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I have been thinking, since FTL travel has a chance of things going horribly wrong, what superstions do you think exist that are supposed to ward of encounters in the Drift?
I am guessing one of them is to never mention the name of a lost ship, especially while in the Drift.
Well, one needs to make offerings to Triune, of course. 3 offerings, since she has 3 different aspects.
In fact, maybe things that come in 3's are considered to be good luck on ships, because of that.
Never jump from exactly the same place as a ship which vanished.
The difficulty with defining a place in vacuum, considering all the orbits and other relative motion, should keep this one from being debunked.
I have to see the stars! Get away from the window!
Some people are going to want to see the normal world for as long as possible.
Don't let a (whatever you're prejudiced against) navigate us through the Drift
Same old.
I assume this thread is supposed to be titled [b]"Superstitions to ward off the dangers of FTL travel."? Took me a minute to figure out what you were even talking about.
Triune was an obvious one but also, Pharasma.
I can see offerings being made to her by more fatalistic/pragmatic crew who want to hedge all their bets.
Hell, offerings to the Devourer would make some sense - make an offering to turn his eyes -away- from your voyage.
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-Always have a ysoki on-board; rub their head for luck before the jump.
-Keep a vial of dirt from your homeworld with you at all times; it will draw you back there.
-You are a leaf on the wind.
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In WH40k the thing that stops any FTL travel turning into the Event Horizon movie is a device called a Gellar Field, which basically stops the residents of the Abyss from breaking into your ship while you whizz through the cosmos -- even if that threat wasn't real, as long as you believe it's real and that the device in question prevents it from happening, you'd never fly without it.
"... and the blue button prevents Socothbenoth being summoned when you engage the drift engine; you should probably remember to press the blue button ..."
Triune was an obvious one but also, Pharasma.
And Besmara.
-Always have a ysoki on-board; rub their head for luck before the jump.Ysoki themselves started this rumor to have an easier time getting hired aboard starships.
Or to get lots of free head rubs...
Triune was an obvious one but also, Pharasma.And Besmara.
Forgot about her - and Desna and Weydan could also fit.
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Screw it, space offerings to all the gods, just to be sure.
I really like the vial of dirt one.
Degaussing. What exactly varies.
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-Always have a ysoki on-board; rub their head for luck before the jump.
Ysoki with bald spots & shiny pates will be regarded as luckier since their head-rubbing has clearly warded off starship-eating giant space hamsters on a greater number of jumps.
Perhaps it's also important that everyone on-board (not just the pilot) rubs the ysoki, there'll be a group ysoki-rubbing session so everyone knows everyone else has rubbed the ysoki. This would be one of the reasons why finding a stowaway is so bad -- he hasn't rubbed an Ysoki so the crew have to rush to throw him out of an airlock to avert the inevitable doom! Wise stowaways know to bring their own ysoki with them to avoid this problem if discovered.
Perhaps if you don't have an ysoki on board you can buy synthetic ysoki fur, which the dealer assures you is just as effective as the real thing -- but will anyone be willing to travel on a ship that dosn't have an ysoki? Black marketeers will sell ysoki scalps, which are almost certainly at least as effective as synthetic ysoki fur, and probably just as good as a live ysoki.
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Perhaps it's also important that everyone on-board (not just the pilot) rubs the ysoki, there'll be a group ysoki-rubbing session so everyone knows everyone else has rubbed the ysoki.
Hmmm... that's not going to work for ships with a substantial number of passengers. Okay, so it needs to be done at boarding... "board pass please sir... and a quick scratch behind the ears... thankyou, enjoy your flight..." maybe also once onboard when the flight attendants come along they offer you the chance to top your luck up "Coffee? Water? Ysoki head-rub?".
First class passengers will each be provided with their own Ysoki to rub throughout the journey.
I never leave home without my lucky Ysoki's foot.
That was not a very lucky Ysoki...
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-Keep a vial of dirt from your homeworld with you at all times; it will draw you back there.
Screw it, space offerings to all the gods, just to be sure.
Whelp, my pilot is going to have holy symbols for a bunch of gods that he cut out of some bulkhead in the bowels of absalom station as close to the starstone as he could get.
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More seriously ...
A ceremony to celebrate someone's first drift journey -- the equivalent of crossing the equator
A mythical space traveller associated with bringing bad luck to a voyage -- the equivalent of sailors referring to a "Jonah" (based on the character from Judaeo-Christian mythology).
Tattooing lucky and/or relevant symbols
Sky is blue & grass is green -- the ceiling of interior spaces is painted blue, the floor is painted green -- useful for orienting & agreeing direction if in zero G
And back to the Ysoki one last time -- not an actual Ysoki, but a part of the ship near the boarding entrance that is colloquially known as an "ysoki" that everyone touches for good luck whenever they board a ship. Over time it would become slightly worn & polished from being touched, and experienced spacers could tell where the Ysoki is on a ship they board for the first time. Traditions would surround how (if) the Ysoki is cleaned and/or decorated.
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I don't want to spoil the fun, but I think superstitions like these probably wouldn't be as...prevalent as they are for things like, I dunno, sea travel in renaissance Europe. As more and more people become aware of things like basic causality, superstition begins to wane. And since Triune, as a god of code, logic, and AI oversees the Drift, they would probably actively discourage anything of the sort. At best, priests of Triune would try to intervene and hold various mythbusters-esque holovids to try and erase some of the nonsense (which they might see as offensive or somehow indicative of their god's lapses in stewardship) and try to teach better active precautionary training.
That having been said, what I would pop up are a bunch of very private, very tiny rituals. The little vial of earth? Yeah, that I can see. A pair of "lucky" dice in the captain's quarters? Yup. A private locket to Desna or Weydan you take with you into the void? Sure thing. But something as widespread as "all ships must have a cat onboard" or "tengu eat bad luck so always have one on board" (disregarding the actual magical evidence to suggest potential truth to this) type superstitions would likely have died out.
On the other hand, the presence of the Gap means society has only had 300 years to figure its life out, sooooo maybe people are still acting like they're from the stupid ages and petting cats to make the monsters under the bed go away, as opposed to, I dunno, investing in a high-tech detection and security system. But I have more faith that at this level of technological and scientific advancement, people will trend enough towards secularism (or, well, quantifiable empiricism, since gods are objectively real in SF) and start to disregard public displays of "lucky vs. unlucky."
I'm not just saying this so you'll leave Ysoki alone.
That'd be dumb...
But seriously though, Ysoki are people just like everybody else. Leave our heads alone!
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So you're saying that hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side?
I don't want to spoil the fun, but I think superstitions like these probably wouldn't be as...prevalent as they are for things like, I dunno, sea travel in renaissance Europe. As more and more people become aware of things like basic causality, superstition begins to wane. And since Triune, as a god of code, logic, and AI oversees the Drift, they would probably actively discourage anything of the sort. At best, priests of Triune would try to intervene and hold various mythbusters-esque holovids to try and erase some of the nonsense (which they might see as offensive or somehow indicative of their god's lapses in stewardship) and try to teach better active precautionary training.
That having been said, what I would pop up are a bunch of very private, very tiny rituals. The little vial of earth? Yeah, that I can see. A pair of "lucky" dice in the captain's quarters? Yup. A private locket to Desna or Weydan you take with you into the void? Sure thing. But something as widespread as "all ships must have a cat onboard" or "tengu eat bad luck so always have one on board" (disregarding the actual magical evidence to suggest potential truth to this) type superstitions would likely have died out.
On the other hand, the presence of the Gap means society has only had 300 years to figure its life out, sooooo maybe people are still acting like they're from the stupid ages and petting cats to make the monsters under the bed go away, as opposed to, I dunno, investing in a high-tech detection and security system. But I have more faith that at this level of technological and scientific advancement, people will trend enough towards secularism (or, well, quantifiable empiricism, since gods are objectively real in SF) and start to disregard public displays of "lucky vs. unlucky."
I'm not just saying this so you'll leave Ysoki alone.
That'd be dumb...
But seriously though, Ysoki are people just like everybody else. Leave our heads alone!
I dunno though, there are some very big factors that might lead to superstitions remaining prevalent, things like Devils and some other evil creatures fearing silver, isn't just a superstition but also a supernatural-physiological reality, vampires really do hate garlic, etc. The average person, even with all the advances made likely doesn't know why these things are true, but they "know" that they are. I would expect superstitions might have a longer shelf-life in a setting where some of them are definitely true. Who wants to be the one who gets the ship eaten by a Drift Kraken just because they thought touching the lucky bolt was just a silly superstition.
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I don't want to spoil the fun, but I think superstitions like these probably wouldn't be as...prevalent as they are for things like, I dunno, sea travel in renaissance Europe. As more and more people become aware of things like basic causality, superstition begins to wane.
Perhaps, but keep in mind that there's no shortage of superstition in the real world. For example, Gallup do continuous polling on various topics, asking the same questions every year-or-so, including every couple of years since 1982 asking in the US about creationism, and that's more-or-less returned that 40-45% of respondents are creationists every time for 35 years! And that's not people risking their lives on the unforgiving seas to discover unexplored lands, it#s people sat at home or behind desks in the wealthiest, most advanced, most powerful country on the planet.
In the real world superstitions & conspiracy theories abound because people are afraid of things that they don't personally understand (CERN, vaccines, microwave ovens, magnets...) and because people suck at understanding probability and differentiating between causation, correlation, and coincidence.
In Pathfinder it's far worse. People *know* there are things that are truly outside their comprehension -- magic, gods, planes, demons. Then Starfinder takes that even further, not just with "native"/Pact World science & technology, but with aliens who have their own weird science, beliefs, and culture, unknown worlds (and the known world vanishing!). There's a lot more for them to be superstitious about than before.
Plus, superstitions become traditions -- several of the examples I mentioned were based on real, current traditions/superstitions, the practices persist and people just say "of course I don't *actually* believe it, but ..."
But seriously though, Ysoki are people just like everybody else. Leave our heads alone!
Sorry, not even a scratch behind the ears? :)
I think all three of my examples above could be known (not universal) in a modern society. Here's one stolen from the Traveller RPG which might be a tradition among some rather than a superstition per se:
When entering the Drift, divert all power from non-essential systems. Dim the lights, turn off the fans and pause the lifts.
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I mean, true, though the US is...not that advanced. There's also the fact that what distinguishes a superstition from causality is the relationship between Event X and Action Y is not in fact relevant. Devils are affected by silver isn't a superstition because its occurrence is a predictable fundamental law, in much the same way that mixing cesium and water causes the cesium to burst into flame. You don't need to know exactly how that chemical reaction occurs to understand and distribute this information. The existence of "magic" in the world doesn't make its rules nonsensical. In actual fact, it simply means that some of the non-casual relationships in our reality are causal in theirs. And once a relationship is causal, it'll get quantified. Based on my understanding...that's literally how the technomancer class came into being :)
If I had citation, I'd be more confident. That having been said, my suspicion is that at this point in sci-fi, superstitions might not only be rare but actively dangerous, since you can easily determine reasonable alternatives. Superstition comes from a perception of lack of control or understanding. Therefore, the more control and understanding one has, the less likely superstition is to flourish.
I dunno...
scratches are fine, but only because you want to do it, not because you think it'll work. I don't wanna be held liable here. AbadarCorp is very specific about the nature of my contract
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Before you leave The Drift, you need to leave something of value behind. Some throw a few UPBs out the airlock. Some toss out credsticks or even real gold coins. Particularly ruthless pirates throw out a captive, or if they've only made a short jump, just a captive's finger.
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Before you leave The Drift, you need to leave something of value behind.
I'm pretty sure the airlines have done this with my luggage more than once. On the other hand, I've never been in a plane crash, so it clearly works.
Never jump to coordinates that add up to a prime number
I don't want to spoil the fun, but I think superstitions like these probably wouldn't be as...prevalent as they are for things like, I dunno, sea travel in renaissance Europe. As more and more people become aware of things like basic causality, superstition begins to wane. And since Triune, as a god of code, logic, and AI oversees the Drift, they would probably actively discourage anything of the sort. At best, priests of Triune would try to intervene and hold various mythbusters-esque holovids to try and erase some of the nonsense (which they might see as offensive or somehow indicative of their god's lapses in stewardship) and try to teach better active precautionary training.
I'm pretty sure superstition would be way more prevalent right now than already is if we had people casting spells on behalf of gods, and other obvious supernatural powers that might affect luck.
Desna does exist in SF. She is the goddess of travel, stars, and luck, among other things. So making some ritual to appease her sounds right.
Even moreso with Triune, given the fact that the only reason you are actually about to travel through the Drift, is because of her (them?)
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Never jump to coordinates that add up to a prime number
Never ever ever ever jump to coordinates that multiply to a prime number.
:D As a mathematician and a computer programmer, I find that very funny. :)Never jump to coordinates that add up to a prime numberNever ever ever ever jump to coordinates that multiply to a prime number.
As neither of those things and most of the time an actual idiot it took me way too long to figure out why it was funny.