The Gaming Outpost

This is ten tiny little seeds to use as background settings for a new world. They can be used as short little bits before transitioning elsewhere, or developed a bit along the inherent lines, or you can take your ordinary alt-reality setting and toss it out while keeping the plot part of the adventure.

These settings are specifically for Multiverser the Game, but can be used elsewhere with ease.

1. In Imperial Canada, the greatest and most feared military force in the world, the Mounties are armed with batons and not bullets. However, you are expected to wait where you are told by an officer. Such as “Wait here, and the wagon will come around to pick you up.” Thirty minutes later, it does. However, before one gets notions of walking away, understand that these Mounties have no excessive force regulations. So if you run, and get captured, you’re going to be spending at least two weeks in the hospital.

2. In Yongslieux Doet, the capitol city of the Kingdom of French Vietnam and the Greater Asiatic Provinces, asking of someone to help you is considered a sign of weakness, and a placing of yourself at the mercy of someone who may well not be inclined toward mercy. Most human interactions are couched in the form of demands, or in very subtle hints at what is needed. “Begging” often results in rejection, or even a slap across the face. The language is Colonial Mandarin.

3. In 1940’s Ubermenschia, an America engaged in WW2 against Germany and German ubermen, to order a hamburger instead of a ‘Liberty Steak’ is to risk a summary ejection from the premises, and a bounce or two as you land.

4. On board, the generational starship, Interstellar Friendship, good manners is a matter of course. No one exits their domicile without a check at their clothing for a mis-aligned tie, or a scarf that is too long, or the wrong hue. Thank you notes are sent for most occasions, including many we would not consider. Violence is fairly low, but depressive strains are slightly elevated (such strains are mitigated by the expressions of concern), except among the socially maladroit who tend very strongly to find singleton work on the exterior of the ship, or similar work, or collapse into a medicated sleep.

5. In Thunderbird Ridge, a Native American confederacy, to call into question someone’s claimed skill makes a duel mandatory, with the only route out of it, a public humiliation involving chains and the throwing of rotten vegetables.

6. In Manifold City, a member of the Ten City League that rose after the Nuclear Spasm of 1972 AD, walking across the street is considered a sign of needing state custody since the roadways have no speed signs, offices have drive-throughs so that you can go directly from car to elevator, and mini-golf-carts are used to move about inside the office buildings anytime the distance is over ten feet. And indeed, walking can be hazardous since no one is looking for pedestrians and can thus more easily run over them.

7. In the Seven Tribes of Kalifornia, the Native American tribes in the 1850’s, do not ‘notice’ people without face paint. If you don’t have paint, you are either totally without skills, or you lied when someone questioned a skill, or you otherwise lied in a grievous matter, and are thus stripped of all face paint, and honor. Wearing paint when stripped is considered to bring the wrath of the spirits…which is true. And if someone were to put on a random assortment of lines, the result could well be to summon a chaos spirit…which might take some time, and as it worked its malicious wiles against you over several days to kill you with your wondering why every effort you take seems to end in spectacular failure.

8. In the Windy City, the Midlands War of the 1960’s arose because the power of corrupt Chicagoan pols and criminal capos was unchallenged, and they imagined they could run the Nation. They made a deal with Mexican leaders, and took Texas. Now, both the independent East and West are trying to retake the Mid. The Mid is ruled by a succession of charismatic dictators, and iron-hearted ‘reformers’ who want to purify the Nation by slaughtering those of other groups (Black, White, Poor, Rich…someone wants to slaughter each group). If you do not frequently smash your hand to your chest, and proclaim “Great is the City and its Leaders!” and “Let us listen the teachings of Mr. Capone.” then people start viewing you as a spy for the East or the West.

9. In Tennessee 3000 AD, if you don’t chew fragrant polymer disintegrate, and spit the chaw, you’re just a stuffed shirt. Spittoons made of diamond pane are ready to pop up out of any floor at a command. If you don’t drive a hovercraft, armed with a laser cannon turret, then you are not willing to do a man’s part, and protect your neighbors and yourself. And if you don’t hunt with genetically engineered super-rotts, why then the mega-squirrels and the impossible possums know it, and they start hunting you. This is a Libertarian community, and it spreads over most of the nation with some slight havens of statist mentality (aka telling people not to use drugs, or restricting the right to keep and bear gatling auto cannon lasers.)

10. Greywaste is a former wonderland of technology which had hi-tech optical and quantum computers and transnational corporations decrying nation-states. Cosmopolitan elites compete with technowizard nerds as to who would rule the new age. The biggest thing they agreed on was that farmers, men in the old-fashioned sense of the term, and just generally everyone who didn’t subscribe to Future Fastforward was going to be Servant Boy in the future. The cosmos thought it would be because they had the reigns of political power, and they’d have a polite but very sweet oligarchy. The techies thought it was because they’d become Singulatarian gods, and everyone else would be pocket calculator sub-components of their godhood.

So, these two groups both convinced they were different and better because they were The Future went to war for the most old-fashioned of reasons. Power. They both lost.

The planet got covered with a foot thick of nanotech made grey goo that turned everything manmade into inedible soup. So….all the farmers and old-fashioned guys started scraping out the goo using terraces of dirt or dead bodies, and hands as shovels as starvation kicked in. They raced to get at the soil, and begin to farm the few plants that survived getting buried in the goo. The farmers were helped immeasurably by the ‘contract is the highest good’ ethos of the former elites. So the farmers offered the former elites a choice…slavery or starvation. It was a freely witnessed contract…’you, the undersigned (well we didn’t have paper so it was actually the ‘named’ but everyone said ‘the undersigned’ due to tradition) agree to work for me for such terms as I may see fit with the expectation that I will do my best as I see fit to provide food for you for the rest of your life.’

Of course, the techheads still conspire to revolt with their whispers in the secret code of Linux, but the farmers have the whiphand now, and they remember every treacherous trick and insult, and besides in the Brave New World the only way to keep everyone left alive still alive is if 99.95% of everyone is a farmer or farmer’s helper. The cosmos that didn’t die, and that was most of them are completely beaten down by the collapse of their palace of dreams. They have no desire for anything more than the next meal.