Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

@Thaminga Actually, now I really wanna try plantains on a pizza. Or hell, go REALLY crazy and try making a mini-pizza crust out of mashed fried plaintain, jibarito-style, and top it with carne asada and cotija or something...

@Thaminga I mean, there's a fine line between genius and insanity. I for one support our new bananas-on-a-goddamn-pizza overlords.

@hystericempress I mean, I'm NOT gonna do something set in the Crapsack Future and forbid the PCs to ever just pick up a bunch of AR-15s and wreck some shop. :3 But in the first, pre-escape phase, especially, I want to lean heavily on tense confrontations and IMPLICIT threats of physical violence, 'cause basically ALL the cards are in the hands of the critters' captors. The threat is always there: we love you, you are our future, but if you act up too badly, there's a machine in the next room that can reduce you to a soup-like homogenate in 1.7 seconds...

@Thaminga At the risk of losing my family, my nation, my love, and everything I hold dear...

I support you fully on this.

Unless there was also tomato sauce. Then you're just a harmless freak. *deadpan stare* 🐯​

But I could see something like this totally working with some kind of white sauce, oil base, or fuck, maybe even Filipino "banana ketchup"...

Honey would work, too, or something similar. Maybe a thick soy-ginger or balsamic glaze? One of the best Pizza-Like Objects I ever had was at a modernist Mediterranean restaurant, and it was something like tahini, honey, walnuts, some neutral melty white cheese I could not identify, VERY hot pepper flakes, and grapes.

@hystericempress And I do wanna have at least some of the scientists at the lab be potential allies of the PCs. They're not all exactly evil, especially not compared to some of the horrible shit that's happening OUTSIDE the labs and cult compounds... The PCs might even find themselves oddly revered, or find the scientists having weirdly mixed feelings about them. They ARE the Designated Heirs Of Humanity, the Glorious New Flesh, after all. (Which will just make it sting all the more if they end up turning on each other out of pragmatism—playing up my sincere believe that EVERY ideology subverts and discards its original principles as soon as they're inconvenient to growth and survival.)

I kinda want a lot of the threats to the PCs be philosophical, social, or existential. People *generally* won't be trying to snuff them, though their own weird genomes might have a go at them occasionally—and the scientists will just give a Mad Princess-Bubblegum/Entrapta-like smile and squeal "DELIGHTFUL! IT'S WORKING! HOW I ENVY YOU!" And then inject themselves with it and promptly start deliquescing into goo. Because as per Neil Gaiman, there's NOBODY scarier than someone who genuinely only wants to hurt you in order to SAVE you.

@hystericempress I figure I really wanna play up the "yeah, um, social media fucked EVERYTHING up and consensus reality has plotzed" aspect of it, so I figure it's a bit like the "Jilly Juice" and "Miracle Mineral Solution" health-quackery crowd.

They don't really need much of a formal structure or enforcement arm at the lower levels, since their True Believers will spontaneously form into both... They're basically buying vials of RNA slime off Wallamazagoogle and drinking it down with little or no idea what it really does... Ooh, which means some of the same crazy transformative stuff is already taking place out in general society, just not at the same level or speed.

Oh, geeze, and maybe it's something like... you ever read the Wild Cards superhero anthologies? It's like the xenovirus from that, where it either subtly mutates ("evolves") you into something less human, or just subtly kills you over time, and both are JUST FINE with its purveyors... Basically, imagine if all the WORST PEOPLE on Youtube got a hold of honest-to-gods genehacking first...

@hystericempress (pause to snarf down some much-needed pho bo vien...)

@hystericempress Hmm. That also raises some interesting questions about what media and communications technology are like in this world, and what happens when the PCs get access to it... Also, sooner or later, the world at large is DEFINITELY finding out about them, because I don't do That Mr. Ed Shit... :D

@hystericempress See, this is just the kind of stuff I was looking for. Knew I came to the right place. <3

@hystericempress And I forgot to put this in DMs. Hi, everybody! :D

@hystericempress Huh, I was originally thinking of having it be a very small cell of like 20-30 whacked-out scientists, but... actually, there's a lot to be said for giving it a big ol' real-world front, with followers who kinda-but-not-exactly know what's going on. It'll not only give the PCs some allies/enemies when they escape the lab, but it'll give me some good opportunities to do some social commentary about fanaticism... Maybe kinda play up the ironic contrast between the desperate low-level "I JUST WANNA CURE MY KID'S HARMLESS NEUROTYPICAL DISORDER, WAAAH" rank-and-file suckers, and the ABSOLUTELY BATSHIT STUFF the PCs know their donations are going to... such as, um, the utterly unholy creation of the PCs... :>

@hystericempress So, today in the shower I was just STEAMING about all the political assholery in the world, and taking refuge in my usual misanthropic BS about how "we should basically give up on the human race, breed sapience into the crows, raccoons, and coyotes as far as possible, then have the decency to JUST DIE ALREADY."

And it dawned on me... that's EXACTLY how these gene-cultists would feel. That's a great motivation for them. And I could really use something cathartic right now, and I think so could a bunch of our friends, so I'm rrrrreal tempted to run an online game.

I'm thinking of scrapping every trace of trad cyberpunk and just putting it smack into the 2030-40s of, say, Phorm's most pessimistic paranoid nightmares. The planet is CLUSTERFUCKED, civil war and revolution are brewing, there are resource shortages, and the notion of human extinction looks... well... at least the cultists are offering to make it swift and merciful.

Naturally, it will not remain a bleak craphole once a bunch of Really Really Mutated animal PCs with highly bespoke genomes and NO investment in human bullshit finally escape and are inflicted upon it. :D But up until then, I'm thinking of running it something like... ohh, wait, that's rite, you were grousing about The Prisoner JUST THE OTHER DAY.

I have been doing the same, and been wanting to do sort of a fixfic that removes No. 6's elements of White Hero Privilege and makes him... well... trash. So basically think "Patrick McGoohan as a four-eyed opposum with an Antifa flag" and you've basically got where I want to go here. :D I just wanted to bounce around some ideas with you and maybe @Daikanu, our resident masters of worldbuilding <3

@hystericempress Hi, sis! So here's the deal... I have had this really cliched furry cyberpunk campaign that's been banging around since high school, where all the PCs are captive "uplifted" wildlife and domestic animals in a secret corporate lab, and they escape and are inflicted upon a cliched Akira-esque society and blah blah blah, and it was all kinda adolescent and stupid.

Well, this year I've been on a MAJOR binge of intelligent body horror and "daylight horror" films—Cronenberg, Carpenter, Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Panos Cosmatos... And I've been thinking of revisiting this shitty RPG world with some new ideas, basically making it more occult, more surreal, and just all around more sophisticated.

My notion of "evil corporate" scientists is evolving into something more like a corporatized "human potential" cult with some gnostic influences, and now they're not so much evil-per-se as DEMONSTRABLY BATSHIT. And the fact they're batshit hasn't stopped them from really discovering some truly scary, unethical genetic potentialities. Real hivemind/The Thing kind of shit. And now instead of just inflicting their studies on these animals, the captors are PARTICIPATING in these experiments...

@troodon Sib, reading your wildlife updates after looking at Reddit is like tuning out an Alex Jones rant and flipping to the CBC. Or Raptor Envy David Attenborough. What I mean to say is, you're an oasis and a life raft and I'm so grateful you're out there and experiencing these beautiful, serene things for us. 😻​😻​😻​😻​😻​

@hystericempress Yeah, I at least have the decency to careen wildly through cycles of pessimism and optimism on a daily basis. :D

(Granted, the chest cold AIN'T HELPIN', and I know you been there just recently... *sanitized hugs* Also, if it makes you feel any better, I've been in a RIGHT FOUL mood the last couple days... and today I finally decided, fuck it, I'm channeling as much as I can into creative stuff. How would you feel about me hitting you up for some RPG design/GMing advice...?)

@hystericempress I tried. I really tried.

Current mood: pondering starting up a local Tizzle Wizzle league. Also pondering inviting a number of prominent local conservative politicians to play, without informing them of this first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am6jQEanzvA

@LexYeen@snouts.online Oh, right. Because you would die.

*reads news and hmms*

*runs to grocery for a pallet of cookies and eight jars of Speculoos butter, then puts on a Do Not Rescuscitate armband*

#moody

@LexYeen@snouts.online So why not use a jar of Speculoos as frosting and have two cookies at once?

submitted without commentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUbmmI5utBc [no cw's]