance. Desperate people are a raw material in the industries of Theles: they are needed to work in the factories, as test subjects for experiments, and even as raw materials for certain unspeakable businesses. The Privateer's Guild also recruits from Theles, since those born here often grow up  to be savage fighters.

[Keiseth]

A little different then I expected but much more interesting, now. What makes a crime in a spinner is especially interesting. Knowing this, life in space seems drastically different then on Earth, and not just in the "everything is lighter here" way, either. =)

Somebody attempting to destroy critical components of a spinner is pretty terrifying. By comparison it's much more difficult to completely destroy Earth.

I can't wait to explore it.

[JohnnyDmonic]

I added what JH wrote pretty much verbatim to the Theles Spinner entry on the Wiki.  It might need to be massaged by somebody, I'm not very good at paring down information.  I love information and always figure more is better so I tend to include everything.

Speaking of which, I'm interested in hearing more about the Technocrats of Theles Spinner.  Are they just rich industrialists who hold their power by having the only high-tech weapons around?  Or are they real technocrats, holding the rest of the L5 colonies off by fear/need of their cutting edge technology, like the race that made the Clone Troopers in Star Wars?

Also, they should totally have a really high-tech mecha arena, sort of as a counter-point to the Dystopian lower-level arena.

[Francisco Munoz]

Let's throw wild hypothesis about Theles' technocracy....

They really didn't exists because...

1.. they are just a bunch of linked brains floating in a liquid tank.. thats why they need tissue samples.
2..they are just a bunch of really old and patched (bio+cyber) clique, new people are just used as spare parts.
3...they live in a life of drugs and artificial reality and an AI's just control everything.
4... a mix of any of the first 3

[JohnnyDmonic]

I like all three of those, although in my opinion they should all be good guys (without the inhumane culling of the lower-level herds stuff.)  I'm pretty fond of the whole post-human genre, but most sci-fi still revolves around anyone who casts off human flesh as being inheriently evil.  

(as an aside I've been trying to figure out a way to write a hidden AI/sentient bot cabal for GH1, ala the group of rogue AI's in Ghostrider 2099.)

 So, yeah, the thing is, I like the idea of them as being fairly much human, because the more human they are, the more the meaningless distinction between them and the lower-level citizens stands out.  However, with that said, they have to have a way of maintaining their power, both from internal threats, and external threats.  Internally they can just use brutal guards, but the more low-tech the brutality they use internally, the more likely some external source is going to say, "Okay, yeah...no, that's enough of that."  

The easiest to maintain advantage as a technocrat is monopoly supply of a product everyone wants.  A certain weapon, an immortality drug, whatever.  The next best is simple technological superiority, however even the best armed can be overwhelmed by a large enough force of Buru Buru.  The final option is outright doomsday Mutually Assured Destruction.

I've no doubt that every now and again L5 law gets fed up with the pirates and does a full sweep of the lower-levels, tossing half the population out the airlock, and is being pretty merciful at that.  But there has to be some mechanism in place protecting the upper-levels from recieving the same treatment, otherwise they wouldn't have the sort of 'entrenched' system neccesary to keep the low-level citizens low.