On Scouting

(Note: this bluesheet was given to Jim, but never published in game.)

The ultimate purpose of Scouting is the perpetuation of human society in an ethical form. This purpose is accomplished through a strenuous training regimen of the finest minds, while they are young and pliable, looking for those who can effectively serve the greater good. The goal of scout training is two-fold:

One of the primary conclusions of psychohistory is that a basically ethical society can never be made immune to Chaos. Unfortunately, this conclusion comes with a horrible converse, that an unethical, amoral, or clearly evil society, can (especially through the use of psychohistorical skill), be made permanently enduring.

Though psychohistory is in some ways the most powerful skill taught to scouts, it is by no means the only one. The tools of scouting, from Knot Tying to Grand Strategy are dangerous weapons when applied by one without a noble heart.

Thus the Phoenix and Eternal scouts are put through the most strenuous of ethical testing, in which far more potentially qualified scouts are washed out than are ever accepted. This system is designed to prevent the nadir event, in which a fully trained psychohistorian is loosed on society with all of the powerful tools necessary to remake it in an unethical, permanent image. All Scouts are pledged to restrict access to psychohistorical knowledge to only those who have proven themselves through the Phoenix or Eternal tracks. Aberrations must be dealt with swiftly, for the benefit of all.

(GM Note: This does not mean you can't share the stuff in the psychohistory or scouting greensheets with people (PCs/trusted NPCs/whatever) for the purposes of discussion and planning. It means specifically that you should not allow anyone who has not undergone the equivalent of the full scouting level of ethical testing to gain any Psychohistory skill ranks. To your knowledge, Psychohistory skill can only be taught to people who have at least 8 levels each in: Weather Prediction; Tactical Psychology or Propaganda; History or Leadership; Planetary or Galactic Politics; and Small Unit Tactics or Grand Strategy.)

On Boy and Girl Scouts

Early Scoutmasters quickly realized that one unified training regimen was impossible, in that it failed in almost half of all candidates so trained. The solution to this was the realization that gender was not, in fact, a symmetric transformation across psychohistorical equations. Gender in this case refers not to simple biology, but to the ingrained human characteristics that this biology has impressed upon the human species. Chancel Rowland described it as the "Yin/Yang nature of human development: while not all boys are dominated by their Yang essence, Population State averages indicate that we should continue to use Yang training techniques for boys, and Yin for girls."

This will of course leave out numerous highly qualified candidates, as they find themselves being trained via techniques dictated by biology rather than psychology. Unfortunately, the refinement in psychological technique necessary to properly assign all talented individuals to their appropriate training regimen at the necessary early age is beyond all but the most talented psychologists. This bottleneck in selection criteria force the Scouts to recruit and train by averages rather than discrete individuals, and they thus lose many candidates.

As technology advances, and the specifics of each person's biology becomes less and less formative of his social mores, it is even possible that the currently accepted gender roles may invert, or that people may attain a single psychological gender. However, this sort of utopian equality is selected against during periods of chaos and oppression, when biological factors once more dominate.

The Detrimental Result of Gender Separation

While the Yin and Yang analogy of gender separation for successful training does result in significant increases in successfully trained Scouts, it also introduces a significant flaw in the system. It was discovered by early Scouts that those fully trained using the Yang methodology were unable to successfully negotiate the transition from order to chaos. Given their training and the resulting embedded ethos, they almost universally died struggling against the onset of Chaos, almost dooming the long term scouting program from the beginning. It was only the severe isolation of various societal sectors (completely unlinked Population States) that allowed early Scouts to survive.

As technology advanced, increasing levels of communication and travel had the effect of bringing all societal sectors together as completely isolated Population States were no longer possible. Seeing the danger to scouting presented by the inability of Boy Scouts to be preserved in stable societal units during the chaotic fall of other units, once all units merged, several plans were devised to rectify the situation. (Superior (for this purpose) Girl Scout training inured female Scouts from the effects of chaos, but Scouting was unwilling to lose a full half of its potential population by abandoning one of the two training regimens.)

Salvation plans basically fell into two categories, Jumping and Isolation. Some of the initial colonization of the homeworld's system were scouting attempts to set up separate societies to solve the Yang-training failure point. Unfortunately, true isolation was necessary for this plan to work. As technology improved, the level of isolation necessary to maintain the trained force increased. While it is possible that several of these isolated scouting outposts still exist as caches against the fall of the main human civilization, the impossibility of coordination between these disparate branches made them ineffective when it came to maintaining civilization.

Thus, the development of Jumping as the primary technique for both preventing all fully trained Boy Scouts from being destroyed during the onset of Chaos, and allowing the preservation of Boy Scouting as a more ideologically pure institution across the Chaos boundary. Once Jumping was instituted, it also became clear that a Jumped Boy Scout was far more effective than a Maintained Girl Scout at reshaping society after a Chaos transition, for two reasons: a Jumped Scout has not been personally touched by Chaos and thus has purer ideals; and a Jumped Phoenix Scout, as a completely independent and unconnected individual, is an ideal Lever for societal change. (See separate file on Jumping.)

Contact and Recognition Protocols

Because jumped Boy Scouts completely lose touch with society, even to the extent of the destruction of all records, the following protocols were established to allow the contact and verification of credentials between Phoenix and Eternal scouts. <Secret handshakes and the like follow along with various computer signed certificates and other ID protocols.>



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