Look out Mutant Past!

Tonight's Mutant Future session, something a long time coming finally happened; a character with the Plane Shift mutation finally used it!  The text of this mutation states that "This mutation grants the power to visit realities in other dimensions... The mutant can only choose to open doors to worlds he has visited before. Otherwise, the doorway leads to a random world of the ML’s choice and design."  I have had a fun plan ready for this since the very beginning of the campaign, because one of the starting characters had the mutation.  Of course, he was only able to attend a few sessions and never ended up using the ability.  But with the deadly sessions of the last few weeks, we had several new characters and two of them have this ability!

My plan was that the first time someone used the Plane Shift ability, it would open a gateway to an alternate past in the same physical location on earth that the portal was opened.  The gate would lead to today's date in the present (the real present, Monday, January 11th 2010).  I figured that the only time the group would want to hop through a portal to a random destination was when they were running from something truly horrid and had no other chance to survive; I envisioned a group of wounded mutants suddenly appearing on Eugene's streets, and thought it would make a fun diversion for the week they were stranded in the Mutant Past before the ability could be used again.

As often happens in RPGs, the way things went down was far from how I had planned it.  After a lengthy meeting with the Mice of the Round Table, where King Arthur and his knights promised to assist in a campaign against Julius Corple and the Knights of Genetic Purity and Merlin told the interested members of the party that he would get a list of materials needed for the robot manufacturing plant to create powered armor for the characters, the party decided that the most pressing threat was Julius Corple.  This decision was aided by two things; the mice had just been invaded by Corple's dog boys and terminator bots, and Dataan's player was not in attendance (he has a serious grudge against the Knights of Genetic Purity and probably would have lobbied hard to make them the top priority).

The group piled into the jeep (all except Natas and his melted face, who rode on the back of Samantha, or "Stang" as she is nicknamed, a 22' long giant mutant wasp who is new to the party) and rolled over to the military complex.  They investigated the building where the formerly aggressive war chimps appeared to be holed up, and discovered that most of their number had succumbed to the FDF7 virus.  The mutated survivors were tending to the diseased and dying, and were patrolling the perimeter of the building as if they expected an imminent attack.  Blue, another new party member, has a special sense that allows him to smell emotional states by the pheromones that are emitted by a body in different mood which he used to detect that they were afraid of something.  He is also a precog, and used this ability to imagine himself hopping (he is a mutant kangaroo) into the building unarmed and attempting to parlay with them.  When he foresaw that they would not react violently, he did this in real time and discovered that their will had been largely broken by the devestating virus and a mysterious creature that had emerged from the military complex and had been slaughtering them one by one.  Now that the rest of the survivors and diseased members of the war chimps had clustered in this one building, the creature had been unable to pick off any more of them, but they were too terrified to leave.  Blue also learned that several of the first war chimps to survive the virus and gain mutations had cracked under the strain of the transformation and had fled off into the swamp never to be seen again.

Blue offered the party's assistance in killing the creature, recognizing that the war chimps could make valuable allies.  He picked their brains for as much information regarding the killer creature as they could give him, then got their permission to invite the rest of the party in.  The war chimps parted with some weaponry to assist the party (good thing to, because the group was out of grenades!  Lard Jeebus knows they love blowing stuff up, so I am sure the ten grenades and the couple of missile launchers that they got will get put to good use) and then sent them on their way with sincere wishes of good luck in their endeavor.  The war chimps had revealed that the creature had an iron will and had proven almost impossible to effect with mental mutations.  It moved with incredible speed and could leap a hundred feet in a single bound.  One of its arms ended in a deadly metal claw, and a tentacle-tongue emerged from this and entered the wound made by the claw to suck out the insides of its victim.  Its other arm was a long tentacle that it used to grapple its opponents.  An energy cannon mounted on its tentacle arm and poisoned quills that covered its head rounded out its formidable arsenal.

The creature only emerged from the complex at night, so the party hoped that by searching for it in the complex during daylight hours they might catch it napping.  Stang shuttled everyone up to the roof, and just as they were discussing strategy and how to best go about finding the beast, it burst through the roof and hurtled itself at Stang (who has the Prey Scent mutation which draws predators to her like sharks to blood in the water).  The following fight was brutal, and several party members (including Stang) were reduced to single digit HP in the first couple of rounds.  Only some lucky shots with the guns looted from the Dog Boys using the alien web ammunition kept it from completely annihilating the entire group.

This is what they were up against:  The 16' tall Xiticix Killer from the Rifts Lone Star World Book.

A few rounds in to the combat, the monstrosity had shredded the rest of the party's alien web ammo like so many spiderwebs and was about to commence with the devouring of the party from the inside out with its claw and tentacle-tongue.  Desperate, one member of the group emerged from behind the air vent where he had been hiding and knelt directly behind the killer, enlarging himself so that he came up to its knees.  Rok used his Plane Shift ability to open a gate directly behind the kneeling party member, and the rest of the group rushed the creature and pushed it over the kneeling party member and into the gate.  As it tumbled in, I told the party that they could see through the gate to what appeared to be the same location, but the rooftop was not in the middle of a swamp, instead being surrounded by dry ground, paved roads, cars driving and generally not a ruined post-apocalyptic landscape.  The beast attempted to drag Rok through the portal with it, but he managed to shut the portal on it, severing its tentacle and trapping the beast in an alternate reality.

Everyone realized that they had just unleashed a terrible killer into the present/Mutant Past.  A debate ensued as to whether or not the portal led to the actual past of the timeline that they presently inhabited, or if it led to an alternate past.  Some party members felt like they might have unwittingly caused the apocalypse that led to the Mutant Future and the world they knew today!  Blue used his precog ability to imagine Du Pont (the other mutant with the Plane Shift ability) opening up a portal to the same place (I ruled that now that Rok and Du Pont had seen through the portal, they could reliably open up a portal to that particular reality if they so desired) and himself looking through it.  He saw a scene of devastation, cars wrecked on the road and people fleeing as the creature slaughtered everyone within reach.

The RPG Library: Rifts Lone Star - World Book 13

This is the first installment of the RPG Library, a new series of posts in which I plan to discuss all the great books from a wide assortment of RPGs that I have snapped up at the local used book stores recently to use for inspiration in my Mutant Future campaign.

Both Emerald Comics and Second-Story Books  here in the Eugene/Springfield area have great selections of Palladium's Rifts books, and I recently picked up a handful of them to mine for ideas.  Let me first say that Kevin Siembieda must have been one hard workin' dude.  How many game books can one man write?  Not to mention that he seems to have done quite a lot of the illustrations as well.

I never played Rifts (or any non-Dungeons & Dragons RPG, for that matter) when I was growing up; the only way I even knew about it was watching a few high schoolers play when I was in 8th grade and taking a computer class over at the high school.  The cover art was awesome, and I loved the stuff I was hearing about giant robots, lasers and missiles.  Unfortunately, there was no gaming store in my small home town in Alaska and the internet was not really a thing yet.  So I kept trucking along with D&D, eventually creating my own variants on the rules to play in a futuristic sci-fi world of my own creation.  When my parents sent me down a huge box full of my old gaming stuff recently, I was pleased to re-discover the material I wrote for this homebrew sci-fi D&D; perhaps I will post some of that stuff soon, it was pretty cool and could be converted easily to Mutant Future.  But I digress.

One of the Rifts books I ended up with is Rifts Lone Star (World Book 13)

The single biggest problem with using this book as a source for Mutant Future material is that the Palladium system is quite different from the B/X D&D heritage from whence Mutant Future sprang by way of Labyrinth Lord.  Rifts uses a skill based system, and the damage and HP equivalents are so different as to be more or less unusable.  This book provides great inspiration, but you will have to make your own game stats for the creatures you find within.  On the positive side, I could easily see running an entire Mutant Future campaign set in post-apocalyptic Texas using this book.  The book has two main focuses: the "Lone Star" military complex, a huge underground military research facility; and the major NPCs and factions present in the area complete with their goals and motivations.

For my purposes, the section on the Lone Star military complex is pure gold.  It has a lot of parallels with the military complex that my players have been exploring - it is a self-contained complex with its own nuclear power plants, hospitals, barracks and extensive research labs.  It is, however, quite a bit bigger than my complex (30 square miles!).  There is a short history of the complex, detailing its discovery by the Coalition States (a pseudo-fascist regime that has sprung up centered around the ruins of Chicago in the Rifts setting), but it would be easy enough to strip the setting details (which are pretty minimal anyway) away and use this in any Mutant Future campaign.  The book does not present maps and keys of the complex, but it does have an extremely useful list of all the major features of each level.  I think I could run months worth of sessions with nothing but some unkeyed floor plans, some encounter tables and these lists, improvising the details as I went.  I will certainly be using them for the two large areas of my complex that the players have yet to explore, the Alien Weapons division and the Trojan Horse project.  So you get an idea of what I am talking about, here is the short list for level five of the Lone Star complex:

"Underground Level Five:  GED (Genetics Engineering Division)

• Huge state of the art Genetics Research Facility subdivided into numerous small labs.
• Secondary Cloning Labs
• Forensic Medicine
• Cybernetic R&D Center (Experimental Works & Bio-Systems)
• Bionic R&D Center (experimental
• Small Crazie/MOM [M.O.M. is explained as a program designed to create controlled mutations in a test subject, which has been spectacularly unsuccessful so far!] conversion Studies Center
• Confinement Hospital for Experimental Test Subjects, with isolation wards.
• Small Interrogation area.
• GECA (Genetic Experiment Containment Areas): Several small and large, prison-like housings and habitats mainly for experimental mutants and exotic animals for study; medium security.
• Zoo and Lab Animal Pens
• Housing for Science and Research Staff.
• Mess Halls and Restaurants
• Recreation Areas, Gyms & Theaters
• Level Five Life Support"

One of the great things about the Rifts books (and all the Palladium books in general that I have picked up) is the amount of artwork included.  There are a lot of quality black and white drawings in this book - here is one of my favorites, showing one of those GECA containment areas mentioned above (I love the scientist with his jaw dropped and the papers spilling out).

The Coalition States have been conducting their own genetic research in the facility, and the book details quite a few mutant animal warriors that have been created, focusing mostly on the Dog Boys.  Covering the creation of Dog Boys, how they are raised and trained, detailed information about their life cycle and more, this is one of the lengthiest chapters in the book.  This section is going to be transferred almost whole cloth into my game, and could serve as an inspiration for any Mutant Lord.

Dog Boys or Psi-Hounds are mutant dog-men that serve as special forces for the Coalition States in Rifts.  In my game they have just been created by Julius Corple as he continues the experiments that he has been running ever since his mutations occurred.

Fascinated by the alien virus that he has identified as the cause of the mutations, he has made more progress in a few short weeks than the Ooh-Oh Monks have made in hundreds of years toward understanding and controlling mutations.  At his disposal he has the immense computing power of the super-computers in his old labs in the military complex, the genetic sequences of nearly every animal that existed before the FDF7 virus mutated and began changing the genetic structure of all living organisms, and the brains of several crack military commandos fully uploaded into computers and ready to be inserted into whatever body he can create.  The Dog Boys are the first stable mutant creature he created and he has made four "models", each with the brain of a different soldier and a body mutated from a different breed of dog.  I will post complete Mutant Future game stats for them at a later time.  Corple is currently finishing up a modified body armor that will fit the dogs.

There are also Ursa-Warriors (mutant bears),

 Battle Cats (mutant felines),

 Monkey Boys (mutant primates, which I have already covered in my facility with the Warangutans and the War Chimps, but I have been planning on having the party run into one of the War Gorrilla Enforcers for a while and now I have a great illustration to use!) ,

Mutant Bats

and Mutant Rats (these are presented as a vicious and anarchistic by nature, and a large group of them escaped from the labs and have built extensive warrens in and under the unfinished lowest levels of the complex)

Of particular use to Mutant Lords is the discussion of cloning and animal genetic enhancements.  You could take this list and create an army of custom genetically engineered animal warriors, no two alike, to wreak havoc on your unsuspecting PCs!  These enhancements are discussed in mostly game neutral terms, and would be easily converted to Mutant Future.

The section on the Lone Star complex also includes a lavishly illustrated chapter of the weapons and armor used by the Coalition State forces stationed there, and several pages of hoverbikes!

When are they going to come out with a real life hoverbike already?

The second half of the book focuses on the NPCs and factions active in the area, starting with prominent Coalition States personnel before moving on to the bandit lords that are the defacto rulers of most of the Lone Star Territory (the areas controlled by the bandits are collectively known as the "Pecos Empire")and the alien races that have emerged from the rifts to stalk the badlands. Each major NPC detailed has a portrait and a section of "adventure notes" that provide a dozen or so adventure hooks that would make it easy to drop any one of these guys into your game.  This section could be used as a springboard for a whole campaign based in post-apocalyptic Texas; there is a lot of good stuff here, including random bandit gang generation methods and an overview of the complex relationships between the larger gangs.  Also included is a geographic overview of the area, with maps and a gazetteer that provides brief descriptions of the most important locations (the page on the "Haunted Ruins of Dallas" is very inspirational) - this is very useful stuff that would need little to no conversion to use in Mutant Future.

I suppose I should conclude this with some sort of numerical review, so I will steal James' review format from Grognardia;

Presentation: 8 out of 10
Creativity: 9 out of 10
Utility (for Mutant Future scavenging purposes): 8 out of 10