"But why the Ivy League, Gill?"

[subplotkudzu]

I'm still rooting around to find suitable ideas for 'prime directive contamination' planets for the USS Carter - the ones that turned themselves into Rome or the Roaring 20's or the Nazis because those were the costumes available that week of contact with a Federation ship. One that did some up as funny but not workable? 

The Carter crew beams down into a bucolic scene of ivy covered brick buildings in the crisp fall air. The inhabitants seem peaceful and friendly and outgoing, immersed in a love of learning and fellowship. When the Carter crew leaves the compound they learn that the adults are trapped in a decades-long hell of debt poverty, forced to work off the debt accrued during their mandatory educational cycle.  A Federation cultural anthropologist, searching for a way to provide better education to an alien culture, unwittingly introduced the late 20th century concept of institutes of higher learning where price was presumed to equate to quality, with people begging to spend more for a more prestigious degree. The collapse to dystopia outside the ivory towers (hey, there's a good episode name) was inevitable.  

I suspect this might strike too close to home for some of the players.

Comments

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

How about a planet where someone left behind a copies of the three main AD&D rule-books?

While the never-released FRUP* contrived by James Wallis uses this premise, so can you.

::B::

* The premise behind FRUP was that copies of all three core books for a certain well-known-but-never-named fantasy RPG falls through a wormhole into a medieval fantasy sort of world, and the inhabitants treat it as a divine communication and pattern their society after it. The added twist is that it's a completely mundane world. No monsters, no magic, but the Holy Books says those things exist, so the blinkered yokels waste a lot of energy painting folks green to make them orcs and calling hurled rocks 'Magic Missles'.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

This gave me the idea of having a copy of Mort d'Arthur left behind by a foolish ship. Hence the Carter would stumble across their own version of Pendragon.

[kriz1818.livejournal.com]

I suspect this might strike too close to home for some of the players.

Proving again that it's possible to want to laugh and cry at the same time ...

[ladegard.livejournal.com]

How about one where, due to some lost poetry collections, the pastoral romantic tradition comes true? The cities as wastelands of moral turpitude and intellectual decay while shepherds and fishwives hold deep, insightful discussions about philosophy and ethics while going about their business?


And sheep! Roaming the Serengeti in autonomous collectives! ...wait, skip that last part.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

That actually sounds like it has legs. Those magic sheep legs that let them clamber up the sides of sheer cliffs to look for moss as they rule themselves.

I am considering the idea of having the Chivalric Romances being left behind to turn a planet into a Pendragon style Camelot.