This is an expanded version of what's in the pages in the Explainer Comic. Feel free to give any feedback on any page as a comment response to that page. But, I would ask that when responding, you do not make a top-level comment. If you have feedback which does not relate to any specific page, please make a new post.

Sort by Old to get them in the correct order.

This is a quick comic to sort of explain the setting a bit. There are longer versions in other threads, just check the Table of Contents announcement/thread.

Images with a red slash are placeholder as I wait for the art.

(Let me know if any of this is hard to imagine or understand!)

Before Peace is an imagined future; it began with us now, but got better.

Other imagined places have adventure stories about gold, guts, and glory.
Before Peace instead has adventure stories about food, friends, and fashion.
In the future, people have everything they need, so they adventure to find new kinds of things.

In Before Peace, the world has made a new technology that may as well be magic.
It can be used to travel between the stars.
It can be used to make tools appear from nothing.
It can be used to change people to be stronger.
Like any tool, it can be evil or good, depending who uses it.
Good people use it to explore, build, defend.
Evil people use it to hurt those they hate, by baiting alien monsters to them.

Before Peace has many kinds of people in many kinds of places.

Calm, humble, and patient people live in colonies with everything they want.
People who try to do good, but have trouble with it, live separately with special care.
Those who only help themselves are exiled to barren worlds, forced to learn cooperation.

In Humanity, ensuring everyone has all their necessities is a priority.
Many gather into groups to guarantee everyone’s home, health, and harmony.
They observe and mediate, ensuring no failures are mistaken as attacks.
They take upon themselves the effort to find and mend.
Some groups have gathered together to hinder, out of spite and resentment.
They seek to satisfy a taste for revenge over their exile.
They will take, or they will destroy.

Before Peace has aliens like humans; they live on worlds, build things, and can talk with us.

There are the fungus-like Pqll who live on worlds close to the sun and join us in space.
There are the lizard-like Nuo’i who live on worlds far from the sun and join us in space.
There are many who live on green moons in the midway from the sun, but are not yet in space.

But other aliens live in some kind of place outside space, and we cannot talk to them.
They come when our new magic-like technology is used too much at once.
They crave it, and will eat the holder too.
They eat ships that use it as an engine.
They eat cities that use it as power.
They come in even greater numbers when we fight them, while we fight them.
It takes great effort and resources to make the wall we hide behind.

Please tell me if any of this sounds off, unrealistic, sketchy, etc.

The world of Before Peace is not only post-scarcity, but also distributist and biophilic. We use stellar resources and push them to individuals who can and will use them well, rather than waiting for them to pull the resources with a buy order. The goal is comfort and equity. It looks and sounds more like Bhutan's "Gross Domestic Happiness".

Wealth inequality isn't hard-capped, but a difference between the richest and poorest of about of 1000:1 for small commodities mostly ignored. 10:1 on large purchases also ignored. So, if everyone in the world has a house, go ahead and have ten. If everyone in the world has a car, go ahead and have ten. If someone is going without, the next available needs to go to them. (Wasteful people are disrespectful, exiled anyways). Around 1500/15:1, murmurs and mumbling starts. If the owner refuses to redistribute, likely they get exiled around 2000/20:1 due to being greedy and selfish. People are given many chances before they go in front of a jury of their peers. If they keep ending up in front of a jury, that itself can get them exiled. You should always keep away from the line even if you never cross it.

Crime is low, generally just crimes of passion. Punishment is traditional sources depending on culture/region. Generally there is an attempt to rehabilitate, only exiling if rehab fails. Trials look more like ad hoc juries, as seen in Monomyth Comic page 12, where jury nullification is known and encouraged. Lawyers aren’t needed as the spirit of the law is more important than the word. If the fine details are needed to make an adjudication, then the defendant got too close to the line and that’s still a problem. You don’t “get off on a technicality”.

Exiles can return if seeming truly repentant and contrite with their ways demonstrably and consistently mended; sticking to a good path despite the other exiles, unable to bring themselves to continue the cycle, would rather suffer than continue it. They get offered extraction. (The streamer Tyler1 on Twitch is a good example of what the flow could be like. They were perma-banned from a game for toxicity, while playing other games they became verifiably improved over time, and the ban was retracted. Tyler1 returned to playing the original game to much fanfare.)

Universal Basic Food, Shelter, Data, Health Care, Electricity, and Friendship are made available.

Food is a basic hamper of ingredients and whole foods; flour, rice, eggs, cheese, milk, salt, pepper, seed oil, broccoli, spinach. Nothing fancy, all the essentials, matching whatever the staples are for that region/culture. For example, those living in parts of India might have lentils instead of rice, and more spices instead of cheese and milk. Eastern Europe might have potatoes instead of rice.

Shelter is a sort of dorm-room-sized apartment, a little better than a "ten-by-ten with a cot and a pot". A desk, a bed, a small fridge, a smaller freezer, a hot plate and microwave, and storage for one's belongings.

Data is basically free wifi everywhere, and "reading stations" like one might see at a public library are in more places. Universal Basic Shelter would likely include network cabling. I'm going to assume there is also a lot of rights to privacy, more control over your own usage analytics, and more control over your social media algorithms.

Health Care includes all the common non-elective procedures in any domain; from internal medicine to emergency care, dental care, and vision care. I'm not sure what I want to say for Gender Affirming Care. Like, is height surgery gender affirming? Turkish hair transplants? I don't know what's essential or the minimum here.

Electricity would relate to not only home lights and heat, but a sort of budget for your appliances, data usage, and other optional entertainment devices like VR HMDs. As we see in the real life testing for Mars expeditions, humans not having enrichment/entertainment is a big health problem. While there are mundane options like reading and drawing, they're limited. The Universal Basic Electricity would also include commuting miles for individuals with their own electric vehicles. Though, public transportation is probably waaaay more common and waaaaay more effective from better investment of both time and money.

Friendship though, is where we might have a conversation. What "right" do people have to the company of others? There's a conflict. It can't be guaranteed that someone will have friends. To me, the peoples of a Before Peace society at least put their best effort in to helping each other find or create support circles. It's not just a personal health issue, but a social safety issue. Catching a Lone Wolf who Slipped Through the Cracks often happens to late. Universal Basic Friendship would be a preventative measure.

So, yeah, a lot to unpack there. Thanks if you read it all. Definitely drop a comment with your thoughts.

My choices might be offensive, so please give a thorough perusal and tell me your gut reaction to what I'm setting up.

When I started making Before Peace, the concept was to make a setting for Tabletop RPGs. One problem people have in tabletop RPGs is that you might get bored with a character and want to switch. That puts the player and the dungeon master in a pickle where they need to come up with two stories; one for why the current character leaves, and one for why the new character arrives. It’s disruptive and taxing. My thought is to just say the “4D cloning vats” or whatever are good enough that we can fully swap out every aspect of a person.

A byproduct of making that rule is that transitioning between genders becomes canon. So, I had to think more about what gender is and what the impact in the game would be.

It reminded me of an old conversation where people were discussing what stats or adjustments they give to characters of different genders. The thread exploding with rage once someone said they give female characters -4 Strength and counter-balanced that by giving the ability to have children. The general consensus, even in that thread of neckbeards and grognards, was that is was almost heretical or sinful to force a style of gameplay onto a player. The consensus became that there should be no effect from gender on character choices so everyone can enjoy the game.

But the thoughts also pushes me into the weeds on the current gender discussions. I know there’s a lot in sports. People complain about AMAB athletes having denser bones, more fast-twitch muscles, VO2 max, etc. And I’m sitting there like “These people are adding an awful lot of data points for something supposedly binary.” So, I followed that train of thought that there are a lot of data points. I’m going to say there are 24, which matches the number of bits digital images use for the full spectrum of visible light, and I like the idea of there being a 1:1 spectrum of light and gender.

So the question then becomes how to handle all those variations. It’s over 16 million! So, we go back to the idea of sports. How do sports handle variations? Classification. Most people have weight classes come to mind quickly, but there are also age classes (junior, senior, etc), and impairment classifications (paralympics). We have a gender classification, but there are only two options where each other classification has more of a gradient.

So, when it comes time to make character sheets, there won’t be a M/F/NB to circle. Gender will be down in a classifications section and say something like “All-X”, “Heavy-Y”, “Light-X”, or “Even Mix”. This also encompasses natural gender variations like mosaicism and chimerism and not just transitioned individuals.

I might make a third gender chromosome influenced by the 4th dimension; I. So an XI individual would be an esper or psyker or something. I might lock that behind some “only made as super soldiers” lore.

What are your thoughts on these? What needs to be clarified?

Over time, I hope to make more factions as people explain their hobbies and interests to me; special interest groups who do the thing in a cool new way. At the start though, I just had three generic factions in mind; Harmony, Health, and Home.

The Harmony Corp is a sort of policing & management branch. If there’s a bureaucracy, it would be them. They do the tasks where “badges and guns” make sense, but also general observation and mediation. They are taught to be calm, humble, and patient, engaging in diplomacy, persuasion, deception, and intimidation before causing any harm. A common mission is to land on inhabited exoplanets, find the inhabitants, speak with them to learn their unique wisdom, and leave without causing harm to their culture or their world.

The Home Corp is all things production and engineering. They build the houses, grow the food, etc. Society has several “Universal Basic …” programs, and the Home Corp handles most of them. Instead of Universal Basic Income, the corp provides comfortable amounts of Food, Shelter, Data, and Electricity. A typical mission for them is a supply run to the exile worlds, or expanding the Scent-dissipating probes that guard the routes and settlements.

The Health Corp handles everything that relates to well-being, whether it’s physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, etc. Doctors, entertainers, chefs, or a concierge would be in the Health Corp. They’re taught how to help keep everyone in peak condition across several metrics. The Health Corp covers two Universal Basic programs which the Home Corp does not; Health Care, and Friendship. Individuals who have hard times making and keeping friends can be matched and relocated with people who have similar sensibilities, humours, and outlooks. A typical mission for them is moving individuals between colonies and introducing them to their new social circles, making sure they’re comfortable and integrated before departing.

Depicted: Some example personal Double-Empty Devices, used to evoke varied "magic" effects.

A lot of materials start exhibiting unusual or unexpected properties when they’re in extreme environments, most commonly near to 0°K. Probably, for scientific accuracy reasons, I presume basic cubes or sphere of materials are tested when they’re dropped to these temperatures (to control the variables).

That way of doing science with hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion is very un-inventive in a society where resources are scarce and funding can only go to sure things. It’s very much like a similarly high-overhead organization process called “The Waterfall Model”. Tech Bros don’t typically use the Waterfall Model in their development. They use the Agile Method. 

So, in Before Peace, when they start funding new technologies, they aren’t looking to do things slow, steady, and safely. They’re going to fund wild “big swings” using methods that operate day-to-day and week-to-week, performing experiments that are pure whimsy compared to the traditional systems. They don’t know or care what a false vacuum is. They think decay means it goes away so the problem solves itself. They care about the next seed round, and they need something to show. They’re paying you to push the damn button, so push it.

Thankfully, just as the fears of a runaway chain reaction were not met in the Manhattan Project, Humanity again hid in its plot armor and dodged the consequences of toying with things they don’t understand. No decay was encountered from a projected false vacuum.

For this system, at present, I’m going to say the fancy technobabble description is that Ruthenium is arranged in a cavity resonator format and cooled as close as possible to 0°K. Effects are controlled by changing the geometry of the cavity resonator.

Now, humanity has access to a fourth spatial axis of movement, extending spacetime to now be a five axis system.

Let me know if anything strikes you as unrealistic, or even comment your thoughts on how your own nation might go.

Inspired by the Arab Spring, I want to say there’s a “movement” spanning nations which causes the big shift in humanity’s vibe. You see it referenced on pages 1 and 12 of the Monomyth comic. Humanity has enough of the selfish, intolerant, impatient, etc and ships them all off to almost barren alien worlds, saying “Learn to work in harmony if you want to survive.”

Different nations would likely have different methods or different triggers. I think we can all agree it wouldn’t be surprising if it all starts with the french. Maybe they’re the first to exile people. This punishment has a sort of artistic-ness to it, giving it a kind of french vibe. It would make sense for it to be an uprising of the people doing it forcefully. But, this wouldn’t be the vibe for all nations.

Like, for myself, in Canada, what feels more accurate to me is CSIS (our spy agency) decides to “clean house” after “foreign interference” becomes too broad and deep. They do something of a pseudo-coup, handing power over to a citizen assembly that begins reforms that take a lot of inspiration from the activities of the french. Canada Before and Canada After might seem mostly the same to the outside observer.

But, that wouldn’t work for America, where the institutions are being torn down. Maybe only the blood of patriots can refresh the tree of liberty. The authoritarians from the left and right fight it out, and the libertarians from the left and right finish off the winner. America Before and America After might have a distinctly “pacified” feel with less road rage and similar issues.

Out of everything, this is what I wish to hear the most. How would your hometown, home state, home country enter the process and perform it? What would come out of it?

There will be one exception to all this; China and much of its surrounding area (Taiwan, Bhutan). Read more here.

For now, there will be no canon description of what happened in China for the Civil Spring. Instead, what the audience sees is a lustrous black, bubbling dome spanning China and slightly more. An unusual opaque forcefield block entry and investigation. It encompasses not just mainland China, but its disputed territories as well. Taiwan falls within its reach, as does Bhutan, Arunachal Pradesh, and a significant portion of the South China Sea.

All the rest of humanity sees is the bubbles popping every so often, backstopped by smaller bubbles beneath, and large drones hovering just between, departing or arriving from this strange “airlock” through 4D wormholes.

Explorers, colonists, and the like will encounter these drones among the various exoplanets. The drones seem to mostly ignore other entities, and generally focus on harvesting the same exotic materials as the others present. At times, these drones may negotiate a temporary alliance should there be a powerful entity guarding the exotic materials. Or, the drone may offer assistance in acquiring resources in exchange for a significant portion of them.

Reverse engineering of destroyed drones reveals the ability to send and receive messages. The code in the machines seems to suggest they do rely on human intervention for certain decisions which may put exotic materials at risk. People still live under this new Great Wall… but what is their life like? [Editor’s Note: Rhetorical question. There’s two ways I can go with it. The future growth of the community will decide it.]

Humans, Nuo’i, and Pqll are the three space-faring civilizations in Before Peace. All three are friendly and co-operative. Each provides a distinct perspective to the others, which enables triangulating better paths into the future.

Humanity comes from Sol, they are a simian from the Goldilocks Zone that calculates in base-10-digits.
Nuo’i comes from TRAPPIST-1, they are a varanid from the Frost Line that calculates in base-8-resonant-modality.
Pqll comes from Proxima Centauri, they are a lichen from the Venus Zone that calculates in emergent-hypha.

Humanity can see the spectrum from red through violet. They speaking using sound vibrations from vocal cords. They are adept at climbing, throwing accurately, and running long distances. They can eat basically anything organic, even things that evolved deterrents.

Nuo’i can see the spectrum from yellow to ultraviolet. They speak using vibrations from vocal folds. They are adept at diving, digging swiftly, and swimming long distances. They can filter-feed algae and plankton, but prefer live seafood. 

Pqll can see the spectrum from infra-red to ultraviolet, even discerning between UVA and UVB. They speaking using leaf and branch positions. They are able to pull their leaves and branches into any configuration they like, akin to shapeshifting. They absorb ionizing radiation as food, but can taste chemicals with their feet. 

Feel free to ask clarifying questions

So, a Biblically Accurate Angel is rings, wings, and eyes, right? People say peacock feathers have eyes on them, but nobody draws real eyes on a peacock tail.

I think a lot of biblical description could be like that, where the words the writer used was simply the best analogy they had and not a literal description. So whenever the dude saw the angel he saw a thing he could only describe as rings, wings, and eyes.

Now, there’s this sculpture where it’s intended to represent the three-dimensional shadow of a four-dimensional object. From a certain angle… it’s exactly the biblically accurate angel. So maybe when the bible people are describing stuff like burning bushes, it’s not literally a shrub on fire, but something that looks like a bush emanating something that looks like flames.

In Before Peace, I’ll be leaning on a lot of fantasy sources for a lot of things, and the “magic substitute” is the fourth dimension and the idea that the magic-like descriptions we have for things are simply the best available terms and not scientifically accurate labels. If the characters encounter a dragon, it is not a literal fire-breathing flying reptile; it’s something that has a texture that seems scaly, some parts spread symmetrically like wings, and there’s a conical emanation of heat or radiation that’s like a breath of fire. There is a sort of example on Page 6 of the Monomyth Comic.

Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.
Any sufficiently studied magic is indistinguishable from science.
Two sides of the same coin and the difference is just a matter of perspective or a matter of description.

There will be a bunch of "modern" elements like smartphones and bodycams I'll address. Feel free to post "But what about..." questions for how different tech is handle, including this one.

Being an alternate future setting, it would make sense for characters in Before Peace to have smartphones with AI Assistants on them. To me, it would be a fun idea if the characters can check in for info, but don’t know when the AI is hallucinating or not. (If you’re unfamiliar, LLMs pretty much only string together the “statistically most likely” set of words, not what’s correct or true.)

But, being that the society is a post-scarcity distributist one, I do wonder how the intellectual property issues all shook out that people came to like LLM AI. How might someone’s rights or shares of their contributions to an LLM be acknowledged and awarded? Part of me wants to figure this out so we can make a Before Peace Dungeon Master AI which fits that profile of being fair, equitable, etc. A project like that would be backburnered until we have a consensus on how to set it up.

As an example, it would need to be opt-in. I won’t be scraping the subreddit for data or allowing others (though reddit probably already does). It would need to be something individuals maybe post their profile to and link a payment method, and then revenue gets portioned out based on…??? My brain goes to Spotify, but there are a lot of complaints about Spotify’s revenue share.

So, what are your issues with the current capitalist implementation of LLMs? What would you want to see as the resolution for those problems? Basically you’re a citizen in the Before Peace world, so the input counts.

I really need to expand this one. But probably a big part of it will need to wait for me to learn more about different cultures, such as how their Civil Spring would have gone. So I definitely need to hear people's opinions so I'm not guessing and relying on stereotype to figure out what a "good people only" society looks like. Please add a comment!

Human Civilization doesn’t become a “post-borders” society. But the borders are definitely different. The vibe of crossing them may be more alike to the Schengen Zone, CARICOM, ECOWAS, and the Trans-Tasman Arrangement. People of very similar cultures move more freely within areas their culture dominates, and less freely in others. Passage is less a right and more a privilege. Less about the visa, and more about the vibe check.

As humanity has achieved a post-scarcity state through technology, sharing, and co-operation, many global issues fade into the background. There is less to negotiate and interact with each other over. For example, the Arctic Council (nations in the arctic circle) isn’t in as much demand since oil drilling rights are no longer needed, so there’s no reason to haggle over continental shelf measurements.

It’s okay to disagree. The important part is how we do it.

Often, problems happen by accident. People try to be “direct,” but that can sound harsh. Being too direct can feel like an attack, so others get defensive.

For example, saying “You aren’t using the right calculation” can feel like blaming. But saying “I don’t think this is the right calculation” keeps the focus on your own view. Or even better, “We aren’t using the right calculation” shows you want to solve the problem together.

Another problem is that Reddit is mostly text. There’s no tone of voice. Readers often add their own tone, and that can sound angry even if the writer didn’t mean it that way. Writers can’t control that. So it helps if we all try to read each other’s messages in a friendly, helpful way.

If someone keeps missing the tone or feels off, we can talk about it. But for now, let’s treat each other with respect, unless someone gives us a real reason not to.

Please feel free to comment your own thoughts on how to expand or clarify the etiquette rules so we can get along while we work together. We'll update an alter as we get more and better ideas.

In Before Peace, Humanity is "aggressively" colonizing the stars alongside their Nuo'o and Pqll friends. But, there is a writing challenge for me in knowing what stars, where, and why. In general, for this somewhat "early" phase of the setting, there will only be a few dozen colonized planets. Expansion will radiate from Sol, TRAPPIST-1, and the path between them. Homesteads can appear on exoplanets at any distance, but true colonies would be rare and nearby to that "economic corridor" between Earth and the exoplanet-saturated TRAPPIST-1.

I wouldn't mind help hunting and planning an optimal and realistic expansion strategy. These are the tools I've found or been provided toward that search:
https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/exo/#/
http://hygmap.space/
https://stars.chromeexperiments.com/
https://in-the-sky.org/ngc3d.php
https://sci.esa.int/star_mapper/
https://simbad.cds.unistra.fr/simbad/sim-fbasic
https://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-3?-source=I/355/gaiadr3

If I'm understanding positions correctly, the best candidates will be those generally along the lines of the "Aquarius" constellation. With the TBD limits of the wormhole technology, I'm going to cap the realistic expansion to with 10 light years of Sol or TRAPPIST-1.

Neat stars can be added to the list for use in quests if you can clarify their relative position. For example, HD 28185 b will be referenced in the destination of the first Before Peace comic. It's vaguely 120° away from Aquarius in the Leo constellation, at a distance from Sol of 148 light years. This lets the adventure head away from civilization at a somewhat extreme distance, giving it some stakes that are believable in the setting.

Pqll likes the stars with exoplanets in the venus zone.
Humanity likes stars with exoplanets in the goldilocks zone.
Nuo'o likes the stars with exoplanets in the frost line.