Revisiting the world of Thear

[DirtSailor]

So, I play with a group of guys and we each take turns being the GM. It is interesting because we each have our own styles. One of us is all about dungeon crawling, another enjoys gimmicky fights, I enjoy story telling. Thing is, my turn is coming up soon... and I want to do a sequel.

The first campaign takes place in the world of Thear, starting out in the Kingdom of Ned'e which for all extensive purposes is the last bastion of humanity in existence. In this world, the soul was trapped within the body so one could be mortally wounded... but live on. Small catch, you continue to feel the pain of the would forever and it drives you mad. People age slower once they hit the age of 20 or so, and to keep from overpopulating every century they have a lottery where families may win the chance to have a child to replace someone lost since the last one. Outside of the walls it is your typical zombie apocalypse type setting with throngs of the undead, the "Old Men", wandering around.

The party had five characters, but I asked my two regulars to allow me to name theirs. The names were Daam and Vee, a male Cleric and a female Monk respectively. The Prince of the kingdom addresses the people one day, stating that in the night the King and Queen had been mauled and had to be released (a full day ritual that CAN actually release the soul, but as the individual has to be restrained and it is so complex it can only be done one at a time, not viable for cleansing the world). He summons the party and has them seek out an artifact called the "Ah-tome" because he believes it can right the wrongs of the world and blazzay blazzay blah.

Here's the catch. "Ah-tome" is just a weird way of pronouncing Atom. The "artifact" they seek is an arming device for a network of nuclear warheads that had been placed under each populated hub thousands of years ago. They activate it... boom... except for the Emperor who watched the mushroom clouds from the sidelines, they believe they just wiped out the human race.

Long story short, this High Fantasy world is our own in the far future. A nanorobotisist from the near future had a daughter who suffered from a terminal disease. Knowing she would die before a cure was created he somehow managed to create nanomachines that would effectively bind her soul to her body and put her into a stasis until a cure could be found. Government finds out there are immortality robots. Weaponizes them. War happens. Nanomachines are dispersed in the air and effect the entire human race. Zombie apocalypse where head shots don't work.

In the end, the party has a Final Fantasy style boss fight where they fight the Emperor (who was mortally wounded as a child and went insane) in two separate forms, then face the REAL boss baddie that they had only been hinted at the entire time. An immortal 12 year old little girl, floating in a tank, kept alive by machines... but the hub, and in control of, all the nanomachines that had been created since.

They kill her. Nanomachines deactivate. Everything dies. Vee and Daam have their genetic codes scrambled so that they can reproduce without fear of incestuous side effects.

Thear = Earth
Ned'E = Eden
Daam = Adam
Vee = Eve

There were many other little mind tucks like that, glaring the players in the eye the entire time until that final "Ahah" moment.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

NOW! Part two. I want to revisit the same world, perhaps even at the same time. In the first campaign, all the players were humans... but this time I want to bar the human race. I want to bar anything that looks remotely human. Elves. Dwarves. Halflings. No no no.

Races will be things like Ratfolk, Kitsune, Tengus, etc. Anthropomorphic animals. The idea is, even though the human race royally messed up... nature continued. Perhaps even because the same nanomachines that gave the human race immortality sparked evolution in the beasts of the earth. Maybe it is what gave them the intelligence needed to speak and pick up tools and make tribes.

So... the quest for the party in the first campaign was to destroy the machines. In this, it asks the question what happens to everything else if the human race is saved?

I'm bouncing around a lot of ideas, such as the party from the first campaign being the final boss of this one, basing the story on Native American Creation mythology as the first was based on Genesis, and a few others... but I would love to hear more ideas!

[Alick]

That is a crazy awesome campaign world, even if I would hate being stuck as a human for the first part. The second part with anthropomorphic animals would be totally awesome though.

As for ideas... How advanced was this civilization before the collapse? Were there robots or anything? Could some of the humans have survived/mutated from the nuclear blasts(possibly creating races like orcs, trolls, goblins, and so forth). How about nature waking up in more ways than just the anthropomorphic races? How about long dormant spirits of nature, such as Kami, dryads, sprites, and whatnot coming back to the world. Those are my ideas.

[DirtSailor]

Advanced enough to have nano machines that can bind the soul to the body ;) For reference, let's say they never advanced far enough to leave earth... but say... iRobot-esque? They DID fight a few AI constructs and there was a library that had a hologram of Kermit the Frog who still read stories to children who had been dead for a thousand years (and a tribe of childlike cannibal frogmen who worshiped it as a God.)

As for human mutation, it would be possible due to radiation and such. I like the idea of the Ghouls from Fallout as possible NPC characters in an encounter where the party could simply attack them assuming they were hostile.

The sky is the limit on how nature could be affected... but I want to be careful about TOO much magic. The last one I went off of the principal that "Any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic." The nanomachines were responsible for the 'magic' but the party had no idea.

A few corrections this campaign will make over my last one, the party became pretty daring once they figured out they were immortal too. The immortality does NOT cross over to the animal kingdom. Also, I want them to at some point come across "Sacred Weapons". In reality, these weapons will put off a tight EMP field that disables the nano machines and "kills" the undead.

[Alick]

Okay, you can keep the feel of Kami as possible holographic representations of nanite based A.I. or V.I.(like a dumber less complicated A.I., running off of program parameters and predictive thinking rather than free will/thought and abstract thinking). Possibly have a 'Mother' A.I. that's tasked with maintaining a healthy and diverse ecosystem inplace of a nature diety. Possibly make all the gods into A.I.'s, with their domains fitting in with their tasks. War could be an A.I. designed as a military strategist, Civilization/Society could be an A.I. tasked with city management, Healing could have oversaw a/multiple/all hospital(s), Knowledge would be the internet wiki overlord, Exploration could run and maintain a host of GPS satellites, so on and so forth.

As for weapons, magic, and such... You could either do it as some evolved form of psionics, mimicked by technology(think omnitools from mass effect), mutations, actual magic, nanite produced effects, or a mixture of any/all of these.

[DirtSailor]

Still on the fence if I should run this with Native American mythology as the ideas I pull from, or counter the Genisis theme with Revelations. I admit, I like the continued use of A.I.s to simulate demigods.

For Revelations, the four horsemen could be AI programs. War, the defense grid. Famine, Agriculture. Pestilence, the CDC. Maybe each AI is programmed to give an appearance that reflects the state of the human race... Thus Famine and Pestilence would be grotesquely thin and diseased whereas War would be massive... I mean, there would technically be 10 nuclear warheads per human at this point.

For Native American, two idea sprout up that I enjoy. 1.). Some end session battle against a giant sentiet spider that references the dream catcher mythos. 2.). The Cherokee believed that sickness was caused by angry animal spirits. The only thing that has been spotted in the forest that they do not know, of course, is the human party from the last game.

[DirtSailor]

Magic will be nanite enduced effects. Oh! Maybe the nanites have never effected the animals in the past... But now that they are becoming more humanoid they are. The magic user in the party could be the FIRST to ever use magic. Perhaps a plague has wiped through the villages and the nanintes stopped it, but if they are disabled they will all die.

At the end of the day, the Human party disabled the nanites to give the Human Race a second chance. I want to show that there were dire and unknown consequences to this. Mass genocide of many just to save the pink skins. Then, I want to give this party a chance to stop it. They have never seem humans before, so they wouldn't know what they were. I could have them encounter their old players multiple times before they figure it out.

[DirtSailor]

Another thought, and I will pen them here as they come...

The problem with super magic holy weapons is there are just so few of them. If you start your journey with one you should keep it, but things get stronger and that mega holy weapon begins to seem a bit less mega holy.

I think I will keep a hidden counter of killing blows. The weapon doesn't just destroy the nanites, it absorbs a portion of them. After a set number of killing blows, the weapon will "level up". Perhaps getting a +1 or an enchantment. The players may even find the " Forge" where the weapons are created and have to spend the levels they earned for those enhancements. Maybe an LCD display on the handle...