 November 7, 2012 - 6:51am | Mono, sub or multi-culture? definition of culture, in the 20th century "culture" emerged as the central and unifying concept of American anthropology, where it most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially To boil it down culture is the ability to encode experiences symbolically and to share them socially. Culture can be looked at as laungauge and custom but there is also "material culture" the items and things produced by social groups which is what the artchaeologist is largely concerned with AD gave us a few specific cultural customs for Dralasites on Inner Reach, Dramune and Yazirians on Hentz, Araks and by giving us PanGal as a language ther are by default 5 languages. This thread probably wont stay focused on human culture and will rabbit trail to other cultures but I wanted to consider ways to distinguish human culture by sytem or planet and even possibly account for sub, minor or other cultures within the human community of a planet or system. For instance I think that human culture on the following planets/systems would all be a little different plus asteroid miners might have a distinct "culture" either in one system or simply throughout the whole Frontier- a brotherhood of Asteroid Miners BAM though the cadre may have helped to foster this sub culture. Possible cultures to define with a custome or two: 1. Madderly's Star 2. White Light 3. Theseus 4. Timeon 5. Prengular (despite being a multi racial planet I feel that its worth while to look at what human culture here might be here since its the Hub of the Frontier) 6. Spacers could form a sub culture though I think I prefer to just have this space was from Clarion and shows it in speach and custom 7. BAM brotherhood of astro miner- clannish sub culture with a snobbishness for those not born to it. 8. Truane's Star whoes culture will heavily influence Laco's As to the language issue- to effectively discuss this topic I think we need to discuss what the native language of the human population of the Frontier is. its not Pan Gal. This gets tricky as some of us like the cannon statement of a another race of humans (not from earth) evolved in another spiral galaxy and some of us like to just include earth in the setting but far off. What I propose is a name for the language that can work for both: something like Anglese which for the pro earthers would be a mongrel language that evolved in the sol system which is a mixture of English, Spanish and Chinese and for the anti earthers its just a name and it can mean what they like it to mean. or we can call the haman language: Terran which again means what the individual fan of the setting wants it to mean and we all get to hold hands and sing Kum By Ya despite our differences. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
October 27, 2014 - 12:42pm | Ground Zero Games, the makers of Star Grunt, Dirt Side and Full Thrust games and the associated lines of miniatures envisioned a future time line where the The Swabian League (a German flavored super power), the Judean League (Jews that were forced to flee Earth), an Arab based power, the former republics of Texas and California banding together to form a new repulic in the space age- this one never made sense to me but then the creator was British), plus a British super power (but of course since the creator was British), america has fragmented and parts are subsumed into the british power while the two states that were formerly repulics banded together. Oh yeah and there is a corporate Japanese power as well. Not what I would have done with projecting new superpowers into the future but interesting enough. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 October 27, 2014 - 7:12pm | Tx + Ca wow that is like mixing night & day in some respects. Sure there are liberal & conservative places in both states but it would be a stretch... I could see Wa, Or & Ca becoming one state. Of course the Brits would want the Colonies back lol ;) "Never fire a laser at a mirror." |
October 27, 2014 - 9:21pm | In thinking about Terra Demographics today, if we had space colonies & Terra had to be abandoned the 2 most spoken languages in the world are Mandarin & Spanish. There are more Asians than any other racial type. The 2 biggest religions are Christianity & Islam. "Never fire a laser at a mirror." |
 October 28, 2014 - 11:39pm | As to the language issue- to effectively discuss this topic I think we need to discuss what the native language of the human population of the Frontier is. In my campaign, we use: Human, Dralasite, Vrusk, Arginian & Gnarsh. |
October 29, 2014 - 4:53am | In the past I did not worry to much about language, but now as an adult I can see how it would be useful to add flavor mainly to the campaign. Also we have a wider variety of tools to allow for easier injections of languages. There are free translation programs for instance and online groups that can help with translating stuff. The question of what Humans speak is heavily influenced I would think by how Humans are conceived of in each game... do they come from one unified culture, everyone has basically same customs, same beliefs, same language or are the more multicultural with one major language and several minority languages, many different customs, different beliefs? Now this would be up to the GM of course how to flesh them out but it can make a difference. Of course this is not something a Ref need make a big decision on right away, probably the first thing to do is square away some sort of Human Common Tongue. People in real life often assume rather stupidly that a person does not understand their language and will switch from English into say Spanish or what ever in front of the English speaker to say things "privately" in a rather public/rude way they think the English speaker can not understand... for years several girls at my job would do this around me (I rarely use Spanish, it does not mean I can not understand some of it) they had the shock of their life (as they had been talking rude stuff about co-workers, super private stuff about themselves & co-workers lives) when another Spanish speaker in Spanish asked me for specific forms while they where doing this (with a gleam in her eye and the cat that ate the canary smile), I got the forms and replied asking if she needed anything else. It was a Sprint moment as they realized I may have understood all the trash talking they had been doing, their eyes bugging in shock. It was so funny.  I imagine people in space regardless of species might do similar things, or in xeno specific settings might use another language that not all the PCs might understand or are assumed they don't all understand. Of course in any multicultural setting everyone almost always learns a few bad words & insults  "Never fire a laser at a mirror." |
 October 29, 2014 - 9:21am | I use pan-gal as the common tounge with it being a combination of the predominant languages of the core 4. Then the core 4 all have multiple languages from their history. For dralasites it is just a few languages, vrusk have a few more, yazirians several, and humans as many as we have on Earth. Each race has one language that has become the defacto language some time back in their history. Vrusk have the oldest common language, dralasites the next oldest, the humans the third oldest and the yazirians the most recent. I do not go into detail much about languages to say the common human toungue is english but rather treat it like a movie where you know the characters are speaking a different language but english is being used for the audience. -iggy |
 September 9, 2016 - 11:18am | SFMan 11 also has Shadow Shack's write-up on Minotaur. TerlObar just did a Google hangout session with me and presented how the orbital mechanics of Minotaur orbiting Ares can work. I'm putting together diagrams and should be able to share them in the next week. There is some culture stuff in Shadow's Minotaur write-up. Meanwhiile, SFman issue 16 had a write up about Minotaur and the Theseus system by Allen Trussell. The problem is I like both write-ups, though I'm more partial to using Trussell's version and Shadow Shack's map... Oh well, choices, choices. Joe Cabadas |
