Using "real" life in your games.

Thanks to Ken at The Rusty Battleaxe and his kick-ass d30 Random Blog Topic Table, this post will deal with three real life locations that I use in my Mutant Future campaign.  First, let me say how much I have loved having a d30 around; one of my players recently procured one and has been bringing it to the Sunday game night.

We are now proud members of the Order of the d30, and in addition to scaring the shit out of my players when I used my once-per-session roll of the d30 for the 40' long, two headed snapping turtle's initiative, I borrowed the 30 sided behemoth for a quick roll on Ken's table and got a 22.

"22. Three Actual Historic/Geographic Settings for Campaigning"


My entire Mutant Future campaign so far has been set in post-apocalyptic Oregon, and most of it has occurred in the Willamette Valley in the Eugene/Springfield area.  In the grand old Gamma World tradition of naming things based on their present names with a twist (and preferably a funny twist), my players have been trudging around in the Willing Mate Valley.


Location Number One:  Skinner Butte

This small butte rises over downtown Eugene, just south of the Willamette River.  It is known for its columnar basalt rock formations, and it is also known for the parking lot on top of the butte where people go to make out in their cars and look out over the city at night.  In my Mutant Future campaign, it is known as Skinny Butt and is the home base of the players.  Skinny Butt is a community of mutants living in tunnels dug into the basalt, farming terraces cut into the sides of the butte and fishing over the cliffs into the swamp below.  I have found that using real life places for my campaign has made my life as a DM much easier; I can describe what the players are seeing, I know what sort of ruins they are likely to encounter, and I can use Google maps for my campaign maps!  Here is Skinny Butt on the map:

I use the "terrain" feature in Google Maps, which gives me a much more detailed map than I was likely to ever draw.  This has come in very handy, particularly when the PCs were chasing some Knights of Genetic Purity through the Sottles (Mutant Futurese for the South Hills of Eugene); I was able to point to each little ridge that they were cresting and tell them, "You catch a glimpse of your quarry in the gully below you, then they round a corner and you lose sight" and everyone was looking at a beautifully rendered 3D map of the terrain and knew exactly what was going on.


Location Number Two:
 The University of Oregon

Home of the best college football team in America, not to mention some pretty cool old brick buildings and extensive underground science labs that make for a great "dungeon" in the Mutant Future.  The University of Oregon, or UO, has become the home of the Ooh-Oh Monks in my campaign.  Worshiping the great god Intur Netz, the monks seek to understand what causes and control mutations through experiments carried out in their underground labs.  Three things make the University a perfect location for my campaign - the brick buildings would have survived pretty well, a good portion of campus is located on a small, sloping hill that would keep the buildings above the level of the swamp, and the campus is situated over a labyrinth of underground complexes.  The present day University of Oregon has such an extensive network of underground science labs that when I was eating a delicious Indian meal the other night across Franklin Boulevard from the UO, I was sitting directly above the world's largest zebra fish breeding facility! There are also very hush hush primate research labs as well as all kinds of other crazy stuff going on underground at the UO.  I will be posting more about the Ooh-Oh Monks soon, because the party has finally made contact with them and learned quite a bit about the reclusive monks.  Heck, they even got an audience with his Magnificence the Dean Docco Profus Flipsham Eggwar himself!  


One teaser - the lowest levels below the Ooh-Oh Monks have been sealed off for centuries, because the lab mice mutated and revolted.  These mutant mice reprogrammed a robotic manufacturing center and created "giant" (human sized) mech suits to run around in and were thoroughly overpowering the hated scientists before they were shut off from the surface.  These mice have been living for centuries under the delusion that the outside world was completely destroyed, and their "kingdom of the pure" was the only remaining life on the planet.  My players just made contact with Nicodemus the door guard and are seeking an alliance with the mice - so more Mice in Mechs coming soon!


Location Three: The John Day Fossil Beds

When my players spent several weeks out in the Eastern Desert trying to prevent the Knights of Genetic Purity from procuring a nuclear missile or three, the locale was the amazingly beautiful painted hills of the John Day Fossil Beds.  This would make for a great location in your typical fantasy campaign as well.  The terrain is very rugged, with steep gulches eroded out of sandstone hills, and there are frickin' dinosaur bones everywhere!  What more do you want, people?  Once again, Google Maps Terrain feature came in invaluable here.  Check it out:

The players spent quite a while manipulating the three desert factions that come together once a year for the Ramming Dan festival that culminates with the burning of a giant wooden statue (Burning Dan) and the ceremonial descent into the missile silo by the three High Priests to ask the god Intur Netz questions.  Unfortunately for anyone in the Mutant Future that wants to visit this picturesque area, the party ended up nuking the place!  That will definitely have to be explained in more detail than I can go into here in a later post, but the short version is that the players accidentally let a dimension spanning blob of alien flesh of unknown dimensions (possibly larger than the entire planet, once it finished coming out of its wormhole) out of the bottle.  They were rightfully scared, and figured that just setting one of the missiles off on a trajectory that would take it back to the silo to detonate while they fled in the hovercraft was the best thing to do.  Oh, those rascally PCs!  

Campaign Timeline, Part 2 - The Second Apocalypse

During the last session my players learned quite a bit about the history of the alien invasion, and in particular the events that led to the current Mutant Future that they know and love.

April 20th, 2010 - January 7th, 2151 - These years marked a struggle for survival by the remaining civilian population and a similarly futile struggle against the alien invaders by a resistance movement made up of a scattered handful of hidden military bases.  A long, cold nuclear winter followed the disastrous events of April 20th, 2010.  With large swathes of the Earth covered in deadly radiation and the sun hidden behind a cloud of smoke and fine particulates that cast a pallor over the land, it was extremely difficult for the isolated population pockets to eke out a subsistence living.  Temperatures plunged below freezing even in the summer, so what little fertile land remained radiation free was covered with frost bitten crops and shallow graves filled with the gaunt bodies of those who succumbed to starvation.  While the Oozyxphg for the most part went back to ignoring humanity while they proceeded to methodically strip the Earth of her resources, they did act with terrifying force whenever they uncovered one of the secret military bases that continued to search for a means to defeat the aliens.  As the years turned into decades, humankind came perilously close to extinction.  Scattered bands of hunter gatherers chased herds of elk and deer across the frosty landscape, scavenging canned goods from the eerily quiet ruins of cities rendered empty in a split second by the neutron bombs of the aliens.  However, humans are marvelously adaptive animals and soon they began to increase in numbers again.  Even though they had lost most of the knowledge of their forefathers, their innate cleverness and drive to survive stood them in good stead and a new, tribal society began to develop.

The resistance movement:  While the majority of the human survivors devolved into a stone-age level struggle for survival, the hidden military bases advanced scientific understanding in leaps and bounds by reverse engineering Oozyxphg technology.  Most of the truly brilliant scientific minds had been safely sequestered by their respective governments well before the fateful day that saw humankind brought to its knees, and these scientists feverishly worked to understand the principles behind forcefields, organic computers, wormholes, and a whole host of other alien innovations.  Soon, the force-field generating tissue utilized by the Oozies had been successfully cultured and military vehicles were outfitted with portable force-field generators.  Military robots were constructed based on the secrets gleaned from the Oozies imposing robotic suits.  Captured aliens were subjected to all manner of testing in an effort to create a biological agent effective against an alien immune system.  The foot-soldiers of the resistance chaffed under the knowledge that while they sat well fed in underground bunkers, enjoying the latest advancements in holographic technology (holodecks ain't just for Star Trek, baby!), their civilian counterparts were scrapping for their very survival on the surface.  Only the belief that they represented the best chance to defeat the alien invaders once and for all and restore humanities position of dominance on the planet through their carefully safeguarded technology kept the resistance movement going for almost 150 years.

The Oozyxphg:  During these years, the Oozies finished their major excavations for mineral wealth on land and began the long process of vaporizing the oceans and collecting its dissolved mineral bounty.  They constructed immense machines that automated this process, and the result was a drastic increase of evaporated water in the atmosphere, and consequently, increased rainfall across the world.  This eventually led to the end of the nuclear winter and, combined with the tremendous amount of greenhouse gases released in the raging fires that followed the nuclear detonations, precipitated a dramatic period of global warming.  Many low-lying areas became vast swamps as the perpetual rains generated by the alien machinery continued to fall.  Many species that had survived the alien neutron bombs and the errant nuclear armaments went extinct during the rapid climate shifts in the century following the first apocalypse.  The Oozyxphg paid no heed, continuing their single-minded pillaging of all the mineral wealth that had ever been washed out of the earth by millennia of erosion and rainfall and swept into the oceans.

January 7th, 2151 - A fleeting victory was achieved.  The biochemists in the resistance movement had finally created a biological weapon that was highly contagious, air borne, could survive for days without a host, and was nearly 100% lethal to Oozyzphg and harmless to humans.  Large quantities of the virus, codenamed FDF7, were produced and simultaneously released near a score of Oozyxphg operations.  Successful beyond even the wildest dreams of the resistance movement, FDF7 not only resulted in the rapid decimation of the Oozyxphg on Earth, it traveled through the wormholes to the Oozyxphg homeworld.  The few aliens who did not succumb to the virus were so weakened that they put up little resistance as they were hunted down and destroyed.  Earth was once again ruled by the human race.

January 7th, 2151 - June 16th, 2156 - These years marked a brief resurgence of human culture, as the resistance movement joined the civilian survivors and shared their knowledge of technology with the now primitive tribes of hunter-gatherers they found roaming the world.  Some of the long abandoned cities, which had become the subject of elaborate mythologies among the tribesmen, were repopulated.  The human population exploded as birthrates skyrocketed, driven by the suddenly abundant food sources made available by the incredible technology that the resistance movement had developed over the years.

June 16th - July 1st, 2156 - The Second Apocalypse.

Sometime around the middle of June, 2156, the FDF7 virus began to mutate rapidly.  Whether this was simply a chance occurrence or if it was a side-effect of the alien gene sequences that had been inserted into the virus is unknown, but the results were deadly.  The virus soon infected all living organisms, plant and animal, on Earth.  For most, it was fatal.  For the survivors, it had the peculiar effect of causing rapid alterations in their genome.  Strange mutations arose, and while the mutations themselves were not passed on to the offspring of the mutants, the virus was passed on from mother to child and newborn children also exhibited the bizarre mutations.  Plants, animals, and insects alike passed through the equivalent of thousands of years of evolution in several short lifetimes as the mutations caused a bewildering variety of new species to arise.  Some plants even achieved sentience, and over time, societies of mutant plants and animals came to share the Earth with mutant humans.  Only a select few incredibly healthy humans proved resistant to the mutated virus, and their descendants shared their immunity.

And that, folks, is how you get to the Mutant Future of today (hundreds of years later, of course)!

Knights of Genetic Purity

I have borrowed quite a few things from Gamma World for my Mutant Future campaign, and the Knights of Genetic Purity are one of those imports.  I originally included them as a somewhat random small encounter for the players; I lifted an encounter out of TSR's Famine in Far-Go module where a group of mounted Knights of Genetic Purity set an ambush near a pile of burning mutant bodies.  The encounter proved to be quite a doozy, involving a long fighting retreat by the players to make it back to a fortified position that they had cleared in the previous session, and it very nearly ended in a TPK.  I sprinkled in plenty of trash talking from the Knights, making it clear that they viewed all mutants as nothing more than dung to be scraped from their boots.

The players had such a strong reaction against the Knights that I realized I had to make them a recurring campaign element.  When the tide of battle turned and two Knights fled into the hills, the party tracked them down and captured them.  The session ended with the party returning the captured Knights to Skinny Butt so that they could be interrogated.

I spent some time between sessions coming up with what the Knights were doing in the area, and the players have been busy foiling their plans ever since.  The following information about the organization of the Knights of Genetic Purity and their plans in the Willing Mate valley was learned by the party when their captives were interrogated by Chab, one of the village Elders and a mutant rattlesnake who truly loved his role as interrogator.

Knights of Genetic Purity

Captured members: Darren Widom, Garr Margon

Symbol:  Red Square, or an unbalanced Scales of Justice

Organization:

Lay Members:  People that profess agreement with the code of purity but are not active members of the Knights are known as the Redeemed.  The Knights now refer to Spanky Butt as the Redeemed City of Spanky Butt.  The Redeemed can qualify for the militia that is invariably raised in a Redeemed City, and distinguished service will earn a promotion to 1st Sword.  Pure strain humans who do not agree with the code of purity are the unredeemed, but are still held in high regard for their genetic qualities and as the only hope for a mutant-free future.

Actual members:

Swords of Purity (or just Swords):  The Swords of Purity are the rank and file soldiers of the order.  Swords are divided further into three ranks, 1st Sword, 2d Sword and 3rd Sword (the highest rank of Sword).  You get a little sword pin to put on your sleeve for each rank attained.  After 3rd sword you become a

Lance of Purity (or just Lancer):  Each company of Swords is headed by two Lancers, known as the Black Lance (subordinate) and the Red Lance (superior).  They have a color coded lance pin to show their rank, and their fighting lances are likewise color-coded.  A company of swords can be up to 50 men and as few as 10.  These are always known as a Company of the Pure and can be further subdivided in half, each half led by one of the two Lancers, the Black Lance taking the 1st Swords and the Red Lance taking the 2d and 3rd swords.

Senior Lancer: There are four Senior Lancers in Porrit Land, each commanding 2-4 Companies of the Pure.

Holy Flame: The regional commander of the Knights of Genetic Purity, the Holy Flame is in contact with chapters throughout the land.  In addition to this northwest chapter that spans what used to be Oregon, Washington and Idaho, there is a California chapter, a Colorado/four corners chapter, a Southern Chapter, a Minnesota/North Dakota/Michigan/Wisconsin chapter, and an East Coast chapter.

Outside of this military structure are the Chaplains, the evangelical “priests” of the order who fervently spread the word that only through the removal of all mutants (and intelligent mutants are considered to be by far the worst, and the biggest priority) will Lard Jeebus finally restore the world to its former grandeur, rid the planet of the scourge of radiation and see the pure strain humans returned to their rightful place as sole rulers of nature.  The Chaplains elevate particularly inspired members of the Redeemed to the position of Friar, who serve as the Chaplain’s assistants.  Worthy Friars who learn the required rituals can become chaplains in their own right.

One of the reasons the Knights spread so successfully is because the Chaplains oversee a program of education and general civic improvement.  They establish schools, improve sewage and water treatment, teach agricultural techniques like crop rotation and fertilization and have a basic knowledge of the causes of disease, so they sterilize medical equipment and have high success rates in treating basic medical problems.  This is all part of the general program of returning humans to their former elevated position.

What Darren Widom revealed:

Sorath Marogot was the Black Lance, now deceased due to the actions of the party.

Garr Margon is the Red Lance.

What Garr Margon revealed:

The Hierarchy in Porrit Land:

The Holy Flame is Tobias Groman.  The four Senior Lancers are: Dex Tinto , Joran Precore, Ziven Talus and Tenal Kyle.  Dex Tinto is Garr Margon’s immediate superior.

The Hierarchy in Spanky Butt:

 A 3rd Sword named Odium Stair has been left in charge.  If successful he will shortly be promoted to Lancer and will be in charge of creating his own Company of the Pure.  In reality, however, Chaplain Squaldorf is the true leader through sheer charisma and force of will.  He is an indomitable man, 45, balding, broad shouldered and slightly pot bellied.  His piercing blue eyes and ready smile reveal his keen intelligence and quick wit, and his ministry and ministrations (he is an expert surgeon) probably explain why the Knights were so successful, so fast in their mission.

Odium has already promoted 10 militia men to 1st sword and drills them and the militia regularly, to what end no-one is sure.  The Baron is not entirely pleased with this turn of affairs, and still maintains his own guard.  However, he was paid well by the Knights and is willing to let this happen unless it becomes obvious it is no longer in Spanky Butts best interest.

The contents of the papers that were captured with Garr Margon:

A journal of his mission.  Highlights:  Company set upon by a group of mutant beavers along the Willing Mate river after the company killed some juveniles who were out fishing.  Half the company of Knights were killed, the Lancers mounts were destroyed.  They had to use all of their grenades to escape.  Arrived in Spanky Butt, received warmly by Baron Jemmas, who is sympathetic to the cause.  Chaplain Squaldorf has great success rousing the populace to a fever-pitch of excitement.  They visited the Ooh-Oh Monks who again refused to help the Knights.  Were not able to conduct any reconnaissance of the Monks because of their spider-bots and ever present security bots.  Observed the mutant community of Skinny Butt – mix of MH, MA and MP, no real organized security, good defensive position on top of hill.

After firmly establishing the local chapter and segregating the mutant community to one corner of the walled city, establishing a strict curfew and limiting trips outside of the designated zone only for businessmen, they reluctantly accepted the local mounts (giant two-headed Grodogs) for their return journey back to Porrit.  They only rode the mounts after Chaplain Squaldorf reminded them that non-intelligent mutant animals were the least offensive of all mutant-kind, and the greater good of returning safely to Porrit far outweighed the sin of riding mutant animals.

A scroll detailing his mission: Establish the Knights in Spanky Butt.  Persuade the Monks to assist in the quest for the artifact.  To conduct reconnaissance establishing what mutant populations live in the surrounding region and the valley south of Porrit.

A scroll tube, once sealed with a red wax square: it contains a message for the Ooh-Oh monks, a mixture of pleading and threatening language:

“Please reconsider your recent refusal to assist us in our search for the relic of New Clear known only as the Bom. Remember that those who do not stand with us stand against us.  While your knowledge is legendary, no amount of knowledge can turn aside the lances of the Purest of the Pure.

Signed: Tobias Groman, Holy Flame of the Knights of Genetic Purity

A scroll tube sealed with an “O” in gold wax -

Your idle threats do not concern us.  We are masters of the Bones of Ooh and can command the knowledge of the Ancients.  Any action against us would be your last.  Confess your impurities to Intur Netz and let the cool light of his wisdom guide your way.

Signed:  His Magnificence, the Dean Doco Proffus, Flipsham Egwar

General Campaign Background

As an artist, writer and musician I find it is always easiest to start with something I know well, something familiar. No matter what crazy place I end up in, there is a level of comfort and detail I can get when starting close to home that is impossible to get if I begin in the wild blue yonder. I know the Eugene/Springfield area very well, so when I decided to run a Mutant Future campaign I set the action in my backyard as it were. My players have been rambling around in the swampy ruins of what used to be west Eugene, and I set the date of the first Apocalypse to April 20th, 2010 so that I could easily improvise what they found in the ruins. While the wacky names in the following post may seem obnoxious or unnecessary, they are merely a continuation of the grand Gamma World tradition of slightly tweaking modern names; I should add that they have been well received by my players. I even received one excited phone call at work when James T. finally figured out exactly where his character was and couldn't believe that it had taken him so long to make the connection.

General Campaign Background

The characters are based in Skinny Butt, a warren-like community dug into the basalt flow that forms a small hill overlooking a bend in the Willing Mate River to the north and a vast swampland that extends to the south, east and west. Skinny Butt is composed mostly of Mutant Humans, Mutant Animals and Mutant Plants (hereafter MH, MA and MP), and is known for its tolerant attitude towards physical oddities. Until last year, a low-lying fog covered the swamp and effectively isolated Skinny Butt from the surrounding world; swarms of vampire bats roamed the swamp both night and day, under the cover of the cloaking mists (the bats’ flesh burns in the sunlight). Skinny Butt was an oasis in the middle of this deadly swamp, as the leader of the town (an ancient mutant cheetah named Grandma Dots who is at least several hundred years old) has the ability to control weather and used it to create a circle of clear skies around the hill. For hundreds of years, the mutants of Skinny Butt fished in the Willing Mate River, farmed rocky terraces carved into the side of Skinny Butt hill, and traded with the Cephalopoids who swam underneath the surface of the swamp to barter the nutritious roots and tubers of water plants that they harvested. Then, as mysteriously as the mists had descended in a long ago time scarcely remembered by even Grandma Dots, they lifted and Skinny Butt was once again in contact with the outside world. Even now, however, venturing outdoors at night is considered suicide because of the swarms of bats and their effective stunning sonar attack.

Important personages in Skinny Butt:

The government consists of a council of elders led by Grandma Dots. Particularly vital issues are put to community vote. The councilors are two elders from each of the MH, MA and MP communities:

MH - the two-headed Zzorbott Zzanderphone and emerald skinned Violet the Green

MA – Wooliandro the wise sheep-man and Chab the pithy rattlesnake

MP – mmPipsoo-uh-woo (Pipso for short, a sentient blackberry bush) and Treebeard

The town has one blacksmith, Bloxun, a 4-armed super-dense heat resistant slab of a man.

There is only one store per se (informal barter being the rule of thumb), run by Mookie Little, a 2’ tall dwarf with an uncannily keen eye and persuasive tongue. Mookie’s daughter Frita Little is something of the town bully, standing every inch of 16’ tall and tolerated because of her father’s importance to the town.

A babbling old idiot known as Skeezax is widely recognized to be the town crazy.

A winged mutant black bear named Hacker Bladwor holds the title of “Defender of the Butt”, bestowed upon a worthy warrior by the council. This title makes him responsible for the security of the settlement, and he takes this job seriously. He is authorized to raise a militia in times of trouble and has several trained underlings who act as his lieutenants.

Nearby Settlements

There are two nearby communities; a larger, walled town named Spanky Butt in the hills across the swamp to the south and a group to the east known as the Ooh-Oh Monks that inhabit a well-preserved complex of buildings on a low hill rising out of the Willing Mate River. Spanky Butt is a mostly pure-strain human community, but until recently many MH with few visible deformities lived there as well. The Ooh-Oh Monks are known as collectors of ancient technologies but little else is known about this secretive group. Rumors of communities to the north were confirmed when a trader arrived from far off Porrit Land, bringing sweet, pure water in 30 gallon containers and trading for the metal and artifacts of the Ancients that scatter the ruins which poke up here and there through the swamp.

Religion and Knowledge of the Ancients:

Lard Jeebus is the primary god worshiped in the Mutant Future. Lard Jeebus is portrayed alternately as a kind and loving (if somewhat condescending) human father, and as a terrible wrathful warrior wielding a mighty hammer and wearing a crown of living serpent vines. Lard Jeebus is closely associated with pure-strain humans but his reputation as a granter of healing blessing as well as terrible retribution makes him popular with all the residents of this scarred land. Colors: White and Brown, numbers: 0 and 7, Holy Day: Soond (days of the week are Soond, Moond, Toond, Woond, Thoond, Froond and Satoond)

Beetzel Bub is the next most commonly invoked deity, a terrifying figure portrayed as a three headed giant fly with sword-like bristles protruding from his bulbous body. Beetzel Bub is thought to cause mutations and is both feared and worshiped for this attribute. Some people whisper that Beetzel Bub and Lard Jeebus are in truth but two different aspects of a powerful universal godhead known only as New Clear. This view is considered heretical by most, and openly speaking of it could be dangerous if a devout follower of Lard Jeebus or Beetzel Bub hears it. Colors: Green and Black, numbers: 6 and 9, Holy Day: Froond

Intur Netz is an ancient diety worshipped by the Ooh-Oh Monks and the tribal communities in the Eastern Desert. A god of knowledge, Intur Netz is something of an oracular figure. Highly trained specialist priests interface with strange technological boxes to ask questions of the old god.

Other minor deities abound, mostly ancestral spirits and totemic gods associated with particular families or areas. These will not be mentioned here, as they vary from place to place and family to family. Some cults have sprang up around particularly powerful mutants as well who make claims to godhood.

Knowledge of the past is fragmentary and often purely speculative. That the world was not always covered in patches of radiation and roamed by strange mutants is self-evident by the ever-present ruins of the Ancients. Who these people were, how they erected such monumental edifices and why they disappeared are mostly unknown. Some say that the pure humans brought the collapse upon themselves with their obsession with technology. Others maintain that Lard Jeebus brought down his hammer because he was tired of being worshiped by only one race.

All Hail Glargorion

Old School RPGers may remember the badders as a race of mutant badgers from Gamma World. They featured in the classic Gamma World adventure Famine in Far-Go, and it is probably the illustration of the badder warrior training with a dummy that influenced me to include them in my Mutant Future campaign.

In my world, the badders are the ancestral enemies of the Coy Pu (mutant nutrias; if you don't know what a nutria is, they are basically 3-4' long rats that have taken over the Eugene-Springfield area of Oregon where I live). They spend most of their time in their extensive burrows underneath the swamps, and have hollowed out the southwest hills of post-apocalyptic Eugene where they raise their badder young and practice the art of warfare. The badders also worship the great worm Glargorion.

Glargorion is a unique mutation, a thousand foot long worm-like monstrosity that chews through solid earth and seeks out veins of metal to devour. After passing through Glargorion's digestive tracts, the metal is compressed, transformed and eventually defecated as pellets of glarg-ore. This metal is both incredibly strong and highly flexible, capable of stretching or compressing to twice or one half of its original dimensions, and it has many other interesting properties. It is capable of storing thoughts and images if a mutant with telepathic abilities spends time placing them in it. Images appear in perfect clarity on the side of the ore, while thoughts are accessible to any sentient creature that touches the metal.

When crafted by a master smith (and the badders have been perfecting the art of working with glarg-ore for hundreds of years) glarg-ore can be used to create weapons and armors that are nearly magical in their effectiveness. In game terms, when such an item is created a 1d4 roll equals the "magical" bonus of the item, +1 if the smith is a master craftsman. Glarg-ore armor is invaluable for mutants with the ability to alter their density, as it can expand and shrink with the mutant up to its natural limits (twice or 1/2 its size).

The badders have an intricate mythology centered around Glargorion, and spend a a great deal of time and energy collecting scrap metal from the ruins and dragging it down to a long tunnel far from the hub of badder society. There, the scrap metal is heaped up until it proves irresistible to the keen senses of Glargorion, and the mighty worm comes to collect its prize, leaving its valuable droppings in its wake. Glargorion visits only infrequently, and the badder shamans jealously guard the secrets of the pulsing rhythms that they send out into the earth with massive counter-weighted pillars, because these vibrations are the language of the god and help summon Glargorion when the precious supply of glarg-ore is running low.

Glargorion can be a cruel god, and its meanderings occasionally take it through the populated areas of the badder tunnels. Then pandemonium ensues as the 20' wide maw gapes and whole families disappear into the depths of the worm. Then the shamans seek for signs and portents to reveal what displeased the mighty worm god, and great sacrifices are offered in its honor. Despite these occasional terrifying episodes, the tremendous value of the glarg-ore and the reassuring knowledge that their god is tangibly real and swimming through the solid earth somewhere below serve to keep the worship of Glargorion alive among the badders.

Campaign Timeline part 1

The default setting for Mutant Future is that society collapsed in the future. This means that when the ruins of past civilizations are explored, high-tech items like laser guns and advanced robotics can be found. The first and largest apocalyptic event in my campaign, on the other hand, occurred on April 20th, 2010. Pockets of humanity remained, however, in rural areas, super-secure military bases and underground scientific research facilities. These remained for hundreds of years until the secondary apocalyptic event occurred and in the meantime, research scientists advanced technology to the point that future-tech items can be found. The main reason I decided to go this route is that I am very familiar with the sort of items that would be found when exploring ruins dating back to 2010. I can use pictures of modern technology, I can describe a modern house (Me -"You find a porcelain basin of magnificent manufacture, its smooth curves artfully contrasting with the square tank rising above it." Players - "Interesting. Perhaps it is a device to wash your face.") and I can use Google maps as a basis for my campaign maps. I think a combination of the familiar presented as the strange and a few much rarer futuristic high-tech devices has been working very well for me so far. I would also add that the tech device that has resonated with the players the most has not been a laser cannon or robot, but the hedge-trimmer that was wielded by the Vile Slasher they encountered. When I described the mutant creature pulling on the start-cord and the hedge-trimmer roaring to life, the looks on their faces were priceless.

Campaign Timeline, part 1 - The First Apocalypse

March 3oth, 2010 - The age old question is answered - we are not alone in the universe. Aliens appear across the planet, somehow arriving without flying in from outer space. They appear in massive vehicles that resemble giant cuttlefish. They do not seem to notice the presence of humanity on the planet, instead focusing on the extraction of mineral resources on a scale never before seen on Earth. They appear at spots around the globe that have high mineral content and seem to be focusing on the extraction of gold, iron, silver, copper and uranium. All attempts at communications fail and several aggressive military expeditions are summarily annihilated.

April 1st - April 19th, 2010 - Large scale riots occur across the world as civilian populations grow increasingly restive with their government's impotence in the face of the alien invaders. Military expedition after military expedition only show that the technology of the aliens far outpaces that of Earth, including some sort of force-field that block every missile thrown their direction. The aliens continue to ignore humanity with the exception of destroying military units sent to confront them.

April 20th, 2010 - The nuclear-armed governments of the world jointly decide that this situation cannot stand, and launch a simultaneous nuclear barrage. Somehow, these missiles are redirected en-route by the aliens, perhaps suggesting that they had been paying more attention than had previously been thought to the actions of humankind. A terrible payload of nuclear devastation is scattered randomly across the world, but this is not the end of the day's tragedy. The aliens, finally motivated to do something about the pesky human nuisance, detonate some sort of neutron bomb in every major population center. These bombs destroyed living flesh but left inorganic material intact. In minutes, the population of the Earth was reduced by almost 75%, only those living in rural areas far enough away from any population center to escape the blasts surviving. The total collapse of civilization as we know it today also occurred almost instantly.