The Internet in Pathfinder

[fictionfan]

In the real world the internet is one of the biggest influences in society (i'm a computer science major). I was think about how using the pathfinder materials you could go about creating it or at least something like it.

So far my only idea so a society of mind-linked people using telepathic bond.

This has two limitations one each link costs 12,500 gp so you need to minimized the links.

There is a limit to how much mind traffic that can some can take (not any hard limit in the rules, but I think there is a limit to how much information a person can relay reliably).

Fot these reasons I am wondering how many messages can you receive (texts, voice messages, mental pictures) and mentally deliver to another person in a hour? For this mind-linked secret society that has quick communication between it members I need as few nodes as possible (to keep telepathic costs down, but I can't have those nodes be overwhelmed by the constant messages.

Also if someone can think of a better way to make a internet in pathfinder I am all ears.

[Knight Magenta]

PF specifically says that telepathy is just like talking. So a telepathic network would be like a giant game of telephone - i.e. useless for information sharing.

I think what you want is a construct with telepathy. You could set them up in any sort of network liked by telepathic bonds. Each construct would be able to talk to and hear people thinking at them within the reach of their telepathy. They would essentially be WiFi access points.

The constructs themselves would need a high wisdom to remember and faithfully reproduce messages. Perhaps a racial bonus to Auto-hypnosis :p

If you don't want to homebrew stuff, have a look at the psionics rules from Dream-scarred press. I think psicrystals get telepathy at level 5 I think. There is also a 2k gp item that counts your maifester level as 2 higher for psicrystal purposes. So you could set each node up with a level 3 psion.

[Big Lemon]

A combination of scrying, pocket dimensions, and telepathic communication could all be used to make an arcane equivalent of a computer. Pocket dimensions would allow people to send physical objects across space, not just information.

[VRMH]

Not really "Internet" but still:

• A librarian who allows himself to be scryed upon while at work, and accepts magical messages to go look at specific books.
• An intelligent item, capable of casting Contact Other Plane at will; the potential Charisma and Intelligence decrease would be irrelevant.

[LazarX]

fictionfan wrote:

In the real world the internet is one of the biggest influences in society (i'm a computer science major). I was think about how using the pathfinder materials you could go about creating it or at least something like it.

You realise that there is a whole host of reasons why the Internet was not invented until the 1980's.

Not only did it take an inspired genius like Vincent Cerf to come up with a network protocol that would find it's own path, but all the dependent tech that had to be invented beforehand. The Internet wouldn't be the internet if all telephone switching still involved human operators to manually manage all connections.

The other thing that makes the Internet the Internet is it's ubiquity. It wasn't anything that anyone cared about when all it did was link up five military strategic supercomputers which was the main intent that DARPA had when they conceieved ARPANet. (The Internet's immediate predecessor)

[fictionfan]

Yes you are right in order to make the internet we would need packet switching (being able to send a message in many small packages) so that we don't need dedicated lines or connections that are filled.