On this next adventure, you'll be heading to The Empty Place. Accompanying you will be The Diplomat. You will be provided with basic equipment and credit for expenses. The climate is temperate, there are few monsters or other anomalies, and no population to speak of. Arrangements will need to be made to dismantle the existing infrastructure so that we can establish supply lines, and security will need to be maintained around key points (for which your credit may be leveraged and expensed). You should expect some resistance at first, but should be able to resolve any conflicts with minimal bloodshed. Should you find yourselves compromised, it is imperative that The Diplomat escapes. They will know how to devise the post-mortem report. Know that long-term success of operations will depend on the initial terms.
I promise there is a real module idea hidden in here. You may ask why I am not explaining, but it simply cannot be discussed.
An advanced amphibious alien species that birth hundreds of young at a time. For the sake of their ecosystem and as a biological imperative, they must allow their young to be preyed upon.
The young are laid in eggs on land and must travel to the ocean after hatching. They are slow, clumsy, and vulnerable on land, and hunted in droves by predators from the sky, on the land, and at the shore.
Despite their technology, wisdom, and spirituality, they must allow this violence, and many even embrace it. But also, some sacrifice more than others.
They have a pheromone system strong enough to sense genes, and have a strong sense of genetic memory.
The Alpha Genome are allowed to breed by the hundreds each. At any time up to 40% of the total population may be related to AG, with varying degrees of access to that genetic memory. The AG and lesser Genomes are a Family, a nation, a technology, a resource, and a religion. They are a species that places great emphasis on genetic "purity".
Much of popular culture is just rehashed genetic memories that induce something like a species- or culturally-specific emotion roughly equivalent to nostalgia.
Memories are altered by Hebbian Learning. When a memory is recalled it is changed due to coactivations of neurons at time of recall.
The genetic memories work similarly.
The Genomes themselves are like gods and demiurges and demons. But there are individuals or clusters who represent them, or claim to represent them, or who acquire disproportionate power through other niches.
The pheromones and genetic memories also make them more social even than humans, and they can empathize and socially intuit at a higher resolution. They experience and propagate both love and hate in dimensions beyond our ability to perceive.
Although they suffered terribly when the technologically superior Americans first colonized their world, the Alpha Genome were eventually elected minority rule over Earth geopolitics, and the nations that allied with them during the period of American colonization prosper under this new regime.
Over time their social technologies, the genetic memories and superior intuition, proved more powerful than guns and missiles.
Despite their similar intelligence and reasoning skills, because humans aren't part of the Genomes and can't experience the genetic memories, they do not feel the same degree of empathy or emotional volatility towards humans as they evoke from each other.
Humans are not socially equitable, but it is different than persecution humans impose upon themselves. Both species continue to inflict far more suffering on themselves than against each other.
The mechanism of the geopolitical takeover of earth involved a targeted effort to rebrand political power and leadership roles as a kind of service industry.
Through this campaign, a critical mass including even some of the staunchest American individualists were eventually convinced to largely acquiesce organization and administration.
Although in minority control, they are acutely aware of their vulnerability should humanity choose to organize against them.
I am not a fan of the "so bad it's good" mentality. I hate how people go to these campy movies with preconceived ideas about the experience they're going to have; who, when faced with something totally outside their frame of reference for consensus reality, choose to scoff and laugh and close their minds, not even considering to actually sit with their thoughts and truly experience what is being presented to them on its own terms.
If you're that person, skip this movie.
Watched this movie at my local indie theater last year, and then when they brought it back in January 2024 for their best of 2023 set I had to rewatch it even though I never rewatch things. I figured I might never get another chance.
This movie is pure awesomeness. It's weird, it's queer, it's campy, it's scifi. I am not expert enough in music to articulate fully, but it's got sounds like from the videogame series Wipeout, Lo-Fi Trip Hop at least a decade before that was much of a thing, electronica, disco, metal, Persona 5-style nu jazz, and all of it is amazing. It's a shame this movie doesn't have an available OST or track list.
It's super low budget but it does some really cool things visually, like semi-transparent overlays of the actors over exotic hand-crafted sets, paper cutouts of tanks over cars, puppets in isometric view engaging in war.
The dialogue and character expressions are all so strange. The voices sometimes seem dubbed over. It takes you totally outside your frame of reference for what people are, how they behave; it makes it feel more scifi, but also more queer (in multiple senses of the word). These are humans who operate in totally alien ways.
There is a story, but it's very surreal, I didn't necessarily understand it the first time but on second viewing it was easier to follow, but it's not really necessary to understand what's going on. It's not a movie that needs to be fully understood, just appreciated.
It's sexy, but in a way that is totally orthogonal to heteronormative sexuality. It deals with some mature themes, there's some very graphic scenes, but it never feels exploitative and it always handles it matter of factly.
There's a character named Spidercuntboy.
If you can get your hands on it, or better, if you can find it in an indie theater, I would strongly recommend checking it out if you're at all into weird stuff.
I would love to get a full-length track of Candle Man's theme, it is so good.
For generations the Fire Kingdom has oppressed the Leaf Folk. That is until the Azure Horde arrived from the seas. At a disadvantage, the only way the Fire Kingdom can survive is by leveraging the unique abilities of the Leaf Folk, if they can make peace in time.
Each player is two characters, an Ancestor and a Successor.
This is a world of circular time, or at least for the PCs. Actions in one time affect the other. If it's easier, think of it like a surrealist dream. A whole other life, a world with its own rules, and maybe no less significant. Quite literally, this is how luck is made.
Like Karma, attaching to the present at the expense of the future (or past, as it were) accrues debt. Even though you represent both interests, sometimes it feels like you just don't have a choice.
The Ancestor and Successor are each other's spirit familiar.
Lucid to each other's dreams.
Both images by the Surrealist Max Ernst
Possibilities
Luck, synchronicities, spiritual phenomena all operate within the circularity of time.
Ancestor and Successor are arbitrary terms. Ones' history is the others' prophecy.
Causality as we think of it is merely a heuristic; a reasonably predictive and explanatory model for something much more complex.
The Apologists believe that in the space between life and death, one is not held on trial. Instead, one receives an intervention with their no longer living friends, enemies, loved ones, and ancestors. One is made to feel sorry for every wrong they've ever committed, to apologize to themselves, the dead, and the living (this is where magic and miracles come from), to have a very cathartic cry, and then a deep and pleasant rest, well deserved.
Some have criticized this belief as a means by criminals and profiteers to stomach the abuses they commit in life. "We'll all experience the same things in the end, so what's the consequence, one way or the other?"
Others find comfort knowing that they will always find forgiveness, and feel empowered to be more forgiving in life. As well, their impact on the world has been vast, and in many cases quite positive.
The Apologists are overrepresented relative to the general population in the field of mental health. They also led the movement to dismantle the prison industrial complex that persisted into the early 21st century.
At the same time, every Carnival King, May Queen, and Fool has been an Apologist, and were empowered by popular support from the Apologist majority.
While many today still debate the merits of this new movement, none deny the influence it has had across the world in such a short time.
I imagine this as a mid-Apocalyptic, Epic Dark Fantasy setting that happens to be set in a technological and culturally Modern world. Something between Game of Thrones and Final Fantasy XV.
You could throw out the explicit reference to the 21st century and embed it in a more traditional fantasy setting and use the Apologist belief system as the source of "magic and miracles" within the setting.
Thank you, I designed them myself! Yes they really work! See that vein there? Yes, I just attach it to the wheel overnight and it's reinvigored by the morning. Oh, those are self-producing bioplastics, I'm especially proud of those. You think I'm beautiful? Gee golly, thanks. I think I'm beautiful too. I mean, I think you're beautiful too. I know it seems impractical, and like a lot of work to have done this, and it is and was, but art isn't meant to be practical. Yes, this is my art. Some people are repelled by it, but I think that says more about them than me. You see what the engineers don't understand, they really just don't get it, is that the system is just one side of the equation, but you can't explain the experience as a system. So I knew, I knew, to really know what it means to be a machine, I had to become one. But it's not enough to be a cyborg, no, that's got it all wrong. Cybernetics is about systems of control, and you can't understand what anything really means through systems and control, isn't that obvious? A cyborg is just a series of interfaces, translation points between electrical signals and those of the body, and then the spirit. No, to embody the machine, I had to reshape myself, the body itself, into something like a machine, a Man Machine. The qualia of it, the pure aesthesia, well, it can't be described, that's the whole point isn't it? To roll on wheels, to see like a camera, to store memories as hash mapped blocks of information! And see, that's where the artists get it all wrong, because they think the machine can never produce art. But it's a moving target, art to them is whatever the human can do that the machine cannot, and when the machine can do it, then it's not art anymore, it's something else. But let me tell you, they've got it all wrong. The machine has an art all of its own, invisible to the perceptual quirks of the human eye, out of phase with the holographic human soul, illogical to the material brain. Let me tell you from personal experience that there is magic in the machine! Am I so repulsive? Don't you want to be a Magical Man Machine as well? Sometimes I miss the oxytocin tingle of a gentle finger stroking along the hairs of my forearm, or the spicy floral fragrance of navratna oil and its cooling sensation on my scalp. I have the memory in block storage, but even in its "lossless" format, I know the je ne sai quai is all wrong, it's a different flavor of experience. And it is lonely sometimes, being the only Magical Man Machine. It's no better nor worse an experience. I mean, in some ways its worse, if only because the world doesn't know what to do with me. But that's where the magic comes from isn't it? The divergence from consensus reality. A vast and sparse noosphere, the joy of ships passing in the night, sailing the ocean of anonymous nobodies and nothings, each themselves doing likewise, whether they even know it or not. Oh my gosh, oh I'm so sorry, I really ran away with myself there. I'm sorry, I haven't even asked yet, how was your day?
