XXVc Notebook- Animal Apercu: Osquip

I'm favoring the old Fiend Folio write-up for the Osquip with this entry and so am only dealing with the six-legged relative of the rat, not the 2e decapod beaver.

OSQUIP

http://www.lomion.de/cmm/ratosqui.php

CONCEIVED PURPOSE: Experiment (failed)

CLIMATE/TERRAIN: Warrens, Ruins, Sewers

FREQUENCY: Uncommon

ORGANIZATION: Pack

ACTIVITY CYCLE: Night

DIET: Omnivore

INTELLIGENCE: Animal

Genotype: Mole rat, shrew and bulldog

Habitat/Terrain: Originally, the osquip was an early experiment in genetic hybridization, with an eye towards creating arable land- the osquips were hoped to build warrens in relatively lifeless soil, breed in large numbers and quickly die, leaving their remains to fertilize the area. However, the best laid plans of osquips and men often go awry, as they say and elements of the bulldog strain became dominant. They eventually escaped into the wild and the rest is history.

Ecology: Osquips were originally conceived as strict carnivores, in the hopes that they wouldn't harm surrounding plantlife, but nature had other plans and they quickly adapted to whatever food was available. They are a common sight in the larger sprawls as well as the occasional orgzone sewer system. In most regards they are like the giant rats they appear to be, avoiding lit, open areas, nesting dark, enclosed spaces and living off whatever source of nourishment they can find. Luckily, osquips were never able to breed any more frequently than the common canine from which they derive many of their characteristics.

Osquip meat tastes like shit, but their hide makes for good leather.

XXVc Notebook- The Curators: The Adventure Continues

So, the short, simple adventure I'm running is called, unofficially, The Curators as it deals with a group of academics that are attempting to counteract RAMs attempts at rewriting Earth history.

The lineup changed and now features Rad Randy and his fellow mutant and newfound friend Kim, a mutant traveller from the radioactive hell of eastern Europe. The tinker, who at press time still did not have either a name or a proper character sheet, accidentally stepped in front of an oncoming bus and that was that for him.

Rad and Kim made their way down the St. Lawrence river from Montreal, where they received their mission, to the rough and tumble org called Ottawa. Their celcomp in hand, they made their way into the surrounding sprawl to locate a possible untainted source of historical information.

On the way they avoid an encounter with a RAM patrol and their pet saluqi (q.v.) As the session comes to a close, the mongols (Terrans that work for the Han) are closing in quickly on our intrepid heroes.

And that's all for Friday's game.

XXVc quickie

The formula for making rocketships in XXVc produces necessarily cigar-shaped ships. They are rockets, after all. But what if you want a different shape? I needed a spherical design and, frankly, couldn't figure out how to do it as the left side of my brain had long-since been replaced by potted meat food product.

Enter Mr. Reaper of "I Crapped in Gygax's Bathroom" and D&D Rules Cyclopedia Errata & Companion fame. He graciously came up with an equation that will produce both cubical and spherical spacecraft, and here it is-

http://web.newsguy.com/a_doom/formula2.html

Now, finally, you can create E.T.'s Xmas Ornament Ship or the Death Star (good luck with that) for your Buck Rogers game.

An Soph!

XXVc Notebook- more etcetera

Global Warming

I felt like the map in the Earth in the 25th Century supplement didn't quite reflect the effects that global warming could have on the Earth and so I did a little research in that area. So, we can say goodbye to Southern California, The Gulf Coast, at least half of the South, and a lot of the East Coast.

I got to thinking that losing those big cities would kinda suck from a game aspect, but a couple of things occurred to me. First off, Earth and the US aren't the only settings in XXVc (far from it) so it isn't like I'm losing out on much. Plus, it's 500 years in the future- just what of today's cities are going to remain by then, anyway? They're going to be completely different, even without the devastation that occurs in XXVc's future history.

The other thing is that SoCal, Texas, and the South can go eat a radioactive dick. Fuck 'em. Good riddance. There's a nice irony to a post-nuke Southern California- the sea level may rise, but their source of fresh water will have long been cut off to them. No point in moving inland, because there's even less water there, and since they've been stealing water from their neighbors to the north for decades (and probably for another few decades to come, if not longer,) their gravy train will most likely come to an abrupt halt once the Big One hits.

The Return of the Han

I'll bet Flint Dille and Mike Pondsmith were kicking themselves for dropping China as the Earth's main aggressor in favor of the Soviet Union. Just one year after the game was published, the Soviet Union collapsed. Of course, like most folks, I'm sure those guys had better things to do than keep tabs on the state of Mother Russia's governmental health. And so, like Twilight: 2000 we're left with something of a relic of old Cold War thinking.

Obviously the same thing could have happened (and still can happen, I suppose) to the United States and the People's Republic of China, but it hasn't and so we get to do with them as we like.

So, what I'm thinking is China, having bowed to the might of RAM (but still one of the biggest dogs on the block,) was granted the western half of North America and control was given to the Han Chemical Group, a vast and ancient conglomerate, to oversee the bleeding dry of the old US of A.

The Han, as they are commonly known, has their own agenda, of course. This is most visible in the Americas in the form of Han Intercontinental Airlines (aka Han Air and, of course, "The Han") who provide luxury aerostat (dirigible) services almost exclusively to the arcologies (and one or two orgs) and also provide "hunting parties", wherein wealthy patrons can pay to fire high-energy weapons at "wild Americans" in the sprawls and wasteland. Sometimes they will act on orders from RAM to go on bombing raids over orgzones that RAM has deemed "uppity."

As a result, most of the inhabitants of these areas have a genuine fear of airships and will flee like rabbits whenever they think one might be overhead.


Why Dirigibles?

Because resources on Earth are rare, in particular oil, of which there is simply none. Oil reserves would have been long gone by the time 2456 rolls around, something I think even the most in-denial, dumbshit "Conservative" Republican would have to admit. The successor to XXVc, the High-Adventure Cliffhanger game, based directly on the Buck Rogers strip, reasoned that the appreance of crappy old biplanes in the 25th century was attributed to their general ease of use and simplicity of manufacture, but I just can't see crop dusters running on solar or atomic power in this particular future.

So, balloons it is. Before the Hindenburg disaster, hydrogen balloons were all the rage. Clean, efficient and... okay, slow, I can easily see their return in a post-nuke Earth. Thanks to a program I saw on just why the Hindenburg blew up, we now know it wasn't because of the hydrogen gas cells igniting, it was because of the peculiar formula of the paint used to coat the envelope (the gas bag.) According to the guy that was investigating the disaster, those brilliant Nazi bastards covered the thing in what amounted to rocket fuel. I kid you not.

In any case, whatever problems may have plagued hydrogen dirigibles in the past would have been long overcome in 2456 AD. So, we have a cheap, eco-friendly, cheap and easy to produce (also safe) mode of transportation. 'Nuff said.

Eight Trillion Chinamen Can't Be Wrong

I wanted to bring the Chinese back into the setting because 1) I'm a traditionalist and 2) it just didn't make sense to me that the "sleeping giant" would still be asleep after all this time. Also, Firefly had more than a little to do with it, in particular giving me some nice visuals to go with and the notion that Chinese would be the lingua franca of the future. Just makes sense to me.

Concerning the term "mongol" as it was used in the comic strip- it's kinda hard to tell if it was ever meant as a racial slur or if that was what they called themselves (in addition to "Han," of course) or what. the protagonists also threw around the term "halfbreed" a lot, which may go back to the original novel, where the Han are possibly the product of alien/human breeding. The thing is, it never really goes beyond "Look! A halfbreed!" and it's not too long before the reference is dropped entirely. I guess the brisk pace of the strip didn't allow for much explanation of little details like that or maybe Phil Nowlan just assumed that people had read his two short novels and it didn't need to be explained.

In my XXVc game, a "mongol" is a Terran who works for the Han. A traitor. The word has no other meaning to Americans in 2456 and the original meaning is long gone. In my first adventure, the players are hassled by a few mongols and will most likely encounter a lot more as the game progresses.

XXVc Notebook- First Adventure & etcetera

So, I ran the "meet & greet" portion of my adventure "The Curators" for Dragonsfoot Lounge pals Ettin of Hexen and Vondan. Ettin is playing a Warrior named Rad Randy, a mutant (more about mutants later) with "neutron hair" and Dan is playing a Tinker Engineer whose name we don't know yet who has a "strong sexual attraction to cutesy-wootsie cartoon characters" (to paraphrase Robert Williams) and carries a "giant" wrench.

In brief, the two have been bid by a group known very informally as The Curators to venture forth from the Montreal arcology into deepest, darkest Ottawa, Ontario in search of artifacts of the past. Since Randy is the tour guide on this trek, he got to pick the mode of transportation there and so chose to take the St. Lawrence river via canoe.

...and that's as far as we got before my shitty internet connection dropped and left my dick in the dirt for a couple of hours.


Next we move on to Howard Chaykin's great 1980's comic American Flagg! and how it relates to XXVc. I'm just going to quote from the synopsis of the comic from Wikipedia. A surprising similarity reveals itself therein-

However, the exiled American government, its corporate backers, and a group of technicians in the defected Soviet lunar colony of Gagaringrad form the Plex: a giant, interplanetary union of corporate and government concerns that conduct commerce and govern the United States from its capital on Mars. Many population centers are grouped around massive, fortified arcologies called Plexmalls and the law is enforced by the Plexus Rangers, the absentee Plex's Earthside militia.

Not exactly the same, of course, but replace the Plex with RAM (the Russo-American Mercantile Corp.) and it parallels XXVc's set-up rather closely in parts. The Wiki article goes on to talk about how the Plex manipulates the poor schmucks of Earth through various means, almost all of which would work well in the game. At least a game set primarily in the arcologies.

As it's been a really long time since I read AF!, there may be other bits I'm overlooking. If I manage to find them in my collection, I'll give 'em a once-over and swipe to my heart's content.

XXVc Notebook - thinkin'

Just some thoughts I've been kicking around the past few days-

I believe it was in Phil Nowlan's short story Armageddon 2419 AD that it's mentioned that Americans are able to converse on a radio frequency that the Han can't pick up. I think I'm going to translate that into my XXVc game as Americans rediscovering Ham radio or maybe shortwave radio (I'll have to look those up first) and the Martian/Chinese/"Mongol" technology is too advanced to pick it up.

I recall hearing that, back in the 80's, Russian electrical systems were archaic enough that an EMP from an air-burst nuke would have no effect. I don't know if that's true, but it's an interesting notion- crusty, old technology as a defense against the shiny, new stuff. It works well for Buck Rogers, at any rate. Witness the use of biplanes in the early days of the strip.

XXVc Notebook: Animal Apercu

I'm going through the AD&D 2e Monstrous Manual/Compendium to find appropriate monsters and animals for populate the planets with. I'll add them as I use them, so this list will expand over time. To avoid information overkill, I'm just listing the bits that pertain to XXVc, since all that other info is available elsewhere.

SALUQI

http://www.lomion.de/cmm/dogsaluq.php

CONCEIVED PURPOSE: Hunting dog

CLIMATE/TERRAIN: Mars, desert and plains

Genotype: Greyhound

Habitat/Terrain: Bred by RAM scientists as hunting dogs, the saluqi quickly fell into favor with Martian prisons where they are used by guards to track escapees. They are also used by high ranking RAM employees in hunting human prey (typically Terran) for sport. Saluquis are best suited to the desert-like environment of Mars and are thus suited to any arid, sandy environment.

Ecology: Saluqis' superior eyesight is ideally suited to the thin Martian atmosphere, where sound carries less well than it does on Earth. Their eyes were crafted using DNA from Boa Constrictors, allowing them a high degree of night vision as well as the ability to see heat signatures.

More to come!