Well, Bill, if you dislike my suggestion about the Flight of the Research Director so much...
Hans,
I don't dislike it. I'm just modifying it slightly to make it more plausible.
You know how insanely expensive long distant interstellar travel is in the
OTU. The Research Director will have had to have embezzled millions in order just to cross a subsector or so with a dozen assistants/uplifts and a few tons of equipment/records/embryos.
KInstead of a "Flight", I'm simply suggesting a "Flight With Outside Help".
The question I'd like to explore is: What does society on that world look like in 1115?
Hmm... First, you can arrange your pre-uplift species along a gregarious scale of sorts. Chimps live in the largest social groups, followed by gorillas, followed by the nearly solitary orangs. I'd think the whole "Only Alpha males and near-Alpha males mate" trope seen in chimps and to a lesser extent in gorillas will have been dialed back during uplift. Leaving orangs aside, polygamy and/serial monogamy seem to be a good bet, maybe tilted a bit towards the former more than humans. Matrilineal scent logically follows from that and a tilt towards communal living arrangements, again except for orangs.
The three sentient species places in the overall society would generally reflect their pre-uplift species "gregarious rating" with chimps being "urban", gorillas "suburban", and orangs "rural". Chimps are "joiners", orangs "loners", and gorillas somewhere in between. You can assign probable occupations with this "gregarious scale" too.
For chimps and gorillas, why don't you take some ideas page from the Gampi minor race of
MTU which I stole in turn from the Navajo, Romans, and New Guinea Highlanders and then modified? Children are said to have a "born to" clan and a "born for" clan. The first refers to the mother's clan and the second to the father. The child's names reflects their "born to/for" status. The child is reared by the mother's clan and the father lives there during that process. Clan matriarchs arrange "marriages", and thus births, according to the needs of inter-clan politics. Groups of clans also form broad
gens.
The orangs will be the odd men out in this polygamous structure They're very solitary in the wild and only interact with others when they need to mate and take care of the resulting offspring. They'd be more likely to form nuclear families than even humans are.
A "dietary" scale should be applied to post-uplift behavior also. Although chimps and orangs are omniverous, chimps have been observed hunting and while orangs are simply opportunistic. Gorillas are purely "vegan" of course.
And then there's a "tool usage" scale with orangs on top, chimps in the middle, and gorillas at the bottom.
Let me see if I can dig out
GURPS: Uplift. There should be some ideas there.
Some questions (in no particular order): Where is the world located? I'd like it to be called Pongida, but that would require placing it in one of the sectors that hasn't had all its worlds named yet. (Are there any of them left?)
Any left? I'd say yes, if you are hardcore and only the count names found in
AotI and the few canonical
CT sectors. Draw the line with DGP and everything after DGP on one side and you'll have plenty of room.
In any case it should be: a) Fairly pleasant (It was an Imperial reservation world before); Terran-prime at least. b) Have a population in the millions or low tens of millions. Possibly the high 100,000s, but preferrably at least a few million. c) Be located as close to the Spinward Marches as possible (The last bit isn't strictly necessary, but I'd like to have them close enough to make guest appearances in my campaign
). Putting them in the Marches itself is not possible, I guess. But maybe somewhere in Deneb?
I think reservation status is the key. You can comb through UWP listings looking for that code must faster than anything else. Reservation status doesn't mean no inhabitants either, look at Marastan. In fact, "maintaining" the reservation would be a good job for your arboreal and semi-arboreal Pongs.
Regards,
Bill
