Setting musings: Uplifted Transhumans
Posted: Sun May 17, 2020 11:42 pm
So the basic premise is that you play as enhanced humans who were the elite of a now-overthrown alien government on Earth. Significant influences include (I need to expand this list):
[*] The human-alien hybrids from X-files.
[*] The transhuman soldiers of the Combine Overwatch from halflife.
[*] alienated teenagers everywhere.
[*] https://xcom.fandom.com/wiki/ADVENT
You are assumed to be members (in fact, agents) of the Worldwide Benevolent Association, which was an organization for transhumans to do refugee relief work during the civil war, that developed into a front organization for the human side. This is meant to achieve the following design goals:
[*] The PCs have some kind of official status, in spite of being members of a despised minority - human partisans can't just shoot you on sight
[*] The WBA continues to operate, providing a structure around monster of the week narratives and other X-files episodes.
It's social commentary on the nature of post-colonial societies, as well as teen-angst body horror. The default structure of a session is that you get a request from a WBA contact or superior to go deal with some situation, and you have to solve it through some combination of legwork and firepower.
I'm still thinking about how soft to make the science fiction. Part of the motivation of the aliens in creating trans-humans with partially-alien emotions and sensibilities was to preserve their culture. This only makes sense if the aliens are deep into a cycle of cultural decay, which is very Lovecraft but not very hard-science fiction (I mean you can just make super-intelligent robots, right?). Making the super science work like magic also opens up the power fantasy elements and the space of character conceptions.
The map has a lot of purposeful ambiguity on it, but the political situation is very messy. So in most countries/regions the aliens took power in soft coups or through electoral politics; the degree of control exercised by the aliens varied tremendously, and there are countries (Switzerland will be given as an explicit example) that maintained political continuity throughout by dealing with the aliens until it become advantageous to join the human side. Other places (let's say Russia) were conquered but then became centers of the eventually-victorious resistance.
The neocolonial social commentary is that, in general, regions that collaborated with the aliens are better developed economically and collaborators have education, technical skills and so forth. The PCs have actual superpowers and so are an extreme example of this. Resentment by the (victorious) human rebels is therefore a major theme.
The aliens were completely overthrown give or take 10 years ago, so there is also concern that the aliens (or their transhuman proteges) will similarly seek to subvert society. Other transhumans will have plots like that which you will need to foil, with extra credit for not exposing transhumans in general to bad press.
Space Marines make great villains, being a jock-Nazi counterpart to the goth-hipster transhuman protagonists. So there are farflung but not densely populated human space colonies, and those colonies won a war in space against the aliens. They are mostly xenophobic and ultra-militaristic. The civil war on Earth only really started *after* the aliens had been defeated in space, and part of the rationale was to keep the space-based humans from claiming all legitimacy on Earth.
Officially, the Earth-based rebels and the Space-based alliance are the same team, but there's an ongoing cold war. The space-based humans have their own transhumans, who are essentially space marines (albeit can be of either sex), who are engaged in missions with often-conflicting political objectives to the PCs.
The alien/PC conversion to a transhuman involved being genetically / surgically / chemically altered, with lots of being strapped to a gurney in bondage gear and conditioned to have inhuman thoughts. Thanks dad. The aliens are deliberately left somewhat vague, so you can add an alien faction that fits your character conception as needed. The alien cultural programming has to fit a few game-mechanical requirements as a social handicap that all the PCs share, but other than that it can be any weird thing.
Mechanically, I'll be utilizing After Sundown with factions and powers reorganized.
This is a more developed version of ideas from ancient posts but I wanted to start over from scratch.
I'm posting this to solicit criticism, so go nuts.
[*] The human-alien hybrids from X-files.
[*] The transhuman soldiers of the Combine Overwatch from halflife.
[*] alienated teenagers everywhere.
[*] https://xcom.fandom.com/wiki/ADVENT
You are assumed to be members (in fact, agents) of the Worldwide Benevolent Association, which was an organization for transhumans to do refugee relief work during the civil war, that developed into a front organization for the human side. This is meant to achieve the following design goals:
[*] The PCs have some kind of official status, in spite of being members of a despised minority - human partisans can't just shoot you on sight
[*] The WBA continues to operate, providing a structure around monster of the week narratives and other X-files episodes.
It's social commentary on the nature of post-colonial societies, as well as teen-angst body horror. The default structure of a session is that you get a request from a WBA contact or superior to go deal with some situation, and you have to solve it through some combination of legwork and firepower.
I'm still thinking about how soft to make the science fiction. Part of the motivation of the aliens in creating trans-humans with partially-alien emotions and sensibilities was to preserve their culture. This only makes sense if the aliens are deep into a cycle of cultural decay, which is very Lovecraft but not very hard-science fiction (I mean you can just make super-intelligent robots, right?). Making the super science work like magic also opens up the power fantasy elements and the space of character conceptions.
The map has a lot of purposeful ambiguity on it, but the political situation is very messy. So in most countries/regions the aliens took power in soft coups or through electoral politics; the degree of control exercised by the aliens varied tremendously, and there are countries (Switzerland will be given as an explicit example) that maintained political continuity throughout by dealing with the aliens until it become advantageous to join the human side. Other places (let's say Russia) were conquered but then became centers of the eventually-victorious resistance.
The neocolonial social commentary is that, in general, regions that collaborated with the aliens are better developed economically and collaborators have education, technical skills and so forth. The PCs have actual superpowers and so are an extreme example of this. Resentment by the (victorious) human rebels is therefore a major theme.
The aliens were completely overthrown give or take 10 years ago, so there is also concern that the aliens (or their transhuman proteges) will similarly seek to subvert society. Other transhumans will have plots like that which you will need to foil, with extra credit for not exposing transhumans in general to bad press.
Space Marines make great villains, being a jock-Nazi counterpart to the goth-hipster transhuman protagonists. So there are farflung but not densely populated human space colonies, and those colonies won a war in space against the aliens. They are mostly xenophobic and ultra-militaristic. The civil war on Earth only really started *after* the aliens had been defeated in space, and part of the rationale was to keep the space-based humans from claiming all legitimacy on Earth.
Officially, the Earth-based rebels and the Space-based alliance are the same team, but there's an ongoing cold war. The space-based humans have their own transhumans, who are essentially space marines (albeit can be of either sex), who are engaged in missions with often-conflicting political objectives to the PCs.
The alien/PC conversion to a transhuman involved being genetically / surgically / chemically altered, with lots of being strapped to a gurney in bondage gear and conditioned to have inhuman thoughts. Thanks dad. The aliens are deliberately left somewhat vague, so you can add an alien faction that fits your character conception as needed. The alien cultural programming has to fit a few game-mechanical requirements as a social handicap that all the PCs share, but other than that it can be any weird thing.
Mechanically, I'll be utilizing After Sundown with factions and powers reorganized.
This is a more developed version of ideas from ancient posts but I wanted to start over from scratch.
I'm posting this to solicit criticism, so go nuts.