I want to see what you think, because I want to one day open up the Oronegrean world for others to play around with. so right now I am setting the basic outline and a few basic fixed facts and one day, sooner or later you can all add your own things and play around in the Oronegrean world. I have allowed anyone to comment now so we can all add our ideas.
The Bunker and other advances forces
The bunker has been discussed already, but let me go over some key points. The Bunker was set up long ago and is home to NAZI scientists who after WW2 fled to Oronegro. Their experiments on kidnapped people range from finding ways to prolong life (the scientists alive in the bunker are the same ones that fled in the 1940's) all the way to creating the zombie virus (discussed later) and to making advanced forms of weaponry.
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| some technologically advanced force. still the can be killed by a well trained force though. |
Well the Bunker is not the only place that creates these super soldiers and their even more super equipment. there is also room for another force other plains in Oronegro. this force could be bunker troops that have been smuggled in some way to this place. more will be discussed about these plains in the next segments.
Zombies and mutants
this is something I have given quite a bit of thought to, we all like zombies, and they are one of the more plausible horror concepts. also because they can be either a small battle field nuisance all the way up to a huge terrifying force, they are very simple to put into the Oronegrean story.
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| this guy hopes he has enough ammo |
Zombies will come from either the bunker or elsewhere. they'll make everything very interesting. and yes they also might turn up in the plains. as for mutants its a pretty similar story.
Aliens and creatures
Well these are the most outlandish of the sci-fi concepts. Aliens are not going to be to much of an issue, they'll be a few scouts, looking to see how the world emerges from WW3, who have come to Oronegro because its easier to hide in a place that humans themselves hide (they did their research). They will have advanced technology but will also be killing machines in their own right, easily able to kill a group of unarmed humans lost at night.
| monster or alien? either one, but still its scary. |
the creatures are beasts from the forests and jungles, they are very intelligent and have come out to put a stop to this madness which is turning their already harmed homeland into a burnt and polluted mess. The creatures will not be armed in anyway except for their own bodies, venoms or toxic sprays. Once again these will appear on the plains, and in the jungle.
Both the Aliens and the creatures will be good killers, but when the military turns up or they face a person who is very skilled with knives or other more primitive weapons, they shall find themselves in a spot of bother. the aliens may have only limited support from their advanced vehicles and flying machines.
The plains
The plains will be the scene for most of this scary, sci-fi activity! the plains are Oronegro's second farming area, they are full of small towns and have one big city. the city of El Puerto Segundo. this is comparable to La Ley in size and was full of very modern buildings, since this area is where quite a bit of the oil came from.
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| Puerto Segundo is the only city on the plains. |
If the sci-fi concepts are of interest then the story for the plains in the civil war is simple. Mostly loyal to the National forces, except for a small group of rebels, the plains (apart from the city itself) were hit by nuclear weapons, and other more dangerous ones designed to create zombies and mutants. these came either from forces from the bunker itself or were supplied to rebel or Soviet forces in the area.
the area soon becomes a toxic wasteland, which brings out the armies or creatures from the forest, out for revenge on human kind for destroying their sacred land. The aliens can just notice this attack and because they are already in Oronegro, come here to analyse the effects of these human weapons but end up getting into conflict with the soldiers. The advanced army which has also now appeared in the plains now advances on the city, encountering national forces, creatures and aliens alike.
in the end your left with a really messed up place with the main city a battle ground between soldiers and advanced forces (aliens or the bunker troops) and the surrounding countryside a death trap for people lost at night!
Well there you go... tell me what you thing
All this is conceptual nothing is certain... I still have to walk the dog and its dark outside, why did I go looking up monsters that picture is creeping me out... and I have a horrible imagination that means as soon as I start day dreaming I'll imagine that one of these will be following me around. yes imagination can be a curse also.have a nice day guys, and I hope none of these follow you around.
How's your night vision? That's one of the benefits of good rods: I've never, ever, been afraid of the dark. The light, now: that can be a problem.
ReplyDeleteI have to admit, I don't do Sci Fi or Fantasy - not as gaming topics anyhow. Not that I have anything against the genres as literature - far from it, though I do find Children's and Young Adult Fantasy on the whole deeper and more satisfying. In too much of adult fantasy you can just about hear the dice rattling, or else they get to caught up in the raunch factor to tell a satisfactory story.
Having said that, it might be interesting to consider the implications of asymmetric warfare, in which one side might be led into an over-reliance on technology, whilst the other, less well equipped technologically, tries to find ways of overcoming that inferiority.
The 'prototypes' of that kind of warfare exists now. The 'inferior' side has to look for methods of subversion to overcome their enemy. These need not be purely military - though military is generally more fun from we wargamers' point of view.
But consider a country in which a good deal of the population is disaffected, yet that population has to be employed in supplying the armed forces. It would not be difficult to contaminate a small but significant proportion of the food supply (E. coli is a good ol' standby contaminant); to compromise the quality of a proportion of the equipment (an E-tool that breaks against anything but the loosest loam won't help troopers' morale); and a sufficiently angry workforce surely can arrange a little sand to get into engines or water into the POL.
It might be interesting too to imagine what low tech methods might defeat laser sighting, infra-red vision, guided missiles or drones. At that, you might find moral consequences becoming more part of the game. As the Oronegrin Government, you COULD authorise the use of, say, white phosphorus as a deforestation weapon to expose the trails and hideaways of rebel forces.
But then the tide of world opinion might render such a course very costly in terms of popular opprobrium attaching to this action, leading to accusations of using chemical weapons against personnel, including civilians; and sanctions of one sort or another. Having considered the likely costs, a desperate government might resort to such a course anyway. Or not. The rebels themselves, having a small supply of white phosphorus of their own, use it and try to place the blame upon the government. Who would know?
I find this sort of thing quite hard to contemplate, actually. That is why the past is so much easier to do...
you make some very valid points. my views on sci-fi are mixed. although I would add some I would never have it as a huge part of the Oronegrean story. actually I feel that even the aliens and advanced forces get killed off pretty quickly, their reliance on their technology became their downfall. the national forces will be able to take them out, the same anti-tank weapons can take down the robots and walkers.
DeleteThe main thing for me is the Zombies and creatures, the zombies are an element I really like. funny to think that my favourite zombie movie is Shaun of the dead. but yes that is my inspiration, the advance of a zombie plague which will eventually be systematically wiped out by troops. as for the creatures, they are Oronegro's guardians, many will simply return to the forest for some reason, perhaps some hero argued the human cause and apologised to the more intelligent creatures.
to note what you have said about sci-fi and fantasy, I think I agree with you. my favourite sci-fi books are Isaac Asimov's foundation series, I have not got them all but I love them, his style makes the fictional seem almost factual, even some of the stranger aspects can seem almost realistic. my favourite Fantasy books are the ones Tolkien wrote, I have so many of his books, perhaps to many, but the worlds full of creatures and powers is something I also enjoy. I think my main problem with the era is that humans are so often seen as powerless to stop the strange fantasy force, I prefer it when humans can just as easily turn around and stand up for themselves.
as for guerilla warfare methods you mentioned all can happen, all did, but of course many cities either joined the rebels or they remained in government control, sure the government was in a bad position but they still had enough loyal workers in factories to be able to carry on.
as for the white phosphorus, that is an interesting idea, certainly such tactics would have been used, but with the Soviet-Reunion now complete and WW3 raging, many nations had bigger problems, sure the combat out there is not as big as one might think, Europe may be in danger but still their soldiers are overseas. Oronegro is of little concern to them, and many would even promote the use of such weapons if it meant an end to the war and that weapons from the embattled state would begin to flow to them in large numbers.
as for rebels using such weapons and blaming the government... that happens in all wars. and yes we will see that sort of thing, and the usual threats from the Soviet Union and the USA that they'll take drastic and immediate action if the weapons are used against their ally... sounds familiar doesn't it? but I guess that's just the way war works.
thanks for your ideas.
oh my night vision??? reasonable I suspect. I have always been able to do things like that, make myself afraid for no reason using my imagination. may also be because of my mental disabilities, I am not sure. it was really bad when I was little, I used to see giant spiders crawling down the walls, once even woke up with one hanging over my head, it was so realistic that I ran and turned the light on, only then did it finally go away, that was one of the worst. anyway enough of that. thanks for taking part in the discussion
I don't think frightening oneself with an over-active imagination is all that unusual - I am certainly capable of that! What one sees in the state between sleeping and waking can seem as real as ... oh, I don't know: a really real thing.
ReplyDeleteI am reminded of a story about a woman who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and had an elaborate story of her imprisonment, experiments conducted upon her, the whole nine yards. She absolutely insisted it was all true. Her family could not persuade her she had been asleep in front of the fire the whole time this was supposed to have taken place.
Possibly the most interesting SF idea might be to 'District 9' it. An alien military task force crash lands, most of the personnel surviving but with only limited amounts of their equipment. Certainly they are cut off from their mother ship/advanced lunar base/home world. As intelligent cockroaches, they need not be bent on conquest, but they find local life forms unapproachable, easily frightened, and apt to get violent when scared.
It then becomes a race for the aliens to obtain enough materials - eking out whatever survived the crash - to construct a communications device to contact whatever supports they might be able to call upon, and weapons of at least self defence.
Another option is inspired by Fred Saberhagen's 'Berserker' books. I believe the Terminator movies might have been inspired by these. Berserkers are fighting machines designed by a long extinct intelligent life form as the ultimate weapon of vengeance in a war it was losing. These berserkers travelled through space, going boldly where no one had gone before, seeking out new life forms, and obliterating them.
They could replicate themselves, were very intelligent, and would even exploit life forms to wipe out others. Very, very nasty. Very, very difficult to defeat.
Very intriguing might be a wasp-like hive intelligence, highly technological, but limited in in size, strength and dexterity by having rather exceeded the maximum truly viable insectoid form. Standing about a foot tall, flightless, they don't look like much. Nor are they interested in killing off earthly life forms, as to use them as incubators and food sources for their larval young. It is not so hard to run down your prey when you have immobilizing weapons such as stun guns. Their foreleg nippers not being particularly dexterous, they use their mouth parts to supply the finer 'manual' agility to perform delicate tasks. Being small, they can hide easily, nor are the usual visual enhancement devices such as infra-red heat detectors much chop picking up creatures whose exoskeletons absorb much of the internal heat they generate.
Incidentally, although CFCs will kill these things off, ultra-violet light hardens the exoskeletons making them more difficult to kill. So large scale use of CFCs, depleting the atmospheric ozone layer, is likely to make the survivors much harder to eliminate...
Speaking of Fred Saberhagen - you might like the Tech meets magic idea behind his 'Empire of the East' stories.
Other SF you might consider are David Feintuch ('Hope' series, featuring Nick Seaforth as 'Horatio Hornblower' in Space - the best of them is 'Voices of Hope'); David Caswell 'A cage of butterfies' or 'Deucalion'; or even New Zealand's own Ged Maybury's 'Startroopers: the final episode' ('Triggerstone is good, too). Another Kiwi author who sets stories in a post apocalyptic Kiwiland is Jack Lazenby.
I did enjoy district nine, certainly a nice break from the norm. I like the hive mentality for aliens also. perhaps most of the aliens on earth are workers, their ships being some transport that has crashed, perhaps because the radiation given off by an ICBM being set off in space crashed its guidance.
Deleteso there would be worker aliens, like the majority in District nine. there would be a few female princess aliens, not queens but they still reproduce, the queen being in control of the alien race would not have crashed. and then there would be soldier ones, the biggest and most dangerous, they would be subdivided into a few smaller scouts and the bigger fighters. and last of all the breeding males the biggest and most potent of all the male drones. I think also some intelligent ones, like our alien Hero in district nine. they could be warrior scouts or something different. who knows.
I like your ideas about the drones for the aliens, that is a keeper I think, afraid of the violent humans, the warriors may have a few of their advanced weapons left over, but yes the rest will have to be scavenged. sort of like the movie "Battleship" then, perhaps leaving out the bit about not attacking non-hostile humans, they may not go out and kill but if you were to enter their territory then yes they would kill your or chase you off. Perhaps outside of the territory (I guess the area around the crash site) they would leave you alone.
maybe even we have some human traders, looking to get hold of some alien technology. of course some legitimate ones trying to help then the usual bad ones.
comparing these aliens to ants... there is an ant species which farms aphids, because they help provide a food source, like how we milk cows and get honey from ants... perhaps we can have some of these "aphid" aliens of the ship.
they could be killers, that are totally carnivorous, they may be the real threat if some escaped. or they could be plant eating like aphids. I don't know that aspect is strange and could be interesting. (alien ants on a mission to round up their alien aphids, like cowboys)
But it is good that all this would only be confined to that one area, or perhaps just one side of the river on the plain even. That way people who want the Sci-fi can have it and those that don't can leave it out.
I thought I'd do Fantasy as a separate posting. I've always found it difficult to suspend disbelieve when it comes to 'Zombism'. You'd think that being dead, they'd call it a day and have a good lie down. Just a thought.
ReplyDeleteBut Fastasy can lead down some interesting roads. In my previous post I mentioned Fred Saberhagen's 'Empire of the East', in which Tech meet magic. I think the premise might have been an inpiration behind the Star Trek 'Genesis Project'. At any rate a device was (I think accidentally) triggered off to revivify a dying Earth being ravaged by a nuclear war. The result was a peculiar suspension of physical laws as we know it. Certain inanimate things (including a nuclear explosion which was happening just as the 'genesis wave' as I'll call it passed through it) became alive, and I can't remember all the impacts.
This idea can be the premise behind the emergence of a goblin race. Poor people living - dying by inches, rather - in shanty towns hard by toxic waste pits. A dust laden wind is blowing more than usual toxic waste into these places when the 'genesis wave' strikes, the result being a not very pretty, but a very hardy, tough, and pissed off race of people. At the same time, the masses of rats living in the same zones get a real evolutionary charge, becoming a rat-like race cognate to GWs 'Skaven'.
You see where I'm going with this. Even zombies become possible as mortuaries, morgues and above-ground crypts are struck by the genesis wave. Being actually unalive the corpses are not fully revivified, and their disappointment at this leads to their general hatred of the living, and the brains thing is really not so much a craving, but a legend put about as a frightener. Nothing can possibly frighten a zombie, of course.
One SF thing I forgot. In the far, far future cities are mobile, and prey upon each other - Municipal Darwinism. Check out Philip Reeves's 'Mortal Engines' - extremely violent; extremely intriguing.
Zombism, is not actually that hard to think of, some propose a mutation of some viruses (rabies I am reminded of) or perhaps some fungi could bring about similar effects. there is the fungi which controls an ants brain, casing it to go to the top of a blade of grass where it is then eaten... strange cycle but a true/disturbing one.
Deletefor this scenario the virus or plant has been designed (in the bunker) as a weapon, the virus would cause the person infected to always feel hunger, I imagine that they would not only attack humans but most living animals. the Zombies would not be dead! though the loss of an arm or leg may not be as bad as perhaps one of the side effects would be the blood clotting easily. bust still anything that would kill a human, given that the blood does not clot in time would kill them also.
the zombies may not attack each other because of some scent, they may be able to recognise one another. apart from that zombies are strange but still quite fun to play around with. perhaps some scientist developed a synthetic material that replicates this scent allowing soldiers to go into infested zone with a reduced threat of being randomly attacked (might not be perfect though)
an animated nuclear explosion now that does sound fun... goblins also, though they would be easily killed off... animated cities, that is a strange idea.
the creatures are different, the fact is that in the 18th century story they could have existed also. around ancient temples of course lost in the jungle, which some explorers back then encountered. Though I think that these temple ones would be a different species to the main ones in the 21st century story, the temple ones being more intelligent and peaceful, worshipped as gods by the natives. friendly, kind but secretive. this other group is slightly less intelligent (not the dumbest ones though)able to form into armies they are angered by the sacrilege of the land (you mentioned white phosphorus) they have joined to wipe out the near by humans. perhaps the most intelligent ones try and stop them, if they are a related species (like humans and Neanderthals) but that's only if they make it into the story.
as for the reanimation of the dead and the "Genesis project" all very interesting, perhaps even a cause for the monsters to come out of the forest even if the forest themselves are not terribly damaged. Actually it goes give me an excuse to add ents :-D I wonder what the jungle version of Treebeard would be.
in Oronegro I try and work around the laws of physics, I am assuming that these imagi-nations are in different universes, with similar laws of physics, but with strange elements.
an example of some strange elements would be for instance Black Matter, this material is for the most part a boring, black, malleable material. but when it combines with a living organism it gives the organism super powers, the ability to create energy and matter but not to destroy it. White matter is different, it gives off energy, and can only ever combine with either a machine or black matter. White matter when combined into a machine can be used to create any form of energy the machine is programmed to create. Grey matter the obvious link of both is strange it cannot create energy or matter, but when combined with a machine it gives that machine concious thought and when combined with a life form the life form is given telepathic abilities.
none of this is set to enter Oronegro, perhaps in small quantities, or perhaps its what explains the aliens and creatures ability to communicate with each other by thought. The creatures go one step better and will communicate with you by thought (the most intelligent ones only though).
I hadn't thought of a disease that effects humans and reduces them to some kind of zombie state. Now that I put my mind to it there is a frightening plausibility about it that makes me wonder if it hasn't happened already...
DeleteThe goblin race I thought of might well have their intelligences enhanced by the genesis wave. As the impoverished working class they will either [a] cease performing menial tasks for the wealthier classes (a great inconvenience for them) or [b] continue service, but fully aware that as service providers they have a certain hold upon the people they serve.
But I was really thinking of Warhammer 40K translated into Oronegro 2.1K. :-)
At any rate, Gowan, it seems to me already you have a lot of good and interesting ideas to work on, here. It will be interesting to see how they will pan out.
the problem I have is not coming up with ideas but managing them, the goblin one is interesting, but that's the sort of thing the rebellious population is doing, they have stopped working and gone home or have carried on working, but for the rebel cause.
Deleteas for the zombies, no worries about them. it may seem plausible but I doubt that any military would dare make such a virus and I doubt that any virus would mutate into that form, without being caught first heading towards that form. but for the sake of fiction its great. its like laser weaponry, sounds possible but the way its presented in fiction is not. (I have considered how to create weaponry that would appear to be like the "laser" rifles in sci-fi but that's not important)