Hi all,
I’ve been having some strange ideas (e.g. “Socialist revolutionaries love tractors - but what if the socialist revolutionaries were tractors?!”) that have got me thinking a bit about sentient machines in the Iron Empires. I know that they are not a feature of standard setting, since it undermines the hierarchical system, but I thought that for our next game (we are doing a zero Index thing now) we might like to fool around with that social hierarchy a bit.
I realise that there are technological stats in the Tech Burner, but I sort of want these machines to be somewhat self-maintaining. Ideally I’d like to have them as the Slaves & Serfdom faction of the world - sort of a bit like BNW’s deliberately-inhibited labouring classes plus the kind of thing that would really irritate the Culture (from Iain M. Bank’s sci-fi novels). The concept is that there are mostly unihibited intelligences that administer their less capable ‘cousin’ intelligences, and this hierarchy goes all the way down to essentially dumb factory-process robots. The top-level intelligences might even be sentient in a “can receive a Connection” sort of way.
Anyone got any ideas? Do sentient machines count as an “Alien Race” as per the forum description? I don’t imagine them to be remotely playable as FONs - if that helps.