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#Post#: 5266--------------------------------------------------
Combining my favorite P&P desktop RPGs... Ascension, Armaged
don, Aftermath
By: wolfman_six Date: December 25, 2014, 8:11 pm
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Ascension
In the late 1940's, a small group of superior intelligences were
born under strange circumstances. The group of babies was
dispersed around the world, handed over to mostly American
foster families by advancing soldiers of General George S.
Patton's celebrated Third Army as it drove eastward through the
Bavarian part of Germany, liberating a diverse group of
devastated towns, former military bases, Stalags, Kasernes,
slave labor camps and erstwhile temporary facilities where who
knows what had been going on during the Nazi era. The babies,
all assumed to be orphans, slipped through the cracks of the
American war machine's administration long before secret
operations like Project Paperclip were begun.
As the infants grew, nobody ever suspected anything about them,
despite plenty of talk and conspiracy theories about freak
eugenics experiments and attempts to alter pregnant mothers to
affect their unborn children (with the mothers ultimately always
dying from childbirth). At first, many grew up in the rebuilding
Cold War West Germany, parented by soldiers stationed there,
eventually rotating home as their military parents' terms of
enlistment ran out.
Thanks to early advances into the Atomic Age, both the hope of
humans reaching for the stars and the fear of global atomic
warfare gripped the public. Meanwhile, these babies grew into
off the charts intellects and pursued all manner of knowledge
like sponges. They would eventually amass secret fortunes, and
through their enigmatic, incredible gifts, take technologies
forward in short years what had often taken generations to
advance before.
The human race, by starting the Atomic Age, had gained the
attention of a small group of wandering entities. Finding
humanity ready to leap to the stars, the non corporeal entities
decided to watch and steer humanity forward, choosing to occupy
infants in order to also experience life as humans.
The entities in their human forms were capable of short duration
time travel (affecting tiny areas around them and able to bring
items or artifacts back). They were also powerful psionic beings
as compared to normal humanity: telekinetics with ESP abilities.
They kept their gifts secret, growing into adulthood and
starting families, working jobs in the sciences and academia or
becoming integral parts of industries that brought forth the
critical technologies that modern day people take for granted.
However, the shadow of the Cold War and potential for global
destruction caused this cabal great concern. They embarked on
plans to preserve humanity from itself. Collecting together in
the United States, but not willing to exclude other nations and
races, the entities formed The Future Council, to share their
knowledge of humanity and take steps to protect humanity from
itself.
The Future Council was divided from the outset as to the best
way to preserve humanity. They allied themselves with
industrialists and scientists who swore complete secrecy and
were finally entrusted with knowledge of the gifts each Council
founder had. Half the group envisioned creating a lifeboat for
humanity, a colony ship launched into space or toward a
habitable world, while the other group considered forming an
organization that could be concealed on Earth, ready to rebuild
a nuclear shattered world. Neither prospect would be easy. The
Future Council and its human allies pledged their lives and vast
resources to preparing a solution, all concealed from mainstream
humanity, governments or people who might corrupt their dream.
Creating a world saving group on Earth became the first
priority. Investments were made to procure land, equipment,
vehicles and advanced technologies, such as cryogenics and
fusion power, for this program. The Future Council time
travelled to bring back some elements for humanity to reverse
engineer into cryostasis technology and ever smaller nuclear
fusion power plants, while only "sharing" parts of it to the
globe at large. Too much put out too quickly would draw too much
attention.
In order to train and staff their survivalist group, they
recruited a wide variety of humans, weeding them out physically
and psychologically, and then training them for an Apocalyptic
event in total secrecy. After training, the Future Project
sequestered their survivalists, placing them in cryosleep, in
hidden underground facilities spread out across The United
States, Canada and beyond.
Many stories of mysterious deaths, strange disappearances, UFO
abductions and the like were crafted to cover the people going
into hiding. Eventually, thousands of trained people were in
cryogenic suspension, and a master command base began to develop
which would collect and store humanity's knowledge in order to
redistribute it to the sleepers should they be needed. This
secret project has been continuing through the modern era since
the 1960's, including updating team equipment, computer systems
and vehicles all without ever waking the cryonauts. For the
sleepers, the clock had stopped when they closed their eyes, and
they expected to only awaken in a nuclear free world, or a
hellish wasteland.
The discovery of a counter Earth in the mid to late 1970's
spurred a drive by The Future Council to accelerate space
technology to further their colony ship idea. A deep space probe
flying away from the solar system ecliptic beamed back images of
a planet flying exactly the same orbit as Earth, but on the
opposite side of the sun, exactly six months on the other side.
From the limited capability of the probe, it was discovered to
have evolved as the Earth, fully capable of sustaining human
life.
Immediately, The Future Council set about secretly assembling
their lifeboat to the stars, with the intention of founding one
or more colonies on the counter Earth, named Haven, in the event
Earth became uninhabitable. Stories of space junk, missing probe
craft and failed space projects amounting to trillions of
dollars really hid the movement of materials to the lifeboat.
The Future Project was already training survivalists and began
to funnel cryosleep teams to the starship while a crew of
astronauts to fly the lifeboat were absorbed into the Project.
Eventually, a crew of 100 and 3,000 American cryosleep
colonists, plus supplies, vehicles and tech enough to build
their colony, left the United States secretly while the world's
attention was on exploding Space Shuttles and waning interest in
space exploration. The intention was for the ship to enter a
solar synchronous orbit for six months, find and land on Haven,
and build. Additional ships and crews were assembled from other
Future Project enclaves, in varying numbers, to also pursue
forming human settlements on Haven, each representative of the
home nation from which it launched.
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The Ascension concept is for Future Project colonists arriving
on an Earthlike world where some things are similar and others
very different. How would they survive?
The Armageddon concept is for humans plunged into the immediate
effects of a global conflict like World War III. Limited nuclear
exchanges lead to breakdowns in communications and
infrastructure, but there are large groups of leaderless
military, refugees, and criminals either carrying on the fight
against the enemy or doing what it takes to go home, or just
plain surviving. Plus, there is always the chance that the
unused nuclear arsenals may still fire.
The Aftermath concept takes place about 150 years after Earths
ultimate nuclear destruction. The master base, programmed to
automatically wake the Future Project personnel some three years
after a global armageddon, sat idle for too long until a freak
electrical storm finally triggered the system. Some teams may
run the risk of not getting the wake up call due to nuclear
fallout and natural changes to the land over the century and a
half of destruction.
Every cryonaut sleeping chamber has a simple plaque engraved
with the Future Project directives: 1) survive at all costs, 2)
reawaken as many teams as possible and converge at the master
base, and 3) rebuild human society. Will the Future Project
teams awaken and manage to survive long enough for rebuilding to
begin? Will the lifeboat colonies, after building up a new
society on Haven, take to space in order to reclaim their
destroyed home world? Can the Earth heal from its wounds and
support humanity or will a monstrous hellish world be left
behind?
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