In this past year's tradition, after a couple of days at work where I have some time to write, I come home and throw an RPG session at the players. This time around it is my Million and Half A.D. campaign, now entitled Gonzop. In this FFFFRPG (Far, Far Future Fantasy RPG), the players get to explore being a Kindred, or a species from the time: the Nimby, the Imby, the Baggers, the Bods, and the Mods. I left out the Roons (walking raccoons), Boons (walking baboons), and the Squiditch (land exploring squids) because I knew they would be too cute to resist for whoever showed up. Only Iron Curtis and Peryton showed up, which is not a bad thing. The three of us have gelled into the experimental core of our gaming clique, while the hardcore but slightly more fans of this or that type of RPG setting show up often enough to make the roll-call. So we explored playing out:
The Nimby- kind of the "masters" of the world some 1.5 million years from now. The species is not the toughest or smartest of all the species around, but they are tougher and smarter than most nearby them. Working as family-communal bands they form nations and hold the best territories for their themselves. Hence the name derived from "Not in my backyard".
Curtis played and elderly one, a "drag", named Tequila. Mature beyond the sexuality of earlier Nimby incarnations (doll, dryad, and druid... drag), but something of a brave, kick-ass ninja-monk. He's 111 years-old in an expect two century long life.
Mod-Skeezer- Mods are my nod to hybrid species of the ultimate, if prototype for post-human RPG, Gamma World. Mods are deliberately modified humanity gene pools for long lost reasons from over a million years ago that are still kicking around. I had a whole list of weird mutants and at the bottom almost as an afterthought, I listed mosquito people. An homage to China Mieville, I guess, or a subconscious means to shooting myself in foot because once Robin (Peryton) heard that option she had to have it.
Oh Pery has a way with names, I actually love this one. Zzazzri is mosquito-head version of a Luke Skywalker. That is if Luke was a she, lived in a swamp that had the climate of the Mississippi basin around Tennessee, and was the worst hated species in the known universe. Still she comes from an established Plastic-Cooking plantation, complete with blood slaves and not too many robotic plastoids, family in the Big Swamps, and wants to see the bigger world.
We roleplayed out a starting scenario. Tequila got to survive a dirigible crash but at the cost of losing precious cargo. The cargo was being transported from the Dome-Gnome abodes of Dome Home back to his homeland of Worlock in the High Valley. Zzazzri got her swamp person on and established the Skeezer accent-- it sounds like Star Trek Discovery "Klingon" (We call them Space-Prunes) which means speaking behind a bad make-up mask. There was some gritty blood-thirsty related violence occurring between the PCs (Robin CRIT-Failed an SR) but they got over it quickly. Now it's time to find the lost manifest.
Gonzop is a place where six months out of the year is March in the American Midwest, three months August, with a February period thrown in for the rest. While an ice age has covered up the worst of the Anthropocene, the bits of it are not too far from the surface. Technology is advanced, but the species of humanity, because they all are humans (humans that often eat those not of their direct species), are only a few thousand years out of that ice age. On top of that other species are starting to gain sentience as well.
Are the variant off-spring of humanity the wave of the future or echos or a species family about to go extinct? I have no idea. I doubt the campaign will come close to answering that. I just wrote the sentence to spice up my concluding paragraph. But this setting is going to rock.
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