Asim in Pirates Of Penzance In Space

Asim details (social):

In feudal and similar such societies, towns form, often at borders, as tax havens for trade and specialization. Many old cities were once only nominally under the control of a local lord, who ceded control of it specifically to allow necessary things to take place without his intervention. So it was on Asim, where towns such as Moore and Toqueville and Ashton popped up over the centuries to centralize certain relatively specialized forms of production, or to allow trade to occur. Such specializations on that level, far below administrative, seldom are anything but apprenticeships and family businesses.
In technologically backward places, such families may have the usual outsize families, but whereas farmers always have a job for another farmhand, a blacksmith may not have a use for another blacksmith. A few decades before the invasion of Asim, these children began to be sent to boarding schools, where such families were assured their children would learn a trade they could return home and practice, and be assured a wealthier, happier, richer life than they had themselves or could otherwise afford to give them. Unfortunately, these were little better than sweatshops, with relatively high casualty rates. The Ashton Trade School would teach its boarders only one or two specific tasks, such as how to make a chair or how to create concrete, and have that child do only that, selling the goods on the market. This allowed a maximum of productivity for a minimum of investment, and with the Drinaxian invasion, there was never any consequence.
A large number of teens came back from those schools with inseparable same-sex ties. This has been a politically charged subject.

Asim geographical details:
One of Asim's exports is lumber. While other materials are quite sufficient, and wood is easily simulated, the relative inexpense of lumber from a lightly populated garden world, locally milled, plus the exploitative relationship with trade, plus the prestige of *real wood from a garden world,* makes it a raw material in some demand.

Livaw is the capital city of Asim's 5 million denizens. Initially its reconstruction under the Drinaxian occupation was performed by conscript labor, largely devoted to housing for troops and administrative staff, and to the spaceport. The expressway around Livaw has always been infamous for its poor planning and bad traffic.

Restoration of Moore's Leviathan, the central feature of a park on Asim, has yet to secure funding. It was damaged in the fighting with "Fundies," a conservative Foundation-affiliated terrorist organization, after the main fighting on Asim was long over. The park is hoping to restore Moore's Leviathan, a presently unique half-excavated megafauna skeleton buried in a hillside. It's not as big as some existing megafauna on other worlds, much less some extinct megafauna in other worlds' fossil records, but Asimi paleontology is relatively underdeveloped.
In the town of Moore, a curious superstition has taken root regarding an old clock tower overlooking the town square. Many people claim to know someone who heard firsthand that a child went missing playing inside its gears and has never been seen again. Versions of this story may include morbid descriptions of a child dying when their coat or arm is caught in the gears, either by means of thirst, starvation, or the gears themselves; other renditions may posit a gang of runaway children kidnaps other children and takes them to the clocktower, threatening them with such fates if they do not fall in line. Given the sheer number of such stories one would think Moore has a whole generation of missing children, but no particular number seem any more missing than usual. There may have never even been an inciting incident, though often there are events which do spin off such derivatives. Unfortunately, Moore town recordkeeping is not historically very complete or dedicated, relying on small town oral history, and as the town grew this has become impractical. Scholars likely never know for certain the origin of these stories, and the townsfolk of Moore will likely have their lurid phantasy of countless missing children indefinitely.

The equivalent of Manila folders on Asim are called Draken folders, for a similar reason. The material used to produce them is grown in the Draken region, a primarily agricultural region with a number of factories devoted to textiles, wood products, hemp products (or their equivalent), etc. In a population of only 5 million, there's really only one factory that produces them, but costs are kept relatively low because there are other options. Draken folders and Draken envelopes are, however, fairly fashionable, being a pleasant shade without added dyes, albeit still within the broad range of natural browns one finds on Asim.

Asim wildlife:
While Asim is frightfully brown in the visible spectrum, the ultraviolet spectrum glows with activity. This was largely unknown until very recently, when naturalists began exploring the largely unpopulated garden world's more distant corners, bringing a variety of newly imported scientific equipment. Now, many ordinary families get magazines and coffee table books of grayscale long-exposure photographs of the flora and fauna of Asim glowing in bright ultraviolet patterns. The same is true to a lesser extent in the infrared, though it's seldom as popular.
The variety and complexity of biomes on Asim are roughly what you would expect from a planet with a full ecosystem. Most animals have some similar analogue elsewhere, at least in form and function. This also means there are a few standout and unusual creatures, those who violate the generally brown tone (often flying creatures similar to terrestrial birds), and the sounds of Asim are not less (or more) pleasant than one would expect.

Asimi politics:
The bane of the most rural and mountainous regions are the relatively rare yet rhetorically compelling and ceaselessly unpleasant extremist political factions, those outlawed groups collectively known as Fundies. These are defined by forging a sense of legitimacy by claiming to be the true rulers of Asim, conscripting individuals under threat of violence to their families, armed pathetically enough to be no threat to Drinaxian rule but enough to be lethal to your average rural farming community. Such weapons are always capable of being produced in low technology areas and are rugged, generally akin to AK-47s in their design philosophy: wide tolerances, low tech facilities and robust construction being more important than accuracy. Such caches are frequently seized by Drinaxian troops in often abandoned camps, but there seems to be no end to them.
The word "Foundation" is effectively legally banned except in specific educational contexts. Certainly any political organization which calls itself anything related to the Foundation is a political organization which is immediately destroyed, largely by arrests, or by a violent shootout.
Leftists do exist on Asim; leftist concerns on Asim tend to have different priorities compared to other worlds, and are often concerned with bootstrapping local technology in preparation for a longer general strategy. Some are subtle, and oppressed by Drinaxian occupation forces despite being little threat; some are no better than the Fundies, and may even be called Fundies whether or not they attempt to draw any comparison to or legitimacy from dropping the name of the old despotic regime.
Other political groups tend to be more assimilationist, though with varying priorities, sometimes very regionally specific. It's a simple fact that Drinax can and will stomp Asim into the dirt again if they must to maintain the supply chain to the floating palace.
Nearly all such centrist (and many varyingly secretly Fundie) parties are wholly or completely bankrolled by business interests, both foreign and domestic. These parties are approximately as frustratingly useless as one would imagine. However, there are nevertheless a number of different interests being represented by a number of different parties and platforms, including space development, movements to establish domestic nobility, industry-specific concerns, medical care advocacy, long-term infrastructure projects, higher education, urbanization or protection of rural or environmental lands, and (most pressingly) improved automation and production. There are also movements *against* automation and production improvement, often but not always at least partially aligned with the constellation of right-wing, Fundie and leftist extremist organizations, because the lack of a social safety net for those made redundant by their jobs being automated away or eliminated by foreign trade is most expedient and agreeable to be dealt with by blaming automation or trade, and not the owners of the means of production. Even when the blame is placed correctly, immediate praxis is often still a matter of simply trying to protect the status quo, as attempting to obtain a general income to cover cost of living or other social welfare is usually impractical or directly outlawed.
TL improvement to specific agricultural industries in response to the whims of Drinax have already resulted in changes to the environment which foreign and domestic naturalists show will damage the environment irreparably if continued indefinitely. Overfishing has already impacted once-rich waters, and Drinaxian markets for very specific foods has resulted in the destruction of habitat and overhunting or overharvesting of multiple species already. Some environmentally concerned center-left and leftist organizations have taken to risky forms of direct action, sometimes motivated by a degree of xenophobia but usually also by very valid concerns about environmental damage. Most parties and organizations don't care, though, and some parties are specifically against "foreign meddling" by the occasional naturalist or ecologist from offworld, and identify even domestic environmental concerns with such as a way to discredit reasonable concerns in favor of capitulation, profit, and Drinaxian ties. Generally speaking, the rank and file are more concerned about their jobs than the distant future.

Queer politics on Asim:
One of many unfortunate legacies of the Foundation is a general skepticism of homosexuality, or any form of family which the Foundation felt might reduce the chance of producing more children. While there was no claim of these relationships being *technically morally wrong,* they were *against the plan,* and so they were proscribed or discouraged throughout the period of Foundation rule. As such, they are usually considered unhealthy deviations from the norm. As the sky opens up a bit to the people below, newly middle class families obsess over childrearing theories, often forming new yet very backward and in fact old philosophies that catch on to varying degrees among patriotic Asimi families. One such controversy is a theory that sending children to a same-sex boarding school results in homosexuality and other "disorders." The more likely truth is that the queer dating pool in rural farming communities is dreadfully small, and enough people attending same-sex schools in close, thick quarters means that those who would date each other, can find each other for often the first time. This naturally spreads ideas and awakens knowledge and self-examination, though it also results in bullying and abuse. As a result of this, many many boarding school queer kids have sought jobs as far from their hometowns as possible, often looking for the first chance they could take to get into space.
While things are better off in major cities such as Moore and Livah, and Drinax in particular creates both accidental and deliberate environments where queer community can thrive unharmed, places with relatively low Drinaxian civilian authority will often look upon such places as tainted, or in extreme cases, degenerate.
Many advanced concepts have not yet fully permeated Asim's queer culture. The distinction of sex, sexuality and gender are not fully abstracted from each other for most folks; there is a continuum of gay to trans; and asexual and demisexual aren't really terms they have, but rather some people just are or are not interested, and/or their needs are poorly met.

Arts on Asim:
Within living memory, music was divided between the poor and the Foundation-affiliated. Simpler and more robust instruments, or very precious ones, were passed through families to make holidays and harvests more pleasant or to carry on traditions and spread sorrows and joys. Work songs, travel songs, historical songs, murder ballads and moritats, subversive songs about criminals and enforcement, even occasional hymns, all could be heard performed, taught from mouth to mouth; arias, operas, and eventually recordings for mass consumption of ballads and sanitized folk songs and lofty music from lofty halls, were produced and distributed, sometimes as sheet music, sometimes as choral or band performances, in the last century even as phonograph records.
Under Drinaxian rule, imports have become a very big deal. Even domestic music has been wildly changed by contact with music from the stars. Songs about Aslan raiders and infamous pirates, labor anthems from GeDeCo hellholes, synth musicals, impossible holographic instruments, all have impacted how people think about music on Asim.
Mass produced simple and robust instruments that travel well and require little maintenance, influenced by imported or lofty pre-invasion music, have produced musical styles akin to reggae and ska that are largely unique to Asim and are a minor but valued cultural export.
Whenever a world opens up to trade with a lower-than-average (especially pre-space age) technology base, such as Asim being freed from the Foundation, there's always a brief, low-budget glut of films and other media created for the new market it creates. Sometimes created with wealthy local fools in mind, sometimes created for mass consumption, the main factors are:

Modern movies with modern effects may well be cheap, but they are not as cheap as possible. The same effects and arts that people are used to on such worlds can be created or simulated far more cheaply by TL 13 or 14 technology. Mechanically, doing things in an old-fashioned manner is in fact still very inexpensive, so even a flick made with hobbyist film and budget practical effects is cheaper to produce on many worlds than it would be on Asim, and this remains true until and unless the domestic technology base improves.

These arts are competing with local arts and crafts, often at a significant advantage, and always from a position of superior knowledge and infrastructure. Hand-knit lace is horrendously expensive, so producing a run of machine-produced lace is extremely likely to be a hit on worlds where such machinery is unavailable. A world where drive-in theatres are modern technology will simultaneously be inundated with everything from expensive high-budget AAA interactive holo shows, to cheap reels of computer animated 3D movies, to painfully archaic B&W action serials. The market eventually settles out and exploitative, cheaper things stop being produced and marketed entirely.

The same is true of vehicles, contrivances, and conveniences. If it's cheap and can be sold, it will be marketed; it may well be bought. If it's cheap enough, it's usually worth the risk.

Asim in particular has a population so low and destitute that the market it opened up was very small, and the only foreign films are from offworld, as it's hard for anything to be foreign in a population of 5 million. Likewise, there is vanishingly little social mobility or wealth distribution, so this applies mostly to post-Foundation appointed administrators, bean-counters, colonial government officials from Drinax, and their immediate retinue, as I assume most folks on Asim don't get much social mobility or money.

Advanced technology on Asim:
There are many barriers to high technology on Asim. Anything leased, or built with planned obsolescence is useless to most folks; something must be able to be used for an extended period of time or serviced and repaired by an end-user, or there's little point. Wealthy folks and hobbyists maintain small spaces, akin to BBSs, that are accessible by repeater the moment one enters the Asim system, but individual nodes may be down at any given time due to any number of minor possible failure points, and latency is very high compared to modern networks. Livah has a powerful intranet with wide access to extrasolar media, updated by packets from trade with Drinax, mailboats, and independent traders, and it is largely in relation to that network that technological outreach progresses; in a population of five million with only a few relatively major towns, there's little need for more.

Of the private internet spaces that exist, an unsurprising number are distribution systems for pornography, often rather niche.

Turns of phrase:
On Asim, stopgaps are a dirty word. It is not that they are never necessary, but distrust of temporary solutions has developed into a subcultural value among laborers, because any temporary solution is almost certainly going to become protected policy. Unfortunately, this remains true even though it's widely despised, but the acknowledgement of this problem is a frequent source of bitter humor.

Cybernetic Augmentation:
While often out of reach for individuals, when augmentation is available, Asimi folks are usually too pragmatic to worry about appearances. Insofar as augments are common, they are visible; and where style is of equal importance to substance, that visibility tends to push the pragmatic to an ideal akin to parody. The person becoming more machine than man is a sometimes celebrated theme, the mark of a person who puts labor and hard work above foolish concerns, and even the wealthy *pretend* to care about that, often getting optional augmentations that look more comprehensive than they are as a matter of fashion to demonstrate their ruggedness. There's surprisingly little concern for what is perceived as natural.

Names:
Insofar as naming conventions haven't been greatly changed by the invasion, pre-Drinax naming conventions remain fairly common on Asim. Many people are named after various of the Founders, those mythical individuals who set the Plan in motion. Other common naming schema include wildlife or geographical features (Jay, Vale, etc.), abstract qualities (Chastity, Valor), or careers (there are, naturally, an absurd number of people whose name are Shepherd or Farmer.)
Other names vary; often names that sound Western and rural to a Western player's ears, such as the canonical Cleon Hardy.

Party political interests (provisional, awaiting DM approval):
Environmental protection, often but not always aligned with xenophobia, always aligned with very valid fears of exploitation
Assimilation with Drinax, role in Drinaxian politics
Higher education for Asimi citizens
Outright xenophobia
Worker's rights, guarantees of work, employee ownership, protection of farmers from capitalist predation
Food safety
Queer rights (usually aligned with other interests as a minor caucus)
Queer wrongs (homophobia, etc., almost always aligned with other xenophobic, financial and conservative interests)
Protection of coastal waters
Crime prevention
At least three brands of patriotism (Drinaxian, Asimi and Fundie; Foundation-aligned references are functionally illegal except in strictly controlled educational matters or as criticism of their reign.)