Low Culture, High Tech

I need inspiration for a board game i'm currently working on.

Setting is a forgotten african tribe that learned how to build robots. No WE WUZ shitposting.

Will dump a few images

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_inventors_and_scientists
youtube.com/watch?v=vlgtYDt7c6U
twitter.com/AnonBabble

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How did your culture evolve to be this way?

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Can't decide between ancient alien technology that was found or some "intelligent" mineral that can only be mined in that region.
I know its not super creative so i gladly accept ideas.

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I'd go with highly intelligent AI with an old foundry and some blueprints, which set itself up as the patron deity of the tribe and provides blueprints, software, and so on in exchange for strange favors it asks..

Also, WE

NEED
TO
STOP
THIS
SHIT
MEME

Tanks, way better than my ideas

Also, WUZ

Also anyone knows a tumblr for this specific trope?

The only setup that makes sense is that these aboriginals found the technology and the technology is so good and immediate that they managed to make it work.

I don't, but a startling number of photos of modern Africans look like cyberpunk art. You could probably use that for characters and then look up some nice fancy-looking blueprints for the tech.

KANGZ

:^)

Thta looks cool, but i dont look for cyberpunk-esque stuff.
The technology should be "clean" and slightly futuristic and robotic.
Maybe something like an ancient, solar powered AI that was buried ages ago and due to ore mining it was excavated and the tribe started to worship it? Like said.

That is shit, that whole AI worship thing is far too commonly used right now to be any good. You need some innovation on this, probably that they do know that it is technology and so far beyond what they had before, and the reason culture has not progressed is that the discovery of the technology happened very recently.

How about instead of the usual crashed space ship to loot the space ship was a bio-library.

The people the ship belonged to were a multi-species society. At some point they learned how to make living memory transferable in the form of neural symbionts that could adapt to any "meat" life.

Kind of looks like slime mold but purple. Doesn't like ultra violet light very much. Also isn't intelligent by itself and needs someone else' brain to do the thinking and shit with.

In humans it latches on to the spinal cord, sends tendrils up into the brain and gradually diffuses around the body.

Due to never having been made with humans in mind it can only impart information upon it's hosts when they are in the deepest of sleeps or meditating because human brains are full of shit and static. Information imparted tends to have a certain random quality to it.

There was enough shit left intact in the crashed ship and has been enough information pick-and-mixed out of the symbionts that a small, highly advanced pocket kingdom has formed around the crash site. Ship is the royal palace/tribal Parliament building. A fortified town now encircles the ship, built with sophistication and understanding but by local hands from local stone.

The surrounding fields sustainable with excellent crop rotation and irrigation and the roads are expertly planned.

Everything is running at peak efficiency and exactly as advanced as it can be made from local material.

Wasn't this already done in Halo? The Covenant didn't know how to fully utilize Forerunner tech and didn't want to for the most part because the way it was for them was sacrosanct.

That said, the idea that they figured out to do it a certain way and just do it that way because they are afraid of breaking it is fine as over time it becomes a cultural thing. Don't put a spiky bit on the robot here because this design has withstood the test of time and there is no need to do it.

Hoe about soem sentient nanomachines SON that were uncovered and possessed the tribe's king.
He showed them some minor "miracles" so they worshipped him like a god and started farming a special ore to build more nanomachines and so on.

I have a few ideas, don't know if they'll help you:

>giraffes with scouter/camera helmets to monitor the land

>warriors wielding electric stun rods/spears

>shaman can command mechanical locusts

>high warrior wearing rhino exoskeleton

>chainsaw Macuahuitl

>hyanas with acid tanks for faster decomposing of bodies

Better, but I'd have them not be truely sentient and just being a safety mechanism that they were originally created to help another society understand how the robots work and how to make them. Also I don't think tribes have a king; they have a chieftain. However, the whole possessing a body thing could be interesting.

>just being a safety mechanism that they were originally created to help another society understand how the robots work and how to make them.
That's great

I also thought about making the possessed "god" just the troublemaking worker, that always hated the king/chieftain. So he starts gathering a crowd of believers around him and starts opposing the king.
Two factions: 1 that follows the new "god" and 1 that stays loyal to the old king. Would be great because i need a rebel group for my story. Sry for my bad english btw, i hope you can understand what im saying.

Mix colonial alt-history with robotic history. A tribe that got robotic tech from the greeks via Egypt, developed it and then through shenanigans with trade were encouraged into that sort of niche where they built an economy on selling robots to other countries as art. As tech advanced said rift valley city state continued to improve and expand from gimmicky toymaking to other branches seen today.

It will stop when a negro civilization actually exists and a negro actually invents something.

Also go with ancient aliens, OP.

ARE THE CRYSTAL GEMS

>a negro civilization actually exists
Pretty much all the kingdoms of north and east Africa

>a negro actually invents something
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_inventors_and_scientists

CTRL+F invented

Unless you meant only African people?

Same way it does in real life: some outsider nation hands the natives technology centuries ahead of their own in order to lever some advantage, and later abandons the area leaving behind the technology. Que setting where bowmen and robots fight side by side.

Why not just say that they're a civilisation that progressed technologically towards a highly robot-oriented tech base, but culturally developed along African tribal lines.

It's a conceit of modern Western Civilisation that our technology goes hand in hand with our cultural values, and that anyone who reaches our tech level (or higher) will automatically share certain cultural traits with us. There are reasons why it's more /likely/ that civilisations with an outlook closer to modern Europeans would develop higher-level technology, but it's far from an absolute rule.

>"I know nothing about African history whatsoever and think anybody who isn't me isn't civilized,"

WE'LL ALWAYS SAVE THE DAY

>Que setting where bowmen and robots fight side by side.

This really only works if the robots are self-replicating, because if you can maintain a robotic device you can almost 100% certainly maintain even basic firearms or other ranged weapons.

EAT
A
SUCCULENT
PENIS
OF
RED
TAINT
SHITLORD

that robo-dinosaur game that just came out where you fire arrows at them

forget name

>forgotten african tribe
>built advanced robotic tech that billions of dollars of researching has been unable to conduct

Let me guess.... aliens?

So basically Wakanda?

Atliens

Nah, Wakanda is actually a highly evolved society. It just happens to be located in an african jungle.

The second idea almost sounds like Wakanda.

>Low Culture, High Tech
The United States of America?

>Low Culture, High Tech
So modern day USA you say?

Africa in the year 2500. seriously, African military hijinks are the stuff of legend.

I also read that screencap.

sorry but that's just not true.

this kind of technological development requires huge amounts of capital, resources, and people manage it all. you need a gigantic industry base to manufacture electronic components that we consider "basic", and generally you need a larger global network or trade supply because you're not going to find all the rare minerals you need in your 20km2 tribal territory.

not saying it has to be a western capitalist system, but a tribal society simply wouldn't be able to develop this kind of technology.

>OP is pondering choosing between "space aliens" and "plotonium" for where his African super robots came from
>"ACKTCHUALLY, that isn't realistic!"

did you even read the post I responded to before you decided to be a fucking idiot today?

HAVE NO STYLE
WE HAVE NO GRACE
THESE ANONS ARE A WASTE OF SPACE

>NEED
>TO
>STOP
>THIS
>SHIT
>MEME

>Some african scientist figures out how to convert resentment into fuel.

Please let me know which irrelevant European country you are from, so that we can mock you correctly.

This one doesn't make sense, why does he have a modern day rifle fut futuristic everyhting else?

Honestly, I don't think you read my post very thoroughly. I was more making a cultural point that a industrial one (if you'd read the story that I posted with it you'd have seen it was about if feudalism had survived the industrial revolution.). My point is that while people generally assume that as industry develops more 'primitive' social traits fall away, there's no law that says this has to be the case. There are scenarios where a people can build a gigantic industry base, form a widespread trade network, etc, etc, and still maintain a social structure akin to an African hunter-gatherer tribe (not particularly likely scenarios, but still).

I wasn't clear whether OP wanted a tribe numbering a few hundred in our real-world Africa that somehow has robots (which is next to impossible to have developed naturally, with a caveat that I will address below), or if he had some kind of future or alt-history scenario in mind. Were the latter the case, I was imagining a society that had grown within Africa into a vast civilisation with all the population, resources and industrial base to build robots, which had had tribal qualities, and had then shrunk back to a more traditional lifestyle except that they kept their robots.

However, while you make a good point it is not a completely perfect one. There are a few scenarios in which small tribal societies could develop to a high-tech level.

The mistake you make is in assuming first that it has to happen on the same time-scale as our civilisational development, and second that it has to use the same basic technologies. It may be next to impossible to develop a high tech society in 200 years like we've done without our numbers and industry, but in 10k years? And for all you know the robots in question are built from carbon fibre, fibre glass and bio-organic circuitry that wouldn't need rare earth minerals or the like. Granted, we're well into the hypothetical now, but we /are/ talking about African super robots.

You're god damn right we are.

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What the fuck does low culture mean if not lowtech?

Did you forget that George Washington Carver invented the peanut?

youtube.com/watch?v=vlgtYDt7c6U

>m-m-muh "facts"
YOU LOST you stupid libcuck millennial sjw.

Endless Legend would be a good place to look, if you don't want to buy it just look at screenshots.

>all these /pol/ buzzwords
They can't even think of actual arguments anymore. Sad!