mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
An artificial being, like a replicant or a GURPS THS bioroid, are called androids in the OTU. They have turned up in OTU adventures IIRC...
TWILIGHT 2300
- Thread starter Laryssa
- Start date
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
I'd class the majority of the zombie films I've seen as sci-fi/horror. Most usually try to have a scientific explanantion for the zombies rather than a magical one.
I'd classify it simply as a horror film. People pay to see other people get attacked by hordes of animated corpses. Skeletons are less believable as they appear to be marionettes on strings. The bones after all have no muscles to move them, to if a skeleton moves in anyway whatsoever it appears as if by magic. One of the requirements for being a zombie is that you must first be dead in order to come back to life as the living dead. Now imagine what happens if a zombie plague affects a meat packing plant. All the undead headless chickens start attacking you. Imagine fossilized dinosaurs breaking out of the Museum of Natural History and rampaging all over Manhattan. That would be some plague! I'd be laughing my head off if I saw a movie like that, I'd think it would more of a parody on horror films than a horror film itself.
So seriously, how would you animate a corpse with a disease? In the book Engines or creation, they talked about nanotechnology brining frozen people back to life, so any disease that animates dead would have to repair the cells structures for muscles, nerves, blood, blood vessels, lungs, and would have to produce some sort of brain to direct the movements of the animated muscles and bones, would have to pump the heart and circulate the blood to supply oxygen for the reanimated muscle cells. Of course if you repaired all the cell structures, it wouldn't look like a walking corpse. Part of the tradition of science fiction to come up with scientific explainations for things.
So seriously, how would you animate a corpse with a disease? In the book Engines or creation, they talked about nanotechnology brining frozen people back to life, so any disease that animates dead would have to repair the cells structures for muscles, nerves, blood, blood vessels, lungs, and would have to produce some sort of brain to direct the movements of the animated muscles and bones, would have to pump the heart and circulate the blood to supply oxygen for the reanimated muscle cells. Of course if you repaired all the cell structures, it wouldn't look like a walking corpse. Part of the tradition of science fiction to come up with scientific explainations for things.
Border Reiver
SOC-14 1K
Since this appears to be the official Twilight Z000 thread I'll link to the official Zombie Survival Guide Website.
It details "zombie canon". The virus infection and how it works, why corpses are not re-animated, weapons etc. If you are really interested get the book out the library. Oh and don't forget it is meant to be humour.
It details "zombie canon". The virus infection and how it works, why corpses are not re-animated, weapons etc. If you are really interested get the book out the library. Oh and don't forget it is meant to be humour.
far-trader
SOC-14 10K
</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Note: Sherrif Kafka accidentally edited my original post while quoting bits of it, I've restored the deleted bit to the best of my memory...</pre>[/QUOTE]
Really "Fantasy vs Sci-Fi" is a blurry line so there's no reason to not colour outside the line now and again. As to your other "magical" beings...
Angels: Transcended beings of energy only.
Demons: As angels or just some hoaxter with fancy tech. (I'm sure you'll recall the STNG episode with Ardra or whatever her name was)
Ghosts: Same as angels too or some psionic perception of eddies in the time current.
Vampires: Another good one for parasitic infection, though perhaps more symbiotic. Just forget all the hoakum about mirrors and reflections.
Zombies don't have to be magical, they can have other explanations that are within the realm of Sci-Fi. Such as a viral agent as mentioned, or even a parasitic one. To paraphrase; any Science fiction sufficently advanced will be indistinguishable from magic.
Really "Fantasy vs Sci-Fi" is a blurry line so there's no reason to not colour outside the line now and again. As to your other "magical" beings...
Angels: Transcended beings of energy only.
Demons: As angels or just some hoaxter with fancy tech. (I'm sure you'll recall the STNG episode with Ardra or whatever her name was)
Ghosts: Same as angels too or some psionic perception of eddies in the time current.
Vampires: Another good one for parasitic infection, though perhaps more symbiotic. Just forget all the hoakum about mirrors and reflections.
far-trader
SOC-14 10K
Precisely. And who's to say that the whole myth of Zombies isn't from an "Actual" case in prehistory of an outbreak of a natural form of the same virus
Zombies: could also be a form of mind wipe (see Memory Alpha) with very simple directive: "Kill until your dead."
Angels: Could also be manifestations civilizations gone by a psionic echo much like the Empress Wave. For if Humans could generate the Wave imagine what an artificial psionic computer or network could generate...
Demons: Assuming the above, would not there be muliple AI intelligences some kind others not so.
Ghosts: There are spaces inbetween Jump Space and Regular Space in which there is images that are conjured when two ships misjump. Sometimes, these lost ships appear in N-Space.
Vampires: Alien organisms or stray genes could get people with a passion for blood. Sharpened teeth would just be part and parcel of body mods in the future. Think what Goths would be capable of at TL 15...
"Really "Fantasy vs Sci-Fi" is a blurry line so there's no reason to not colour outside the line now and again." 100% agreement here and add in pulp horror which was founded around the time the great American Golden Age of SF, and you have a winner...
Angels: Could also be manifestations civilizations gone by a psionic echo much like the Empress Wave. For if Humans could generate the Wave imagine what an artificial psionic computer or network could generate...
Demons: Assuming the above, would not there be muliple AI intelligences some kind others not so.
Ghosts: There are spaces inbetween Jump Space and Regular Space in which there is images that are conjured when two ships misjump. Sometimes, these lost ships appear in N-Space.
Vampires: Alien organisms or stray genes could get people with a passion for blood. Sharpened teeth would just be part and parcel of body mods in the future. Think what Goths would be capable of at TL 15...
"Really "Fantasy vs Sci-Fi" is a blurry line so there's no reason to not colour outside the line now and again." 100% agreement here and add in pulp horror which was founded around the time the great American Golden Age of SF, and you have a winner...
far-trader
SOC-14 10K
Absopositively!
I think their a plausible horrors and less plausible ones. Given that there are walking corpses that have been walking around for 300 years or so, how can it be that they haven't been consumed by some wild animal by now? I know the smell or rotting meat can be irresistable to many creatures. Some creatures have gotten into my garbage cans just recently. I'm pretty sure any walking corpses would be walking skeletons after 300 years if even that. if your definition of a zombie is just a person with a blank expression on his face with his arms outstretched in front of him, I sort of doubt they could survive this way for 300 years. if they are alive, then they need to eat, sleep, reproduce, and breath. If they are walking animated corpses as the traditional D&D definition, I'd think all their meat would have rotted away or have been consumed by now. D&D zombies are usually made from recently dead corpses dug out of graves. Skeletons last alot longer, then there are mummies, Remember Thundercats and Mum Ra the Ever living!
far-trader
SOC-14 10K
Who says they have to be 300 years old? Who says they have to be corpsified? Drop the D&D definitions and some of the other pure supernatural horror ones and use some of the science fiction ones for Traveller, there are plenty to choose from. Trying to put D&D undead in Traveller would be like adding laser carbines and spaceships to D&D. A really bad idea. Oh, right, they did do that (module S3 iirc)
And it was NOT a good idea.
The Borg in star trek were kind of undead looking, as was the first terminator. Ultimately if you want bad guys to fight it can simply be aliens occupying the planet as in Battlefield Earth.
I read the book, and its not bad. Yes the writer was the founder of the Scientology movement, which is too bad, because I really though that book was a good piece of fiction, the movie really didn't do it justice. The book was one thousand pages long after all.
Basically the story of battlefield Earth is one where aliens from a parallel Universe invade the Earth and mostly exterminate humans from the planet. There were not alot of aliens here, they are mainly present to extract minerals from the planet, and another disadvantage they have is they cannot breath the air, they are large creatures in d20 terms and they are called Psykos or something like that, also their breathing gas turns to an explosive when exposed to radioactivity due to elements such as uranium or plutonium, that might not be such a bad idea. the humans are basically what the aliens failed to exterminate, they depended upon viruses or chemical weapons to wipe out humanity so they could exploit the planet and turn a profit for the corporation. the humans basically band together to find a means of driving these aliens off the planet.
I read the book, and its not bad. Yes the writer was the founder of the Scientology movement, which is too bad, because I really though that book was a good piece of fiction, the movie really didn't do it justice. The book was one thousand pages long after all.
Basically the story of battlefield Earth is one where aliens from a parallel Universe invade the Earth and mostly exterminate humans from the planet. There were not alot of aliens here, they are mainly present to extract minerals from the planet, and another disadvantage they have is they cannot breath the air, they are large creatures in d20 terms and they are called Psykos or something like that, also their breathing gas turns to an explosive when exposed to radioactivity due to elements such as uranium or plutonium, that might not be such a bad idea. the humans are basically what the aliens failed to exterminate, they depended upon viruses or chemical weapons to wipe out humanity so they could exploit the planet and turn a profit for the corporation. the humans basically band together to find a means of driving these aliens off the planet.
Sifu Blackirish
SOC-14 1K
Laryssa, I would recommend The Morrow Project for some ideas for what those hidden caches might contain. Including, possibly, some frozen people from before? Hmmm...might work if you retain the 2070 stat date.
I like where this is going: wilderness reclaiming the urban ruins, nature recovering from the mass-destruction the Industrial Age has caused to it, but nature tainted by the legacy of civilization - nuclear powerplant meltdowns (what would happen if the human operators of a nuke plant die and no replacements arrive?), toxic waste with long half-lives, vast tracts of urban ruins slowly re-colonized by nature. A very large (and welcome) divergance from the archetypical "the world got nuked and it's a Wild-West style desert" paradigm of many post-apocalyptic books/films/computer games.
A point which you should consider is how much remaining useful products (light industrial machinery, weapons, ammo, medicine, vehicles, fuel and so on) would still be around 300 years after the Apocalypse. A mostly-biological Apocalypse would mean that most booty won't be damaged by the war, so most losses wouldbe due to natural erosion - this rate of erosion is an interesting point for our science experts to chew at
) - but won't this small population have access to ALOT of loot to scavange, especially easily-operated things such as small arms and body armor?
Also, for an 2070-Apocalypse setting, you might be able to use some of the space-colonists (from a self-sustaining colony, robably on Mars) as either the PCs (trying to find unreplicatable spare parts for whatever broken McGuffin in the colony, for example), as a plot tool (a shuttle has crashed near the PCs village and the survivors hire/convince/force them to help them reach a spaceport/extraction-point/etc, or as the main antagonists (either conducting experiments on Earth survivors to see how their biology has reacted to the effects of the bioweapon and yet survived, or even trying to use their relic-technology to enslave Earth survivors to use as slaves to rebuild civilization with the Colonists as the rulers).
And, for a hard-science approach to "Zombies", you couls have a genetically-modified strain of Rabies (sp?) infecting human survivors in more recent times (perhaps a tribe unknowingly entering a bioweapon lab?); they won't be dead, but other zombie-like behaviours could easily be manufactured (BRAAAAAIIIIIINNS!
).
I had a similar idea some time ago. My idea was that about 20 years into the future, after a period of rapid advancement in biotechnology, an ecological catastrophe (think West Antarctica melting over a few years due to global warming, combined with very unstable weather everywhere) puts the spark to the powderkeg of depleted non-renewable resources. This ended up with a limited nuclear exchange, but far wider bioweapon and chemical exchanges, with about 95% of Humanity dying (some from the bioweapons, some from famine and disease coming in the wake of the death of civilization). This would mean a global population of 500 millions (population growth would easily give us 10 billions in a few decades), somewhat similar to the pre-industrial or early-industrial population of Earth. Due to the mostly Human-specific nature of the destruction, Nature in general, and plant-life in particular, would recover far faster than Humanity even with all the climate-change mess going around. The game would be set 50 years after the catastrophe, with most bioweapons no longer active for atleast 30 years, and with the larger shelters (which have existed for two generations with closed life-support environments) starting to open up. On the surface they'll encounter nature gone wild, non-sheltered Human survivors (usually naturally immune to the bioweapon used in their area) gone semi-wild, some remaining robotic systems (rare due to the lack of maintainance for 50 years), and... "monsters". These monsters would be genetically-modified animals designed during the Biotech Bubble for various purposes, including used as beasts of war or farm animals. Think of bio-modded attack dogs, rats genetically-engineered to be larger and more vicious to infiltrate the enemy's maintainance ducts and chew away the cables and pipes there, large cockroaches genetically engineered as a high-sustainability source of meat... Technology would be pre-industrial in most surface-survivors communities, with a few of the larger ones reagining some early-industrial capabilities; tech-scavanging would be common; the sealed shelters would ahve their own pre-war stashed gear and some light industrial equipment, as well as the knowhow to operate it, but would typically have very small populations of a few thousands each at most. I might end up running this setting to my girlfriend (who've already expressed an interest in post-apocalyptic settings similar to this) using a derivative of the FUDGE system or, maybe, modified CT rules.
A point which you should consider is how much remaining useful products (light industrial machinery, weapons, ammo, medicine, vehicles, fuel and so on) would still be around 300 years after the Apocalypse. A mostly-biological Apocalypse would mean that most booty won't be damaged by the war, so most losses wouldbe due to natural erosion - this rate of erosion is an interesting point for our science experts to chew at
Also, for an 2070-Apocalypse setting, you might be able to use some of the space-colonists (from a self-sustaining colony, robably on Mars) as either the PCs (trying to find unreplicatable spare parts for whatever broken McGuffin in the colony, for example), as a plot tool (a shuttle has crashed near the PCs village and the survivors hire/convince/force them to help them reach a spaceport/extraction-point/etc, or as the main antagonists (either conducting experiments on Earth survivors to see how their biology has reacted to the effects of the bioweapon and yet survived, or even trying to use their relic-technology to enslave Earth survivors to use as slaves to rebuild civilization with the Colonists as the rulers).
And, for a hard-science approach to "Zombies", you couls have a genetically-modified strain of Rabies (sp?) infecting human survivors in more recent times (perhaps a tribe unknowingly entering a bioweapon lab?); they won't be dead, but other zombie-like behaviours could easily be manufactured (BRAAAAAIIIIIINNS!
I had a similar idea some time ago. My idea was that about 20 years into the future, after a period of rapid advancement in biotechnology, an ecological catastrophe (think West Antarctica melting over a few years due to global warming, combined with very unstable weather everywhere) puts the spark to the powderkeg of depleted non-renewable resources. This ended up with a limited nuclear exchange, but far wider bioweapon and chemical exchanges, with about 95% of Humanity dying (some from the bioweapons, some from famine and disease coming in the wake of the death of civilization). This would mean a global population of 500 millions (population growth would easily give us 10 billions in a few decades), somewhat similar to the pre-industrial or early-industrial population of Earth. Due to the mostly Human-specific nature of the destruction, Nature in general, and plant-life in particular, would recover far faster than Humanity even with all the climate-change mess going around. The game would be set 50 years after the catastrophe, with most bioweapons no longer active for atleast 30 years, and with the larger shelters (which have existed for two generations with closed life-support environments) starting to open up. On the surface they'll encounter nature gone wild, non-sheltered Human survivors (usually naturally immune to the bioweapon used in their area) gone semi-wild, some remaining robotic systems (rare due to the lack of maintainance for 50 years), and... "monsters". These monsters would be genetically-modified animals designed during the Biotech Bubble for various purposes, including used as beasts of war or farm animals. Think of bio-modded attack dogs, rats genetically-engineered to be larger and more vicious to infiltrate the enemy's maintainance ducts and chew away the cables and pipes there, large cockroaches genetically engineered as a high-sustainability source of meat... Technology would be pre-industrial in most surface-survivors communities, with a few of the larger ones reagining some early-industrial capabilities; tech-scavanging would be common; the sealed shelters would ahve their own pre-war stashed gear and some light industrial equipment, as well as the knowhow to operate it, but would typically have very small populations of a few thousands each at most. I might end up running this setting to my girlfriend (who've already expressed an interest in post-apocalyptic settings similar to this) using a derivative of the FUDGE system or, maybe, modified CT rules.
Opponents in this setting (Laryssa's one) could probably be:
1) Other surviving Human tribes/gangs/factions/individuals.
2) Humans from the Mars/Luna/Larange colonies.
3) The environment (wild and messy - the elements, weird weather patterns due to environmental effects of the War, plus radaition/pollution/bio-contamination from the War, from old dumps and from failing reactors).
4) Wildlife, including animals which ahve escaped from zoos to survive in the now-depopulated world. With the first generation having ALOT of dead humans to feast on, reproduction rates would be relatively high despite the environmental damage caused by the war.
5) For a 2070 apocalypse, some robots and/or automated security systems might survive and might be the foes of a scavanging group entering their protected area (or would AIs exist with their own agendas?).
1) Other surviving Human tribes/gangs/factions/individuals.
2) Humans from the Mars/Luna/Larange colonies.
3) The environment (wild and messy - the elements, weird weather patterns due to environmental effects of the War, plus radaition/pollution/bio-contamination from the War, from old dumps and from failing reactors).
4) Wildlife, including animals which ahve escaped from zoos to survive in the now-depopulated world. With the first generation having ALOT of dead humans to feast on, reproduction rates would be relatively high despite the environmental damage caused by the war.
5) For a 2070 apocalypse, some robots and/or automated security systems might survive and might be the foes of a scavanging group entering their protected area (or would AIs exist with their own agendas?).
