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MAD potential

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Prophet710 Prophet710's picture
MAD potential
Considering Eclipse Phase and the current state of the Sol system during its timeline something occurred to me after watching iRobot and G.I. Joe last night. There is the serious potential for SUPER VILLAINS. Far away hideouts! Mad Science! Cloning Crazies! ALL of this just waiting to be unleashed on the poor citizens of Transhumanity. Exsurgents and TITANs aside Transhumans themselves have a knack for complete or mutually assured destruction on a planetary scale. A Mad Scientist with an adaptable nano-virus, A crazed synth morph designer with an army of skillwired Alpha Forked Steel Morphs, Insurgents/Terrorists/Fundamentalists with access to ANTI-MATTER! The list is endless for some serious/crazy/hard scifi gone epic! I had stayed focused on the TITANs and ETI and Exsurgents, but there is SO MUCH MORE! Anyone else want to throw around ideas of the mundane transhuman becoming the horror of the universe?
"And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes. And slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us."
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: MAD potential
Prophet710 wrote:
Considering Eclipse Phase and the current state of the Sol system during its timeline something occurred to me after watching iRobot and G.I. Joe last night. There is the serious potential for SUPER VILLAINS. Far away hideouts! Mad Science! Cloning Crazies! ALL of this just waiting to be unleashed on the poor citizens of Transhumanity. Exsurgents and TITANs aside Transhumans themselves have a knack for complete or mutually assured destruction on a planetary scale. A Mad Scientist with an adaptable nano-virus, A crazed synth morph designer with an army of skillwired Alpha Forked Steel Morphs, Insurgents/Terrorists/Fundamentalists with access to ANTI-MATTER! The list is endless for some serious/crazy/hard scifi gone epic! I had stayed focused on the TITANs and ETI and Exsurgents, but there is SO MUCH MORE! Anyone else want to throw around ideas of the mundane transhuman becoming the horror of the universe?
In one of my campaigns, this is damn near all we did for antagonists. Lets see, we had a vigilante Promethean that decided to take Firewall's mission into its own hands (think seed AI Punisher), a mercurial AGI terrorist who was his own army of suicide bombers, a rogue Ultimate overhumanist that decided to wipe out the lesser beings of the system (who we affectionately nicknamed Ultimate Hitler), an async that started a religious cult around him being the messiah, a surya pod that decided to try and destroy the Solar habitats and cut off the Sun's ties to the rest of the system, and a radical outer-system anarchist that has made it his sworn duty to destroy the vestiges of capitalism in the system, no matter the cost. Those are just the ones I remember.
Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: MAD potential
A secret part of my setting (players, avert your photoreceptors!) involves a Seed AGI hiding on a very minor asteroid it has turned into a fortress/mainframe. It calls itself Ming the Merciless - yes, it has skinned its home virtual reality in classic Flash Gordon style. It is actually a Firewall ex-member and not that a bad sort: after figuring out a few things about the other hidden Powers That Be it decided to stay quiet and intervene very subtly to help transhumanity. So it invents "helpful" technologies and then creates emissaries - fake people with the right skills and mindset that grow from launched nano-seeds - to sell them. Of course, who knows what this will lead to... "I'm not crazy, I'm *advanced*!"
Extropian
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: MAD potential
Another great mad scientist is Dr Driscoll-Toyoda from my adventure Think Before Asking. In my game he has becoming a recurring source of trouble/help - one Firewall-aligned fork and one hypercorp-aligned fork, both willing to do *anything* to save transhumanity. Usually by means of extremely risky AGI research. Then there are the Argonauts... just think of them as a whole faction of potential mad scientists. Organised mad scientists. Mad scientists with good PR. And worse, they even had mad engineers to help them.
Extropian
Prophet710 Prophet710's picture
Re: MAD potential
No exaggeration, Ming the Merciless is a Firewall Proxy that hits up my group of players every now and then. Sort of like a Mr. Johnson. His real name is Sylus Ming, but they named him the Merciless after he ordered the complete cleaning of a Futura spin-off habitat.
"And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes. And slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us."