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 Part 8: "White sugar, the most addictive foodstuff ever developed"  Chapter 5: Lands of Voodoo History of the Caribbean The penultimate chapter of GURPS Voodoo, Lands of Voodoo unsurprisingly focuses on the Caribbean, starting with a rough outline of its history...or the history as told by 1995 C.J. Carella, at least, which isn’t necessarily 100% accurate. I’ll freely admit that while I know some of what is wrong with this section, I don’t know enough about the history of the Caribbean before the Trans-Atlantic slave trade to go into massive detail, so feel free to give your own comments on anything that’s extremely wrong if you are more knowledgeable. It begins in the pre-Columbian times, with the Taino and the Sea Caribs. The Taino were a group of peaceful indigenous peoples, living a semi-nomadic lifestyle of hunting and gathering as well as raising domesticated manioc (cassava). The Sea Caribs, by contrast, were a warrior culture descended from mainland South American tribes that engaged in both widespread slavery and ritual cannibalism. The Aztec and Mayan Empires also existed, but they don't matter because they're not in the Caribbean and thus only get a brief mention as a rare trade partner for Caribbean tribes. In 1492, a "misguided Italian adventurer" you may know as Christopher Columbus sailed in and set up shop in the name of Isabella I and Ferdinand II of Spain. Things didn't go well for the Carib-weakened Taino, with disease, slave labor, and guns decimating their already fragile numbers. A Dominican friar by the name of Bartolome de las Casas was part of growing opposition to this mistreatment, however, and suggested that the Spanish plantations and mines be worked by slaves taken from Africa instead. And thus the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was born. The British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese Empires wanted in on this action as well, and made their own settlements in the Caribbean and South America soon after. On these islands, the planter culture and its cash crops reigned supreme, with African people suffering from the grueling oversea voyages on inhumane slave ships and at the plantation masters’ lashes. Class systems were developed from conceptual blood quantums, with terms like maroon, quadroon, and octaroon coming to exist simply to demarcate just how much white blood vs. black blood one had in them. Interracial people, referred to collectively as mulattos, were a middle class between the purely white and purely black, and racial animus between the mulattos and the black slaves was and still is heated. There was also a fair bit of piracy and privateering in the shipping lanes during the 16th Century, but this eventually ground to a halt as more and more imperial control over the seas was exerted. Entering the 19th Century, things start getting more shaky for the imperial powers. Populist uprisings begin to form across the Caribbean and Latin America. The Spanish Empire in the New World fell apart island by island, and the French-owned Haiti underwent the Haitian Revolution, where slaves and Maroons (escaped slaves who formed their own communities in the wilderness) overthrew the aristocracy of the islands and formed their own sovereign nation. American forces would occupy Haiti from 1915 to 1934, where paternalistic racism was present, but this eventually ended and "a lot of positive results" came from the occupation in the form of improved healthcare, better roads, and a better organized society. For the rest of the 20th Century, it’s dictatorships, poverty, and general not-greatness that gets but a few sentences of text.  Caribbean Occult History Rather than interweave the paranormal and historical parts of its history, a separate section of this chapter goes over that timeline from the perspective of the supernatural elements of the setting. Or parts of that timeline, at least, as there are four major beats of this two page long section: slavery, the Haitian Revolution, Papa Doc Duvalier, and Fidel Castro. For the first, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade is the second worst human sacrifice to the dark gods that has ever happened, the only worse on being the Holocaust. For the second, the Haitian Revolution was mostly the work of Maroon Initiates, who were able to rally the rebelling slaves and use their magic to overpower the technologically superior French. "As a symbol for African Americans, Haiti is both an example and a terrible warning", however, due to a dark legend. Dutty Boukman was the Maroon houngan who helped spark off the Haitian Revolution in both real life and the world of GURPS Voodoo. In GURPS Voodoo, however, things go a bit further than sparking. After killing thousands of white slave owners, Boukman and his houngans force the hand of some of the French Lodge members left alive to: namely, sacrificing thirteen slaves to summon a Corruptor. The Corruptor claims it is willing to assist the French colonials as long as they let it live on the island forevermore. Scared to death of the rebels coming for their heads, the Lodge members accept. The Corruptor scares away the rebels' loas, causing them to lose that battle to the French. In retaliation, the colonials massacre black Haitians en mass, "making little distinction between rebels and innocent people of the wrong color". After this defeat, the same Corruptor appears to the rebels, offering them the same deal it did the French: as long as it got to stay on the island forever, it would crush their foes. They agree, and the Corruptor goes to royally gently caress up the Napoleonic Army with plague and disaster, allowing the Haitians to win the day. The Haitian Revolution wins the black people of Haiti their freedom, "but at a terrible price", as the Corruptor remains under the totally binding interracial pact it made and is the cause of all the poverty, hurricanes, and other woes of Haiti. The land itself is tainted forever by this ancient spirit. If this all sounds vaguely familiar, that may be because "the Haitian rebels made a pact with the Devil" is literally a claim made by several evangelical Christians such as Pat Robertson and Lowell Ponte. It’s always a fine line to walk between using conspiracy beliefs in fiction and accidentally promoting really horrible ideology, and in this case I feel Carella unwittingly stepped over the line. The section on Papa Doc Duvalier reiterates the statement from last update that some of the Tontons Macoutes were actual tonton makout spirits, but now ups the number of them from a few of the organization’s members to "most of" them. It is also hypothesized that both Papa Doc and his son Jean-Claude (AKA Baby Doc) were either dark Initiates or directly Corruptor-possessed. It’s also stated that in retaliation for John F. Kennedy suspending financial aid to Haiti, Papa Doc used a powerful curse to force Lee Harvey Oswald to make the now infamous fatal shot in Texas on August 22, 1963. Finally, we've got Fidel Castro. Rather than through his own charisma and the strength of the people, Castro's overthrow of the Batista regime was done through a pact with a Corruptor. The CIA being unable to kill him? Corruptor. Staying in power for so long? Corruptor. The Cuban Missile Crisis? You guessed it, Corruptor. In-Betweeners and dark Initiates run rampant, drug trafficking and terrorism are rife, and the Corruptors generally love Cuba and their servant Castro for it.  Chapter 6: Campaigns The very final chapter, GURPS Voodoo ends off with the classic “so, what’s the GM going to do with all this information?” chapter. Campaign Setting The natural assumption for a GURPS Voodoo campaign is that you’re going to set it in either the Caribbean or urban United States, but what if you go off the script? ...No, not like playing on other continents besides North America, that would be silly! What we have here are suggestions on integrating other settings entirely. Want a Voodoo supers setting? Consider reading Marshall Law or George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards for inspiration on the GURPS Voodoo cosmology in a supers setting! Cyberpunk? Street samurai melee fighting In-Betweeners and netrunners vs. e-Corruptors are go! Want to mix GURPS Voodoo and the  Time Period While GURPS Voodoo is meant to be played in the current, very modern year of 1995, you can optionally set it in other time periods of the setting’s history. You could even go as far back as the Pleistocene, where Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon Initiates channeled totem spirits to survive in a harsh world. There’s also the possibility of the Crusades, where the Muslim Lodges, Byzantine Lodges, and western European Lodges were all at each others’ throats. Alternatively, you could go into a dark near-future (like the shocking future year of 2017!) where the Corruptors have won the fight and the world is an even shittier place. Most of this section, however, relates to the Golden Age of Piracy and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade onward. Since it’s mostly stuff we already heard in previous chapters, though, there’s not much to talk about and we can move ahead.  Campaign Style This section is literally just an expansion of the point buy options from back in chapter 2. While this may be mostly redundant and possibly would have been better served by moving these more detailed overviews up into chapter 2, it at least does go over the benefits and drawbacks of doing the campaign in different ways. For instance, the 100 to 150 point scrubs tier of campaign is great for personal stories and people who think rather than fight, but it has a definite lethality not suited to all play groups and limits you to using the weakest spirits and cultists while ignoring the vast majority of the weird supernatural poo poo in the setting.  Campaign Themes Last, but not least, GURPS Voodoo finishes off with a look at some thematic frameworks that help outline just what it is the players are going to end up doing. While one theme can be a campaign unto itself, the book suggests that having an adventure or two – hell, even the whole campaign potentially – reaching into several themes can bring more life to the players’ experience. Going over them briefly one by one, we have...
Next Time: With the bulk of GURPS Voodoo covered, the only thing left to do now is to coordinate and give out some final thoughts before moving on to that certain other C.J. Carella-adjacent game once more.
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Aug 26, 2017 16:26
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Green Intern posted:Really loving the artwork of Cool Skeleton, and the one of somebody showing off their fart gun to a friend. Rigged Death Trap posted:On the internet
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Aug 26, 2017 18:28
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Part 9: The Wrapup  The Legacy of GURPS Voodoo In spite of his insistence that it would happen, neither Carella nor any other author released further GURPS Voodoo sourcebooks in the years past 1995. It would receive very slight additions here and there, however; the books GURPS Who’s Who and GURPS Who’s Who II, for instance, would provide a few notes for the real world figures of John Dee, Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts, and Queen Ana Nzinga Mbande in the context of GURPS Voodoo. Its true legacy, however, would be in its magic system. Not only did ritual magic turn up again in further GURPS Third Edition titles such as GURPS Shapeshifters and GURPS Spirits, it would eventually make its way into GURPS Fourth Edition as well. It first surfaced in the latest edition in 2008 with the publishing of GURPS Thaumatology, a book of various magic tweaks and alternate magic systems, where it commanded an entire chapter and was renamed Path Magic. The system mostly remained the same, save for increasing the number of Paths from five to eleven by adding six new paths: Cunning, Elements, Form, Gadgets, Knowledge, and Nature. An alternative Path system was also introduced in the same title, referred to as Book Magic due to each Path being related to a specific magical grimoire. Where things really kicked off, however, was a 2011 GURPS book called GURPS Monster Hunters: Champions. Written by Jason “PeeKitty” (his name as a ‘priest’ in the Church of the SubGenius, which he has decided to keep around as a nickname in production credits but usually shortens to just “PK”) Levine, GURPS Monster Hunters was a line of campaign workbooks meant to give GURPS players a quick reference for making their own settings in the vein of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, and the like. There’s a lot that could be said about that line, but we’re here for the discussion of GURPS Voodoo, so I’ll cut straight to the chase. GURPS Monster Hunters’s magic system is dubbed Ritual Path Magic (RPM for short), and is yet another retooling of the ritual magic formula. Here, there are nine Paths: Body, Chance, Crossroads, Energy, Magic, Matter, Mind, Spirit, and Undead. The Paths also have alternate names based on nine of the ten sephiroth of the Kabbalist Tree of Life, hearkening back to the good old Gnostics again, but unless I missed something about casting fireballs and raising zombies in my time looking at Jewish mysticism the names are seemingly random. More importantly than its choice of Paths, however, RPM actually codified the further creation of rituals by adding various energy modifiers, qualifier of power level as “lesser” or “greater”, and seven keywords for specific types of ritual effect – those keywords being Control, Create, Destroy, Restore, Sense, Strengthen, and Transform – with all of these codifications having specific energy costs to add up and say exactly what your ritual’s value actually is. RPM would manage to rise to the top of the heap of fan-favorite GURPS magic systems and eventually gets its own setting-neutral supplement for those who didn’t care about Monster Hunters but wanted to use its magic system. I’d say that even though GURPS Voodoo itself never had any further sourcebooks, that’s a relatively big line of inheritance for it to have. Closing Thoughts What are we, over two decades and one lovely review later, to make of GURPS Voodoo? Is it an unfairly ignored masterpiece of a setting that fits up there with the legendary greats? Is it one of C.J. Carella’s masterworks, worthy of as much or more admiration than something like Terra Primate, Buffy the Vampire Slayer the Roleplaying Game, and indeed the Unisystem as a whole? ...Well, no. It certainly tries, though. And really, I’d say that’s the phrase I’d describe GURPS Voodoo: The Shadow War with as a whole – “it tries”. The goal of having a roleplaying game focused around people of color and a group of religions that are often demonized in European and American pop culture is a laudable one. Ultimately, however, this goal clashes with 90s liberalism and Iron Age comic book sensibilities, creating a world crawling with a hilariously high number of serial killers, drug dealers, pimps, and gangsters that are all literally demonic in nature opposed by a wizard Burger King Kid’s Club of those who have realized that maybe both sides are bad and we all just need to all come together and put aside things like the history of chattel slavery and institutional racism in order to stop the real metaphysical evil of the world. Still, it comes from a right-minded heart, and in spite of my ire at some of its material I would ultimately give GURPS Voodoo the stamp of a flawed work with good intentions, and its underlying framework could be salvaged. To put the cards on the table, here's my own personal and heavily opinionated "four things that could be improved upon in V:TSW".
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Oct 2, 2017 23:36
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Barudak posted:So Earth is supposed to be evil/bad (the game uses the term "spiritually dead) but as we'll see in the next update in addition to Oreos being a huge point in Earth's favor, Eden is colossally hosed up in ways Earth isn't and Eden's God is, arguably, massively eviler than Earth's. Fossilized Rappy fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Oct 18, 2017 |
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Oct 18, 2017 07:23
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Herbie the mimic bouncer hits that right level of "goofy mundane fantasy life" that D&D too often skimps out on.
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Nov 24, 2017 17:21
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LatwPIAT posted:David Pulver's catgirls aren't necessarily fetishistically portrayed, but it's rather noticeable when almost every single RPG book Pulver writes has catgirls in them; GURPS: Mecha, GURPS: Bio-Tech, GURPS: Transhuman Space, GURPS 4e, GURPS: Reign of Steel... Though from Bio-Tech we can learn that Pulver does seem to be somewhat enticed by the idea of cat-girls in heat forcing themselves upon him. >_>
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Nov 26, 2017 06:02
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Freaking Crumbum posted:
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Nov 30, 2017 21:51
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Feinne posted:Frogmen:
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Dec 2, 2017 08:43
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Feinne posted:They note that while the bunyip has tons of features ascribed to it, its actual form is similar to a diprotodont (a sort of prehistoric kangaroo). One comparable in size to a rhinoceros. It’s an herbivore but doesn’t really enjoy tiny creatures like humans getting in its grill, so it’ll pretty much attack anything that gets near it. Feinne posted:The Outback Dragon is pretty much a six meter long komodo dragon. I ‘think’ this is based on a real extinct giant lizard, which is suggested to simply not be extinct. They’ve moved from a diet of bunyips, which are pretty scarce now, to a much more common large land mammal: humans.
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Dec 8, 2017 07:00
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 Review Part 1: This is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius The Extraterrestrials Sourcebook posted:The world of Conspiracy X is based on historic and contemporary events, persons, and groups. The secret of a good Conspiracy X campaign is weaving “real” events as seamlessly as possible into the story line so that the players cannot be sure what is true and what is deception. Heightened paranoia is central to the experience. When this book, or any other Conspiracy X publication, uses names and details taken from history or contemporary affairs, all such references are fictional or satirical. Conspiracy X is intended solely as a game and not as a source of the “truth.” Nothing in this book is intended to degrade or impugn these people or groups, nor does this book purport to reveal true secretive information about them. In fact, Eden Studios and the authors would like to publicly disclaim any “inside” knowledge and assure any MiBs and Aegis operatives out there that there is no reason to look into the matter any further. Honest! The Extraterrestrials Sourcebook begins with a brief introduction that goes over the basics of Unisystem writing style for those who didn't pay attention the first time: the game uses d4, d6, d8, and d10 dice, the Imperial measuring system is used, the writing swaps between male and female pronouns for third person referrals on a by-chapter basis, etc. There's also a whopping six page-long timeline of alien history, but we're going to straight up ignore that because it's stuff that will be learned organically through the rest of the book. This leaves nothing between us and starting this long-delayed post with the actual first chapter.  Chapter 1: The Atlanteans Atlantean History While they may be outwardly human now, the Atlanteans have a very different ancestry. They call their home planet Adlan'ns - hope you're not allergic to apostrophes, because there's going to be a lot of proper nouns in this section with them - a moonless world with almost-constant daylight and frequent storms. A plethora of violent predators evolved on the planet, but the most successful were giant canine predators referred to by Atlantean palaeontologists as the Sphi'ns. Eventually, an arboreal pack-hunting offshoot called An'Sphi'ns developed, having smaller body size, opposable thumbs, larger brains, and muzzle-free faces. The An'Sphi'ns would eventually begin to forge tools, walk upright, and become sapient, becoming the ancestral Atlantean: the Pr'Adlan'ns. The most successful Pr'Adlan'n tribes were the subjugation-obsessed and weapon-crafting Dyauspa'r, agrigultural Gerishrig'al, metropolitan Qwezdaco'al, aristic and honor-loving Rapa'lo, nomadic Ahr'am, and seafaring Ea'don. When the Dyauspa'r decided they wanted to become an empire and began steamrolling over tribes and clans all around them, the Gerishrig'al and Qwezdaco'al quickly offered to sign articles of confederation. The others, however, all fought back: the Rapa'lo only submitted once they were nearly extinct, the guerrilla fighters of the Ahr'am didn't lay down their arms until they were promised autonomy under the Dyauspa'r empire, and the Ea'don navies kicked the asses of the Dyauspa'r repeatedly and only eventually joined the empire under the condition that all of the Atlantean tribes would band together and wage holy war on a sapient species of ocean-dwelling armored serpents called the Leva'ans that had been plaguing Ea'don ships. With all the tribes united under the Dyauspa'r, the Atlanteans spread across their planet, eventually creating a society with the weird contrast of Information Age technology and a feudalist social structure. An overarching global feudalism unsurprisingly bred dissidents unhappy with the aristocracy. These ragtag anarchists, freedom fighters, and general malcontents were collectively referred to as Anuzca'lipoc: "the Adversaries". In spite of that rather bombastic title, though, the true danger to the Dyauspa'r Empire would come from within; 750,000 years ago, increasing autonomy of the nobles of each of the tribes and infighting between them would rip the empire apart in a great civil war. The Pr'Adlan'ns would have almost certainly wiped themselves off the face of their planet were it not for the intervention of the clergy known as the Nameless Priests. An old Dyauspa'r religion, the Nameless religion held that the universe was created by Ns (literally "Nameless"), a cosmic nothingness that gained the spark of thought and proceeded to think the rest of the cosmos into being out of a desire for companionship. While Ns as a primordial god had existed in pre-unification Pr'Adlan'ns cultures, under the Dyauspa'r Empire his mythology was codified. A Satan-like figure was represented in the Leva'ans god of shadows named Dra'ans, as well as a pantheon under Ns was created in the form of seven children collectively known as the Celestial Family: Ah'ram the goddess of hunting and justice, Anuzca'lipoc the god of adversity and growth through trials, Dyauspa'r the god of the heavens and bureaucracy, Ea'don the god of the seas, Gerishrig'al the earth goddess, Qwezdaco'al the god of laws and craftsmen, and Rapa'lo the god of fire, war, and creativity. The idea was that each tribe was meant to emulate the god they were 'named' after, even having their leader give up their own name to take on the name of the tribe and act as an avatar of their god, and with that social conformity could be obtained. While that obviously didn't work before the civil war, the Nameless Priests managed to persuade the tribes to come stop the bloodshed and actually follow the example of their gods under a new theocratic society.  Under the Nameless Priests' societal plans, all were children of Ns first and tribal identifier second, marking the period where the Atlanteans consider their modern species to have truly begun. After divvying up land to each of the tribes, now known as the Seven Celestial Families, the priesthood would create a new seat of power in the form of the Autarch. An Autarch would be chosen by the Nameless Priests in an event known as the Harmonic Concordance whenever they felt like it was time to get a new Autarch. The Autarch's rule was absolute, and anyone defying it would be effectively excommunicated by the Nameless Priests, unpersoned as one of 'the Forgotten'. Nobles were also given extra legal protection under the rule of the Nameless: a commoner who killed a noble would have themselves and their entire immediate family executed, and duels to the death between different nobles were expressly prohibited. Fast forward 50,000 years from the Atlantean civil war and the Rapa'lo have invented nanomachines. Even better, several centuries of further research perfect it to the point that the Atlantean people are immortal nanite-hives! At first, this immortality was only afforded to the nobles of each Celestial Family by supposed divine mandate, but enough commoners rebelled that a new eighth Celestial Family specifically for the rebels known as the Frad'ri was created by the Nameless Priests in a hasty attempt to patch things up once again. The Frad'ri would select two members every decade to receive the gift of nanomachine immortality. The Atlantean immortals would capitalize on the whole inability to die thing by inventing artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and space flight. The Ah'ram of the day would be the one to put these three things together into a fully functioning luxury trip through the stars to find potential new people and creatures for the Atlanteans to conquer, so she and the rest of the Ah'ram Family packed up and headed into space. Around 500,000 years ago, the Ah'ram Family ship finally lands on a planet with life bigger than microbes. Unfortunately, it's the homeworld of the Grays, which at this point were basically psychic space dolphins. The Grays attempted to communicate telepathically, but the lack of psychic powers in the Atlanteans led to Ah'ram and her people assuming that the Grays were all weird sea beasts too dumb to know a predator when they saw one. Queue the Ah'ram Family hooting and hollering about this fun new trophy animal to hunt down and slaughter for the honor of their clan. This was the first time the Grays encountered a new species, and also the first time they ever felt the psychic impression of suffering and violence. Unsurprisingly, they didn't take it well. Doing what any self-respecting psychic space dolphin would, the Grays mindfucked their own genetic code to become terrestrial bipeds, made some coral spacecraft, and went to tell off these new rear end in a top hat neighbors. And by 'tell off', I mean 'kidnap and vivisect', because the Atlanteans had done the same to them and thus given the species a very bad new habit. Meanwhile, back on Adlan'ns, the reigning Qwezdaco'al decided that all the other Celestial Families were getting too much honor and fame for him to sit around and do nothing. His plan? Create and release a nanomachine swarm to terraform the entire planet into a perfect eden, optimally designed for the Atlantean people to relax in eternal comfort. Unfortunately for him, the Nameless Priests had a different idea; namely, to turn the planet into a hostile hellworld and murder all the commoners so that the immortal nobles of 'pure blood' could become even stronger. With that goal in mind, they tampered with Qwezdaco'al's invention, and its release ended up creating a gray goo scenario. As all life and land on Adlan'nis melted into a slurry of nanite-infested mud, the terrified nobles on their spaceships gazed on their dying world for the last time. Next Update: A bunch of dipshits with a god complex stumble onto Earth. Chariots of the Gods ensues.
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Jan 22, 2018 12:58
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 Review Part 2: I'm Not Saying It Was Aliens, But...  Chapter 1 Continued When we last left the Adlan'ns, rogue elements of their society had just reduced their entire planet to sludge. Only a hundred thousand or so immortals escaped, and out of those a fourth were the assholes responsible for the destruction of the planet. The colony ships of each of the Celestial Families scattered to the solar winds, engaging in genocide or mass slavery whenever they happened to alight on a planet with sapient life. This changes in 175,000 BC, when an Anuzca'lipoc vessel lands on Earth. They found a native species of 7" tall hairy giants that would eventually be known in the human tongue as the Pilosi. At first, the Anuzca'lipoc enslaved these creatures as they had so many others before them, but as word spread and more and more Adlan'ns colony ships came to this wondrous Eden of a planet, the species' god complex flared up again. Sure, the Pilosi were big and strong, but they refused to speak the Adlan'ns tongue, and didn't appear very bright. The immortal aristocracy of Adlan'ns wanted to have commoners groveling at their feet again, those who would worship them and tend to their every whim. Enter Homo neanderthalensis. The reigning Gerishrig'al of 150,000 BC decided to become unto as Ns, using her gene splicing skills to create a monkey-Adlan'ns hybrid: the first Neanderthal; ignore the fact that Neanderthals evolved earlier than that, history is a lie and everything you know is wrong. Scratch 'we need commoners who will worship us like gods' off the to-do list. Still, this wasn't enough for some Adlan'ns. The Frad'ri Family declared that there needed to be a weapon that could be used against the Grays. And what better to do so than something made from the Grays themselves? They and the handful of living Qwezdaco'al nobles pitched the idea of splicing Gray genetic material into Neanderthals. In spite of initial resistance from the other Celestial Families, the blessing of the Nameless Priests gave the Qwezdaco'al a chance to 'redeem' themselves by engaging in this new venture. 50,000 years of experimentation later, and humans are born from the union of Gray and Neanderthal DNA. After ordering their new servitors to genocide the Neanderthals as proof of their loyalty to the Adlan'ns nobility, the Celestial Families prepared to set into their old ways of honor-feuds, aristocratic excess, and general dickery, only to be shaken awake by a string of 'oh poo poo, oh gently caress' moments. Humans began showing precognitive abilities, then cultural evolution on a scale of decades rather than millennia, and finally the creation of their own languages, gods, and inventions outside of those given to them by the Adlan'ns. Even more startling was the eventual manifestation of monsters that had not existed before the humans began dreaming and weaving tales of them. The terrifying truth of the matter was that the experiment in creating a species capable of challenging the Grays was a runaway success, to the point where only Adlan'ns overconfidence kept them from going into a full panic about the possibility that their servants could one day become the masters. The Ea'Don Family was given the task of making sure the humans kept evolving into the perfect sword to wield against the Grays and not stray off the path of worshiping their creators. To perform this task, the ruling Ea'don created a titanic island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, declared himself its emperor, and dubbed the island continent Atlantis. Similarly, the Adlan'ns would be called the Atlanteans, to make their name simpler for their human underlings to pronounce. Qwezdaco'al would create his own island empire in the Pacific, called Lemura, and the two nations would become the primary homes for the Atlantean people and their human subjects. This time, sure of their control and no longer freaking out about the potential of human development away from Atlantean norms, the immortal nobles once again settled back into the societal norms they had established on their homeworld so long ago.  But what of the Pilosi? If you'd forgotten about them, I wouldn't blame you, but they're still around. The secret truth about the Pilosi is that they could speak and understand Atlantean perfectly fine, but had no tolerance for the yolk of oppression. They saw humans as brothers unfortunately too ignorant to see their place as slaves. Pilosi rebels that escaped Atlantean society over the millennia both secreted some humans to freedom and experimented with harnessing the ambient psychic energy created by human presence, creating what modern people call magic. Two particularly industrious Pilosi brothers evne created cities of their own in the jungles of North Africa and in the high Himalayas. The brother of the jungle city was foolhardy enough to taunt the Atlanteans with his power and freedom, which the Atlanteans responded to by sending in human and Atlantean warriors to slaughter the city. The city was so thoroughly razed that destroyed nanomachines and unchained raw magic would scour the entire region, turning the great jungle into the Sahara Desert. The mad as hell Atlanteans began a full-scale campaign of extermination against the rebellious Pilosi. Those who survived scattered to the winds to protect themselves and their human allies; some would even go so far as to take to the oceans, where they would grow gills and exchange their fur for scales. While the sea Pilosi were content to just chill out and befriend humans, the land Pilosi would continue to hone and refine their magic, especially the powers of illusion that could help them escape the notice of the raging Atlanteans. Some would even find a golden brown metal that was capable of amplifying psychic power during their travels around 25,000 years ago. This metal, dubbed orichalcum, was rare and powerful enough that they quickly snatched up any on hand and began to forge it into foci of various shapes and sizes to help themselves and the Pilosi-allied human population increase their magical powers. Meanwhile, back with the Atlanteans, Autarch Ea'don has been busy. He's created another island city in between Atlantis and Africa called Tro'don, ruled by his son Pri'don. While Pri'don took on a load of human wives and hosed himself up the largest Army on Earth, other Atlantean rulers began to send off their own colonies to both weed out the Pilosi rebels and expand their influence. Gerishrig'al and Ahr'am colonized the Mediterranean, Qwezdaco'al and Rapa'lo the Americas, Dyauspa'r the far east of Asia, and a daughter of Gerishrig'al and her Ea'don ally the Russian steppe. These independent colonies were given instructions to build pyramids in the fashion of the temples that once dotted Adlan'ns, and given only Bronze Age technology to avoid the possibility of being on par technologically with their Atlantean masters. 10,000 years ago, Dyauspa'r decides that his army of humans known as the Gre'ks are formidable enough to challenge any foe. Seeing this new age of expansion as a perfect opportunity to stir up poo poo with his old rival Ea'don. His plan: have his spies convince a Tro'don noble to demand a bride be taken from the ranks of the Gre'ks as tribute, then use this event as casus belli to invade Tro'don. A Gre'k warrior named Akki'r leads the assault on Tro'don; turns out he's actually a Pilosi agent and powerful psychic warrior, though, and he ends up killing Pri'don and slaughtering Atlanteans left and right in the name of human freedom rather than in the name of Dyauspa'r. Whoops! As human rebellions erupt across the planet, the panicking Atlanteans turn to the Nameless Priests for guidance. Turns out that millennia of inbreeding and oaths of secrecy have driven the Nameless Priests a bit loopy, though, so their decree is to scorched earth the entirety of Atlantean operations on Earth. Atlantis, Lemura, and countless Atlantean technological marvels are destroyed via overloading geothermal power plants, with no regard for the loss of Atlantean or human life. A volcanic ash cloud creates an even colder climate, and so much of humanity is lost that it goes through a population bottleneck and loss of knowledge. Reeling from yet another disaster, the Atlanteans went back to the drawing board. Again. Humans were considered too valuable in the forever war against the Grays to remove entirely, but direct control was now considered way too dangerous, so what to do? The provided answer was to weave Atlantean narratives into human religions, presenting the Atlanteans as gods. The Gre'ks led by Akki'r against Tro'don would become the Greeks and Achilles against Troy, Gerishig'al would be the goddess Ereshkigal, Ea'don would inspire Poseidon, Qwezdaco'al and Anuzca'lipoc would be reflected in Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, etc. While limited but direct 'divine intervention' was allowed in the days of the Babylonians, Greeks, and early Mesoamerican civilizations, this would end in 300 AD. Nonetheless, every human religion that exists today is at least partly influenced by the Atlanteans' attempts to use religious rites as a way to control humanity, with Confucianism in particular being called out as the most directly written by Atlanteans themselves. They've similarly tried to influence humans' psychic potential through secret societies such as the Freemasons. Nonetheless, all of these attempts at molding humanity in their image haven't changed the fact that the Atlanteans' influence has greatly waned. They are a dying species, cursed by their own hubris, and they've begun to truly realize just what that means the future. Next Update: The life and times of the modern Atlantean.
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Jan 24, 2018 17:12
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Review Part 3: I Am The Modren Man  Chapter 1 Continued Atlantean Culture The surviving modern Atlantean is a psychological minefield. Immortality has made them restless egomaniacs with a god complex, obsessed with being the apex at one thing or another, be that war, political maneuverings, science, art, or what have you. Atlantean interactions are pretty much centuries-long dick waving contests, and most are too prideful to work with one another for more than a brief period of time. Even the Celestial Families are more a matter of heritage than any cohesive unit for what few Atlanteans remain. This is a problem for them, as multiple storms are on the horizon. Humans have become technologically advanced enough to challenge and even kill Atlanteans, the Grays are on Earth and gathering allies, and the Saurians are an unknown factor that most Atlanteans see as too minor to be important but some are genuinely concerned about. There are only two cohesive 'societies' of Atlantean that still exist, one of which are the Nameless Priests. At this point, the Nameless are so inbred and mentally burdened that they are almost always dissociative psychopaths, barely connecting with the world around them and living in monastic communes. These communes must never fall below sixty-seven members, as sixty-six is considered an unholy number, and most are meant to have a membership around the sacred number eighty-eight. Unlike other Atlanteans, the Nameless are so obsessed with blood purity that they refuse to utilize internal nanites, meaning that they still have a mortal lifespan that caps out at around age 300. When a Nameless dies, all the other members of the commune begin having sex in an attempt to produce what they consider a viable offspring. All of the nonviable offspring are aborted, and once the viable one is born and matured their parent is executed to maintain the constant population number. One Nameless commune in the Himalayas has found and begun a tenuous diplomacy with the Pilosi living there, which would probably be a shock to other Atlanteans if the commune ever decided to give enough of a gently caress to inform anyone else (which is unlikely). The other connected Atlantean social group are the Forgotten. Members of the Atlantean diaspora that were deemed to have committed a crime worth capital punishment were literally unpersoned, their memories forcibly removed as they were thrown into the wilderness of Earth to fend for themselves. While these sentences are meant to be carried out for several thousand years before being revoked, some were forgotten due to the Nameless not having all their chickens in a row, hence the moniker. The amnesiac Forgotten were still immortal, however, and inevitably stumbled across other members of the Forgotten that were 'familiar' due to facial recognition software being part of the standard Atlantean nanomachine system package. Slowly but surely, they came together into their own secret society, attempting to find their true origin. This search went in vain until the 1980s, when a Forgotten scientist who had taken the human name Randolph Winot was drafted into a cell of Aegis. Winot's work ended up putting him in direct contact with Atlantean technology. Realizing that the craft had the same nanotechnology within his own body, he informed forty-three other Forgotten of this occurrence and they formulated a plan. Randolph Winot would continue to work for Aegis, work his way to the top rank of his cell, and demand a face to face meeting with the Atlantean who had provided the craft to Aegis. The Atlantean in question, Leese, was set upon by the whole group of Forgotten, tortured, and eventually gave up knowledge of Atlantean culture and the punishment of the Forgotten before dying soon after. This knowledge created a schism in the Forgotten. Some felt that they could return to the Atlanteans and plead the case for their memories to be restored, but the majority were mad as hell and wanted to both take their memories by force and give the Atlanteans a world of hurt. The retributive group, now forty-five strong, is known as the Reckoners and remains led by Randolph Winot. They seek to use contacts in Aegis and NDD, as well as a newfound alliance with the Grays, to shore up power and then beat the poo poo out of the Atlanteans hiding on Earth. Meanwhile, the eleven 'Pacifiers' have similarly sunk their tendrils into Aegis and the NDD to learn more information about their brethren, while also contacting Nameless Priest communes as they try and fail to get them to break out of their dissociative slump.  The Parts of a Disjointed Whole As the rest of the modern Atlanteans are so disconnected and individualistic, five NPC Atlanteans are presented near the end of the section to highlight some of those operating on Earth with disparate goals and attitudes. The first of these is Azek'al, Guardian of Humanity. One of the original Qwezadaco'al who created humans and part of an ancient faction that tried and failed to convince the Atlanteans to give their creations the same rights and technology as their own kind, Azek'al sees humans as his collective children. Having already served three thousand years of memory wipe for attempting to give Atlantean nanotechnology to humans directly, Azek'al has looked for a loophole in Atlantean law via giving a guiding hand to human scientists and innovators in the hopes that they will soon invent the same sort of technology on their own. His current machinations involve creating a Silicon Valley nonprofit called the Forward Thought Institute, which he heads under the human guise Louis Michaels. Unfortunately, his hopes of a golden age of humanity are currently on the rocks. His two most trusted scientists, Laura Dickinson and Jeremy Lee, are the only members of the Forward Thought Institute that know Azek'al's secret, and have even been given limited nanoaugmentation; unfortunately, they only see dollar signs, and are secretly more than willing to gently caress Azek'al over if it means they can control the flow of technology and become filthy rich. Voeth'am, The Eugenicist, is unsurprisingly less of a benevolent figure. Once a famed Atlantean explorer, the species' first encounter with the Grays broke something inside of her. Suddenly, there was an alien culture out there that had powers that the Atlanteans not only didn't understand, but could not possess, and that ate at Voeth'am for millennia. It's all she thinks about and the obsession that colors all her pursuits; Voeth'am wants nothing more than to grant Atlanteans the power of psychic awakening. She's made numerous attempts at mucking about with Gray DNA to see if there's something there that could work with Atlanteans rather than simply create humans again, studied all manner of psychic powers and magic rituals, observed the Seepage, and kept the company of sorcerers and scientists alike, but her efforts have not been fruitful. Her latest and most desperate plan is to create a metahuman (an artificial superhuman created by the Grays that will be explained more in their chapter) that is both psychically active and receptive to nanotechnology, then transplant her consciousness and nanites into it. For this to be a valid plan, however, she has to thread the line of working with the Grays via a collection of middlemen; not only would the Atlanteans definitely convict her of high treason were they to find out, but Aegis would almost certainly send their top agents to disrupt the plan if they knew of it, seeing it as a top threat to humanity. Djerl'r, Hegemon, is God. Like, literally, he's God. The capital G God. Yahweh. Jehovah. That God. In ancient times, he came to humanity proclaiming divinity, using nanotechnology to perform miracles such as manna from heaven and disasters such as the Ten Plagues of Egypt. After that got boring, he gave up on the physical god bit, instead playing a new game of taking on a human form and rising to power, 'dying', then taking a new form and doing it all over again. King Philip, Henry II, Pope Innocent III, Qin Shi Huang Di, Boudica, Hernan Cortes, and Tokugawa Ieyasu are called out as specific 'people' that were all just Djerl'r entertaining himself. After the other Atlanteans got tired of him literally sending out messages bragging of his accomplishments, Djerl'r decided that his next game would be to unify the Atlanteans once more, with him as the king of course. To this end, he has installed a network of informants in the US political system, Aegis, and the NDD, collected information on all known sapient species, and openly aided numerous Atlanteans while covertly sabotaging and even murdering others. Erlyn'lo, History Maker, has a hobby that is less directly destructive but definitely insidious. She sees herself as an artist and writer, with human history and prehistory as her canvas. Whenever history needs to be rewritten or surprising new evidence of the past comes to light, there's a good possibility it's something Elryn'lo has whipped up using her nanomachines. She even created the whole 'human fossil record' from Australopithecus onward from scratch - Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were both Atlantean creations, remember - as part of her game. Right now, she's considering creating 'evidence' endorsing either young earth creationism or astrobiological origins of all life on Earth. Since Aegis is getting too close to uncovering the True History for her liking, she also has started to plan a story that will put the organization in disarray. Finally, there's Lerun'al, The Prophet. A pacifist and great philosopher since the days when Adlan'ns was still a habitable world, Lerun'al was both fascinated by the existence of the Grays and horrified at her kin's senseless slaughter of them. She took the stars as a wandering contemplative for millennia before eventually reaching Earth, where the human experiment was in full swing. Humans' powers of precognition sparked a new passion in Lerun'al, and she began devoting herself to recording human prophecy and precognitive techniques over the ages. Things took a turn for the unpleasant in the 1950s, when an overwhelming pattern of dreams and visions related to the apocalypse began to appear. Most of these featured demons with large heads and eyes, which Lerun'al understandably believed to be the Grays. She took it upon herself to avoid humanity suffering this future by helping human psychics become stronger and influencing media producers to create increasingly negative portrayals of Grays in pop culture. Will her plans stop the apocalypse? Well... Conspiracy X 2.0: The Extraterrestrials Sourcebook posted:If only she knew that the greater threat would come from the Saurians. Next Update: We finish the Atlantean chapter with Atlantean game mechanics and technological marvels.
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Jan 31, 2018 20:07
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