The Tragic Tale of Julius Corple part one

A while back my players spent a couple of sessions searching for keycards and passwords to give them access to various places in the ancient military complex/megadungeon that they were exploring.  They knew, from some snooping around through personnel records on a computer, that the two head scientists in the facility were Julius Corple (in charge of the Alien Weapons division) and Hodges Craigslist (in charge of the Biological Weapons division).  Earlier, they had found a door labelled "Alien Weapons Research" that they had been unable to open.  Reasoning that the head of the Alien Weapons division must hold the key to this tempting area, they made their way to Julius Corple's quarters.  

Right away they realized that something was different with Corple's chambers - they could not access any interior cameras through the buildings computer network, and in fact, it seemed that the suite of rooms was not connected in any way to the power and computer networks of the rest of the facility.  They could not cut the power to the door and the normal spiderbot access shafts that connected almost every other part of the facility had been sealed off.  

Undeterred, a party member capable of teleportation bravely transported his body blindly through the closed door and luckily did not end up materializing in a space already occupied by a solid object!  He was greeted by an enthusiastic robot dog (named "Woody" according to the engraving on its water bowl) and a rather spartan set of apartments.  Corple apparently took his work home with him, as his bed, chairs and couch were low disks that utilized the alien repulsor field technology to suspend a body in mid-air above them.  The door opened easily enough from the inside, and the rest of the party entered.  Woody seemed overjoyed to have company after centuries alone, and instantly took to following the party around.  They found very little in the way of information on Corple's computers, which actually seemed to have been unused at all.  Likewise, they found no books or journals that might contain a clue or a scribbled pass phrase.

On Corple's bare desk sat a holo-portrait, the only furnishing in the entire suite that spoke of human warmth, depicting a woman with long brown hair and a pleasant smile.  The holo-projector was engraved with the words "Darling Alyssa".  Saying those words aloud resulted in the large repulsor disc that served for a bed rotating to the side and revealing a shaft opening up into a chamber below.  Descending down the short ladder, the party entered a room that unnerved them greatly.  The chamber that they found themselves in was glass-walled and circular.  Behind the glass walls pink and blue organic tissues throbbed and pulsed with visible electrical energy.  A confusing tangle of cables and what seemed to be umbilical chords passed through portals in the glass and connected with the naked body of a man lying in the middle of the floor.  This body was apparently Julius Corple, as the pile of synthetic military issue clothing next to the man contained his keycard.  Interestingly, and this is what really creeped out the party, they soon realized that Corple was still alive. His hair and fingernails had evidently been growing for centuries, and he did not respond to any stimulus, but his heart was beating and he was breathing.  They grabbed his keycard and beat a hasty retreat.

Part Two reveals how Julius Corple brought about the downfall of the military facility.

Mutants vs. Monkeys

As promised, here is the sordid tale of what my PCs have resorted to while trying to pit one faction against another in my Mutant Future campaign.

The first thing they came up with was to somehow turn the Knights of Genetic Purity against the two bands of apes.  There was talk of killing three birds in one bush, or something like that.  The Knights are the mother of all factions in my campaign world, a continent spanning organization dedicated to the complete eradication of all mutants and the restoration of pure humans to their former position of unchallenged supremacy.  The party captured two members of the Knights way back at the beginning of the campaign, and the two unfortunate bastards have been languishing in a dark hole in Skinny Butt, their only contact with anyone being the occasional visits from Chab the rattlesnake, one of the village elders and the self appointed "interrogator" (read as "torturer").  So the party takes their prized camcorder and their only tape and brings one of the captured Knights out into the swamp.

Warning:  the following paragraph may be a little disturbing, so if you are faint of heart, please skip it and go watch a family movie like Silence of the Lambs instead.

This campaign has been a campaign full of firsts for me.  First openly gay PC, first time running a session with 10 players, and... first time my players have shot a snuff film in game?  WTF?  They decided that they would stage the gruesome massacre of the captured Knight at the hands of a "warangutan" (really Bozko the shape-shifting plant assuming the general form of a great ape and covering his body with shaggy red moss).  They filmed this Blair Witch Project style, from the point of view of the other Knight who "got away" after capturing the horrible death of his comrade on film.  The party wanted to really get the Knights pissed off at the Warangutans, so they had Bozko actually rip the poor dude to shreds in front of the camera.  Interestingly, of the six players participating, only one (my girlfriend, playing Beyonce Chai) expressed any reservations about this plan and she still drove them out into the swamp so that they "didn't do anything even stupider".  The truly disturbing part is that Dataan the robot became aroused during the filming of this movie and there may or may not have been robot masturbation involved.  The party  arranged for the video to make its way into the hands of Chaplain Squaldorf, the true power behind the recent incursion of the Knights into the Willing Mate valley, and then they sat back to watch the fireworks.  However, the PCs soon grew bored waiting for a response from the regional headquarter of the Knights up in Porrit Land, so they decided to take a stab at stopping the apes themselves.

Their next plan was to ally with the War Chimps and attempt to wipe out the Warangutans once and for all.  However, when they flew an unmanned drone that they had just spent a week repairing from the parts of several nonfunctional drones they had secured many sessions earlier, they discovered that the War Chimps had posted a horrifying "keep out" message in the swamp; a roughly circular ring of cut trees marked their territory, and flayed corpses of swamp creatures and mutants alike adorned the tree trunks like bloody post-it notes.  Zooming in on one body with the drone, the party saw that it was flayed from the neck down, and its eyelids had been removed.  And thats when they realized that this poor mutant (a swamp trapper from Skinny Butt town) was still alive - it turned its bulging, dried out eyes at the drone as if it were silently begging to be put out of its considerable misery.  Dataan flew the drone in low, planning on ramming the flayed mutant in the head to put it out of its misery... and he flew the drone right into the War Chimps trap.  They had a ring of concealed blinds a ways in from the outer perimeter of stumps, and a War Chimp with a missile launcher blew the drone up with one well placed shot.

The PCs now decided that maybe they didn't want to ally with the War Chimps after all! Their next brilliant idea was to ally with the Warangutans and convince them to leave the complex and wipe out the War Chimps with the party's help.  They journeyed to the Badder warrens and made their way to the now filled in tunnels leading to the Hangar level of the military complex.  The two shapeshifting plants in the party burrowed through the dirt in root form, creating just enough of a pocket of air behind them to drag a pair of spiderbots down with them.  Once Swampy (one of the shapeshifting plants) got in to the long cross tunnel that leads from the hangar level all the way under the swamp to the sublevels of the Ooh Oh Monks (yet another faction in the swamp), he soon heard a vehicle rumbling down the tunnel at him.  He hid, and saw a jeep driven by a Warangutan pulling a covered troop transport, heading down the tunnel towards the Ooh Oh Monks.  Dataan, controlling a spiderbot, sent it down the tunnel towards the hangar while Swampy set off after the jeep.  Soon, a terrific explosion echoed down the tunnel, and the party surmised that the Warangutans were attempting to blast their way into the lowest levels of the old university complex that the Ooh Oh Monks inhabit.  Dataan's spiderbot reached the blast doors to the hangar, and attempted to use the door's control panel to access the complex's computer system - when to the parties considerable dismay, it became apparent that some true computer wizard had overridden the codes that Dataan had left in place in the complex and the party no longer had access to the still active security networks.  The door began to shut, and Dataan had his spiderbot scurry through and into a maintenance shaft in the wall (the facility is riddled with tiny shafts designed to let the spiderbots scurry around and do their job of maintaining and repairing the electrical, computer, ventilation and water systems of the base).  Peering through a small opening in the wall, Dataan saw through the spiderbot two large Warangutans wielding rocket launchers come up to the door, accompanied by a Terminator looking robot - picture the shiny metal terminators that don't have any skin covering their terrifying metal bodies.  The Warangutans covered the doorway with missile launchers while the Terminator opened it up - of course, they saw nothing.

Meanwhile, Swampy was making decent time heading down the tunnel toward the Ooh Oh Monks, a distance of several miles, with the second spider bot accompanying him.  Soon, the party heard over their comlinks (stolen from the military complex a while back) the Warangutans back at the door to the hangar level warning the Warangutan party up ahead that there was something in the tunnel.  Swampy began traveling much more carefully, in long extended vine form taking cover behind all the heaps of scrap metal that line the tunnel.  The spiderbot went up ahead, under the control of Dataan the robot, who trusted in its small size to escape detection.  The spiderbot came to a juncture, where the the jeep and troop transport were parked, guarded by a single Warangutan standing behind the twin heavy machine guns mounted on the back of the jeep.  Dataan cautiously snuck the spiderbot past this point and came into a room that had evidently once held a large door which had since been blasted away.  A squadron of Warangutans was exploring the chamber beyond, which was filled with what seemed to be massive boilers and other strange rusted out hunks of motionless machinery.

Swampy, alternating between his normal vision and gamma ray vision, continued on slowly and carefully.  He spotted the tell-tale radiation leak from the fusion cell powering a plasma rifle up ahead, and realized that two Warangutans were concealed behind the cab of car that was leaning against the side of the tunnel ahead of him.  Deciding that he could take on two of them with the help of the hypnotic fragrances he could emit, he painstakingly inched a viny protrusion of his body towards the apes and released a cloud of mind-controlling goodness into their hidey hole.  He instantly realized that they were far too powerfully built to succumb to his tricks as they burst forth, plasma rifles blasting.  Luckily for Swampy, they had not spotted him as he was concealed behind the everpresent stacks of scrap metal.  Never known for his discretion, Swampy rolled the lone grenade that he was carrying directly between the two apes who frantically hurled themselves to the ground as it exploded.  Before the smoke even cleared the apes were laying down covering fire as they called for back up.  "We've been hit!  Taking fire from unknown assailant!  Alpha Squad leader, send back up!"

A squad of five Warangutans set out to assist the two fighting Swampy - only to be grenaded themselves by Bozko who had been waiting in the collapsed tunnel to the Badder warrens.  Bozko dropped four grenades from more or less directly above the squad, and killed three of them on the spot.  Now convinced that they were experiencing a serious assault, the Warangutan leaders  called the exploratory party that was moving under the Ooh Oh Monks back.  In the meantime, Dataan had stolen their jeep with his spiderbot, ramming it into a wall and breaking the neck of the Warangutan who was manning the machine gun in the process.  Then, the spiderbot turned the machine gun down the corridor and opened fire on the exploratory party.  With the enemy now apparently coming from all sides, and not even sure what was making the machine gun fire (as the spiderbot was completely concealed behind the gun), the Warangutans broke formation and ran.

 Swampy had continued his fight, and when the two Warangutans he was engaged with started retreating to join up with the larger contingent of the exploratory party (who were now getting into a second jeep that was parked in the large room by the Ooh Oh Monks), Swampy couldn't just let them go and he popped out of cover and took another pot shot at them with his trusty shotgun.  As he dropped back down, they let him have it and I rolled a natural 20 and killed him on the spot... When his player asked if he could roll a savings throw to survive since he was a shapeshifting plant and most of his body mass had never left cover to take the shot in the first place, I decided to be a merciful overlord that night and told him to roll a save vs. energy attacks.  Of course, he still had to get a 15 or higher on a d20, so I figured he was probably toast anyway... then he goes and rolls a 15 on the dot.  I ruled that Swampy was alive but unconscious, mostly blasted to smithereens, and clinging to life only as a small globular mass of unrecognizable plant matter.  The Warangutans all retreated in their Jeep back to the hangar level and shut the blast door, not at all sure what had been attacking them from three sides.    A spiderbot was sent to check on Swampy, as he had suddenly cut off communications.  His quivering remains were retrieved, and the party beat a retreat back to Badder Town to plan their next move!

One important thing has been missed so far; the role of Julius Corple in all this.  Corple, a brilliant roboticist and all around mad genius from the year 2135, had recently been released from centuries of confinement within a massive alien computer/brain.  Exposed to the surface air, he contracted the FDF7 virus and soon grew a second brain and began exhibiting strange powers.  He was last seen, after grabbing the body of Laura Hazelton (a footsoldier from 2135 who was dying of the virus), flying over the swamp in the direction of the military complex.

Many small clues in the last session led the players to speculate that Julius Corple had become the leader of the Warangutans and was directing them as well as the strange Terminator robot the party had seen.  Are they right?  Only time will tell....

I do intend to post the full tale of Julius Corple soon, he is a tragic figure and was directly responsible for the downfall of the military complex all those long years ago.

NPC Factions (Or how to be a lazy DM)

Despite my players' often repeated claims that I am an awesome DM, I know the sad truth - I am a very lazy game master, running my games with a mixture of way too little prep work, a good dose of fly by the seat of your pants and a little bit of luck from the dice gods.  The honest truth - for the last 10 sessions (or 40-50 hours of real life time spent playing), I have spent a grand total of two hours doing preparation work!  I spend FAR more time on this blog then I do my game, and I am not a particularly prolific blogger either.

How do I do it, you might ask?  While my background in competitive extemporaneous speaking and improvisational theater certainly helps, I don't just make it all up as I go. One of my favorite lazy DM tricks is an oldie but goodie, the use of NPC factions.  The vast majority of the two hours of prep work I have done recently was statting up a few different groups that the PCs have been interacting with.  I first come up with the leaders of the group and write a sentence or two describing their personalities and motivations.  Then I stat up a sample member of the group, a tough member of the group, and make a few notes about different weapons or armor that I can use to make members of the group seem unique (for instance, one Warangutan might be wielding a plasma rifle and wearing flak armor, while another is clad in plasteel armor and is carrying a rocket launcher and a vibra-dagger).  When statting up the typical faction members, I write down a range of HP (50-80 for your average Warangutan) so that I can pick a number in the range whenever an individual is encountered.

One amazing thing about using factions is that once you place them in your campaign world, they just keep on surprising you with all the things they do.  It is very much like getting to watch your world come to life before your eyes.  Knowing what the goals of the faction are and the personality of its leaders means that you should have a good idea of what they are doing when the PCs aren't looking.  For instance, when the PCs in my campaign left the military complex in the western swamp, they for all intents and purposes forgot about the warring groups of War Chimps and Warangutans that they had inadvertently set free from the level they had been trapped in for centuries.  While the PCs spent a few weeks out in the desert trying to prevent the Knights of Genetic Purity (another faction in play) from gaining access to nuclear missiles, the War Chimps left the complex and took over a section of the swamp centered around the complex, while the Warangutans focused on seizing control of the complex itself and the tunnels that lead away from it far underground.  This brought the Warangutans into conflict with the Badders, who the PCs had left with the codes to unlock the doors into the lowest level of the complex so the Badders could scavenge scrap metal from the ruined vehicles in the hangar to offer to Glargorion.

In the middle of the PCs adventures in the desert, the now deceased Logan teleported back to the hangar level to look for material to repair the parties hovercraft with - while there, he saw a pile of Badder corpses and the door leading into the tunnel that accessed the Badder warrens standing wide open.  So when the party returned from the desert, they decided that they had to assist the Badders and somehow thwart the militaristic apes that they had unwittingly unleashed on the area.  Two sessions later, and it looks like I can mine this particular little conflict for quite a few more sessions as the PCs have been coming up with one crazy idea after another, trying trickery and diplomacy to pit the Knights of Genetic Purity against both factions of apes, attempting to ally with both factions of apes against the other and, at the end of last session, it looked like they were moving towards trying to get the Ooh Oh Monks involved in this affair as well.  This tickles me pink, because the Ooh Oh Monks are one of the original factions that I set up at the very beginning of the game, and so far the PCs have been content to completely ignore them (in part because Dataan escaped from servitude to the Monks and is more than a little afraid that they may reformat his CPU and put him back to work processing data should he ever run into them again).  My next post will detail some of the crazy antics this little set up has led the party to attempt; the last two sessions have been wild, woolly, a little disturbing and tons of fun.

Next Post:  The Party shoots a snuff movie and meets a Terminator!

Dark Sun Monsters in the Mutant Future

I have been converting a lot of Dark Sun monsters with psionic abilities to use in my Mutant Future campaign, and have found the conversion to be very easy - I even did it on the fly during the last session, with successful results.  Dark Sun monsters are perfect for Mutant Future because for the most part they look like mutant freakazoids to begin with, and psionic abilities are really just mental mutations going by a different name.  When my PCs headed out into the eastern desert a while back I grabbed some Dark Sun monster manuals, my copy of the 2e Psionics Handbook and spent a half hour making notes on possible encounters.

The creature that I converted on the fly was a Red Silt Horror from the Dark Sun Monstrous Compendium Appendix II (a really cool if lesser known monster book, illustrated all in color by Thomas Baxa who did, for the most part, a great job).

  I beefed it up considerably to make it a challenge for my heavily armed PCs - the Dark Sun version has 8 HD and a 12' body, I made mine roughly 30 HD (180 HP) with a 30' body.  I had it lurking, antlion style, in the sand.

The Red Silt Horror, according to the notes in the book, uses its ESP to discover what its intended victim desires most, then uses False Sensory Input to create a complete illusory image of the desired object in the victim's mind.  It also possesses the abilities of Attraction (just what it sounds like, creates an uncontrollable desire in the victim to approach the desired object), Repugnance (pretty much the opposite of Attraction, except the victim also wants to destroy the object) and Psionic Blast (save vs. death or lose 80% of remaining HP in the victims mind!).

What I have done when converting psionic abilities to mutations is to ignore the PSP cost of an ability - I usually just make it an at will ability, unless it is particularly powerful and the original monster only had enough PSPs to use it once, then I make it a daily power.  Then I assign or roll a willpower score for the creature and use standard mental attack procedure from Mutant Future.

In this case, the Red Silt Horror used its abilities to lure the pilot of the hovercraft into its sand pit.  This made for some interesting role playing as only the pilot of the hovercraft saw the incredibly inviting oasis, while everyone else saw the hovercraft slowing down and turning towards a sand pit.  When Dataan wrestled Beyonce Chai out of the pilot's chair and attempted to drive away, he in turn experienced the mental abilities of the Silt Horror (Dataan has a pitifully low willpower).  I had some fun with describing what exactly Beyonce and then Dataan saw out in the desert that made them want to stop the hovercraft and investigate - suffice it to say that I tailored it carefully to each player's desires, and in the case of Dataan and his player Carter, that made for some pretty hilarious moments.

In any case, soon the hovercraft was teetering on the edge of the sand pit and only  the extremely quick thinking of Bozko the shape-shifting plant (riding behind the hovercraft in the party's jeep) saved it from slipping down straight into the gaping maw of the waiting desert behemoth.  Bozko wrapped some tough fibrous roots around the jeep's tow hitch, made most of his body into a bow of sorts, strung with a vine, and made a small part of his body into an arrow attached with a thin fibrous cord to the rest of his body.  He rolled an attack roll to shoot his body-arrow at the hovercraft, and as it flew he spooled more and more of his body into the trailing cord.

Last session marked the first appearance of Senor Carter's new d30, and I happily proclaimed us proud members of the Order of the d30.  For the uninitiated, that means that each participant in the session (your humble Mutant Lord included) gets to substitute the d30 for any one die in any dice roll, once per session.  Bozko grabbed the d30, and rolled something ridiculous like a 28 on his attack roll.  I ruled that not only did he hit the hovercraft, he nailed its tow hitch attachment, so he turned his arrow into a loop of vine, grabbed the tow hitch, and poured the rest of his body mass into strengthening the vine-y rope that now linked the Jeep and the hovercraft.  Logan, driving the jeep, put something on the gas pedal to keep it pulling the hovercraft out of the pit while he teleported into the fray that was just beginning.

The Silt Horror, realizing that its dinner was no longer sliding down towards its waiting gullet, erupted fully out of the sand and revealed its 8 writhing tentacles as it grappled at the hovercraft.  Logan, arriving in the back of the hovercraft, grabbed his four-barreled  missile launcher and ran to the front.  Just as he opened the cockpit and put the missile launcher to his shoulder, the Silt Horror hit him with three tentacles and grabbed the hovercraft with 4 more.  Undeterred, Logan took his last action as a living mutant - firing three missiles directly into the horrific beast (Logan has a mutation that allows him to take an extra attack a round, and also gained an extra attack from leveling up, so he gets to take a lot of attacks!).  Two of the missiles hit, enveloping almost the entire hovercraft in the radius of the explosion (Logan may not have thoroughly thought this course of action through), instantly killing the already wounded Logan and two newly acquired slave boys (Dataan was quite upset) who were stationed at the forward guns and seriously messing up the exposed cab of the hovercraft and its other two occupants.  Feeling generous, I ruled that the PCs still in the back of the hovercraft were unaffected.

Luckily, at this point the forward guns of the hovercraft were more or less directly pointing at the Silt Horror, so the badly burned and extremely ticked off Beyonce Chai and Sage (a mutant plant, a new character played by one of the original players who has missed a bunch of sessions recently) pushed the smoldering corpses of the slave boys out of the way, grabbed the guns and let the monstrosity have it.  They both also rolled higher than a 20 on the d30, and I go with the old "a natural 20 is a double damage critical hit" house rule, so between the two of them and the damage the critter had taken from the rockets the Silt Horror was reduced to 3 HP.  It used its escape tactic (using its air jet to creat a huge could of sand) and disappeared under the sands.

Whew, what an encounter!  I should mention that the PCs chose not to follow the old road ways, but rather headed straight across the desert to save time, so I felt that they needed to run into something terrifying to remind them that cutting cross country across a Mutant Frickin' Desert is not without its perils.  Danny (Logan's player) had a back-up character already rolled up, so I told the party that their fight had been witnessed by a stranger who came up and offered to guide them around "all the other Sand Monsters"!  They gladly took him up on his offer, and we continued the session with the party's sense of fear and awe at the Mutant Future successfully restored!

Robot (homo)Sexuality

Random tables for harlots and bust size speak to the long history of PCs seeking sexual satisfaction in RPGs.  The latest example of this occurred last night as Dataan the robot tried to persuade his five newly acquired slave boys to sample his sweet, intoxicating robot man-love.  This is interesting to me in several respects - first, I believe Dataan represents the first openly gay PC in any of my campaigns, and frankly, I am a little surprised it has taken 17 years of DMing to get to this point.  I mean, it is 2000 frickin' 9, you would think that barrier would have been broken by now.  Second, I am a little taken aback by the concept of robot sexuality in general.  I don't know why, but the concept of a robot with a libido is a little disturbing to me.  Somehow, it seems like that sort of thing would be left out of the basic programming, but perhaps it is a necessary consequence of self awareness?  I will have to think about this further.  Thirdly, the mechanical aspects of robot sex are far from clear cut.  It is unclear which of the requisite tools Dataan actually possesses- we know he has a mouth (which he consistently puts to brash use over the loudspeaker of the Swamp Orca) and hands, but what other equipment is this former data entry bot packing?  As I learn more, I will probably post it here - hopefully I do not have to change my blog's G-rating!

Amazing Blown Glass Monster

I think this is a candidate for the "coolest monster ever" award.  Local artist and glass blower Hamm crafted it out of one piece of blown glass, with the exception of the tongue, white teeth, and eyeballs, which were added in separately.  I commissioned this piece as a birthday present for my girlfriend a few years ago, and I just told Hamm to "create some kind of cool monster" and left it up to him.  I am sure it was a welcome break from all the requests for custom pipes that he normally gets!

I have been waiting for a chance to sick this bad boy on my players, and I have a feeling that they may run into it very soon if they follow the course of action that they have been discussing.  Game statistics will have to wait until they actually run into it.  If anyone wants to stat this thing up for other systems besides Mutant Future, be my guest and feel free to use these images (please give a credit or link to my blog if you do so).

Nameless Alien Creature:

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)!