OK, now that we’ve got Assemonite religion all set out, it’s time to look at the law. I roll 2d6-3 for each of the five categories of law, and then average them all out for the overall law level.
Weapons law gets a 6, which is high-moderate. This kind of the law is also the only one that gets specific guidelines for each level in the various versions of Traveller, so I can tell you that Amon Assemon forbids all firearms except for shotguns, which I can’t imagine being overly useful on such a small moon. That might challenge the sort of technolibertarianism I was seeing in the moon’s culture, as it is a governmental intrusion into individual liberties, but perhaps not. After all, those Google techies that I used to run with who are my main model for such are mostly liberal-leaning well-off urban folk. Exactly the sort of person I, at least, expect to support gun control.
Further cementing that technolibertarianism is the trade law level, which comes out a 3, the highest level still considered low. It seems like the Assemonite Parliament has generally taken a free-trade, laissez-faire stance. It might be described, perhaps, as a frontier kind of stance. I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet how similar Amon Assemon feels, to me, to a sort of queer-ass Western setting (in which the colonialist idea of terra nullius, “no man’s land”, happens to be true cuz moon). Scattered homesteads with no real town except maybe the spaceport, and relatively few restrictions on commerce? Yeah, that’s a bit Wild West. I guess we can sum up Amon Assemon as “technolibertarian Firefly written by flamboyant, non-assimilationist queers” ~ I’m into it.
What about when someone done me wrong on this moon? Remember that Traveller splits that into criminal and civil law. Criminal law comes up with a law level of 7, or high. OK, forget the technolibertarianism ~ or, maybe, don’t. As a leftist anarchist, I’ve seen how rightist versions of anarchism can allow fascism to foster (the liberal problem), invite fascism (the anarchocapitalist option), or even be identical to fascism (the so-caled “Third Way”, a.k.a. esoteric anarchism, a.k.a. cryptofascism, a.k.a. anarchofascism, a.k.a. the alt-right). Queer fascism is also totally, and sadly, a thing. Maybe Amon Assemon has begun to shift in such a direction. We’ll be able to judge better when it comes to rolling the personal freedoms law level, but we have established that there is at least a little bit of the draconian to their legal codes.
How litigious are they? Rolling for it, we find that civil law is at a solidly high level of 8. As intense as the punishments can be for breaking the law, losing a lawsuit is worse. Considering that the highest law level a representative democracy can roll in this system is a 9, Amon Assemon is practically the worst. Let’s see how permissive it is with personal freedoms, the stat I consider the primary indicator of fascism. We roll another 8. Yep, this technolibertarian individualist queer paradise has rotted from within and become a totalitarian state. I imagine it still looks like the Wild West to Ishee, a place where queer people can learn and grow to find and become themselves, a place where a body can settle in with a good-sized parcel of land and live by the fruits of their own labor, but that is a mask ~ only a little true ~ or what is actually a tyrannical and intrusionist government.
I’m starting to feel even more sympathetic to that radical direct democracy rebel group. I’d even call them freedom fighters.
The overall law level is the average of the other levels, which is 6.8 ~ just shy of a high level of law. It’s only their dedication to laissez-faire free trade that prevents them from achieving high. Their public relations stance probably makes more of this economic freedom than it deserves. Tyrants always like to make out like their defenders of freedom, after all.
Another key indicator of a planet’s level of fascism is how progressive their culture is. Amon Assemon has few enough people, and a democratic enough government, that this is a flat 2d6 roll. An 8 means the moon ends up with a conservative (barely) attitude, which adds +3 to the roll for the culture’s progressiveness action. Whatever that ends up being, however, I think it’s fair to say that we’ve established a fairly right-wing vision of a queer homeland. It’s not one I share, but there are qweens out there for whom it would sound glorious. That 2d6+3 roll shakes out as an 11, indicating an indifferent action. That’s kind of an awkward term ~ it means that they lack a drive to progress and change, but also lack a drive to resist it. This leads to an almost immeasurably slow rate of change in their society. That seems about right for the right-wing queers I’ve met in my life.
Perhaps luckily, the 2d6 roll to determine how aggressive the Assemonites are comes up 8 ~ unaggressive. However, the accompanying 2d6 roll to determine their actions is a 3, which means they’re militant. These are the fascists against which appeasement might work ~ they flout their military strength and many openly advocate for military solutions to their problems, but they prefer compromise to action. Their bark is worse than their bite, because they won’t actually attack unless backed into a corner or given absolutely none of what they want. This doesn’t make their diplomats any easier to deal with, incidentally, because it means they’re bullies who bluff up a big intimidating pose and ask for more than you can give in an attempt to convince you to “compromise” and give them what they actually want, and maybe a bit more. I think this is what Trump wants the American populace to think he is.
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