“We don’t want to play this anymore.”
It was one of the hardest things my gaming group ever
said to me.
“Space orcs fighting space elves with bolters and zappers
and whachamacallits that are technically inferior to third world equipment from
the 1940s? It’s not innovative. It’s not interesting. It’s not relevant.”
“But my next scenario’s really great! You get to rescue a princess …”
They gave me the sad-puppy stares of people who really
don’t want to explain how much you’re embarrassing yourself. “Science fiction is supposed to be about the future. Our future.
It’s supposed to tell us what to expect, what to fear, how to deal with
the problems of the decade after tomorrow.
Real life problems. Real life
insights.”
“Monaco still has a princess. Or a prince or something.”
“Look … Heinlein wrote about what it would be like to
live on the moon. The physics, the
biology, the challenges. He wrote it to
young people who might one day be the next great minds at NASA, called on to
make it happen.”
“Yeah, that’s relevant.
Are you sure he didn’t write about winged pigs engineered by some
well-connected biology prof with stem cell money that used to be NASA’s
budget?”
“Hey, that’s not bad.
You really can do this if you try.”
“At the cost of my sanity. You want to drive me back to drinking?”
“You’ve downed half a six-pack since we got here.”
“Turn on Fox or CNN and I’ll chug the rest.”
“It’s either that or we go over to Chuck’s to play Axis
and Allies.”
Nothing motivates a GM like the threat of losing his
audience. So, with the aid of a good
map, I managed to find the nonfiction section of my local library and began a
lot of much-needed catching up. It was
the sort of in-depth technical research that led Heinlein to predict moon
colonies in the year 2000, and Asimov to realize that the robots at Ford Motor
Company would need special instruction against murdering humans. I stacked the table with books, skimmed and
summarized, noted trends and followed the scent of gritty reality to its
intellectual roots. As the spiderweb of
interlinking 21st Century thought began to take shape before me, I
was able to narrow my reading list to those texts most likely to define the
shape of the world in years to come. I
eventually ended up at two, each widely supported by the sciences and backed up
by legions of like-minded imitators:
The State of the World, annual, by the Worldwatch Institute
America Alone, by columnist and commentator Mark Steyn
I read like I hadn’t read since grad school. I highlighted, I dogeared pages, I made notes. I jotted corollaries, interactions and wild theories, crossing out and correcting as my understanding developed. Finally, in the small hours before game day and after a bottle of good Scotch, it all came together like the sun rising over the Seven Golden Cities of El Dorado. I clipped fresh paper into my scenario binder, and began to write …
Humanity At War: 2100 AD
A Wargaming Source Text
By Vynnie
The Geoscape:
The excesses of the 21st Century were legend. Man-made global warming progressed at a pace even beyond the predictions of the U.N. and the Worldwatch Institute. The small gains of conservationism were quickly swallowed by the growing population bomb, by a mass of teeming humanity consuming, combusting, respirating, and carving away the last tenuous scraps of the global forest for a place to build their homes. Antarctica grows wheat, and Canadian sunbathers line the shores of Hudson Bay. Residents of tropical nations see the sun through clouds of dust, forgeworld red.
The wealthy nations, or what remains of them, were spared the worst of the consequences. Vast seawalls follow the curves of thousands of miles of coast, holding back a sea risen 47 meters above its level of 1900 AD. At borders with the Third World they turn inland, doubling as a check against illegal immigration. The Third World itself, defined as those nations without the public resources for such massive feats of engineering, was inundated. Remnants of tuna schools circle the ruins of Mexican resort towns, and the young deserts of New Guinea end abruptly at unfamiliar coastlines. The Earth-mother bleeds.
Biotechnology:
Demons: The biotech of the 21st Century gave man the capacity to swap genes between organisms, or even to splice his own blueprints into bizarre new life. Untold power was there for those willing to embrace it, but with a horrible price: the codes that must be replaced were the very ones that make us human. Nevertheless, some few power-hungry individuals with the necessary wealth have succeeded in transforming themselves into beings of deep and alien intellect. These creatures have long ceased to be human, and are known in the vernacular as “demons.”
Psionics: Psychic systems, the “sixth sense,” describe a technology of brain implants allowing data gathering without the use of the five natural senses. (Yes, I know that modern biologists have identified seven senses in Humanity, but gimme a break. Whoever heard of the “eighth sense!?”) Psychic connections include direct mental Internet links, or links to surrounding nanomachines, or directly to the special faculties of other nearby psionics.
Eternals: Medical science in the 21st Century produced cures for virtually every human malady, including aging. Humans with the appropriate treatments and a violence-free life could hope to live forever. Needless to say, the required regimen is expensive and beyond the reach of the Third World. Eternal treatments were most popular in Europe, where medical services were inexplicably more efficient because they were run by the government – an effect also seen in postal and vehicle registration services, among others.
The American Empire:
Americans, just as Steyn predicted, doomed themselves by a breeding rate that dipped below population maintenance before the 21st Century and continued to fall. Outnumbered by the Muslim world 20 to 1 in 2050, the fledgling empire’s grip on hegemony slipped away. The future belonged to the fecund and the confident, and America had ceased to be either.
All was not lost, however, for as the old, traditional Protestant society crumbled, the Mormon culture planted in Utah by Joseph Smith reached a flashpoint of fecundity that placed it at the forefront of United States demographics. By 2070 two thirds of Americans were ethnic Mormons (with an average of 10.7 siblings) and the rest were rapidly converting. Cultural infighting continued around fundamentalist strongholds, but eventually most old-line Christians either went to the Third World as missionaries (where they rapidly became an emergency protein supply) or begged and bought spaces on the cyclical shuttles to Mars. Casual church attenders made little fuss, as they didn’t see how Mormon teaching was really any different (and couldn’t remember a lot of what their churches had taught before going Mormon anyway); they ultimately decided that Mormons had more church socials and better after-school programs for their kids, and that one holy book was just as good to not read as another.
The Emperor: America has become no less democratic since the Mormon ascendancy, but numerous European examples have shown the positive social effect of a monarch figurehead. Consequently, America’s first Mormon-dominated Congress allocated Federal money to establish an Imperial Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah, to be inhabited by a massive Demon generated with DNA extracted from the corpse of Joseph Smith. It is for philosophers to debate whether the resulting creature really was Smith in any real sense, but the sad ending of the story is that the reanimation was unsuccessful. Perhaps the design factors were too ambitious, or the source material too degraded, but a catastrophic loss of homeostasis forced the medical team to place over 90% of the Emperor’s organs in stasis. Monitors, surprisingly, show definite brain activity in the dying Emperor, and his massive psychic faculties have been known to spike with power when the Empire faces its darkest threats.
Eternalism: Eternalist procedures are all but unknown in America. Mormons ascend to minor godhood on death, so the extending of a mere mortal life is considered a punishment for sin. (It is considered impolite to discuss the Joseph Smith Project in this context.) The closest thing America has to Eternals are the Dreadnought cyborgs, made from the remains of laggard or incompetent soldiers who were not fit to ascend after one life’s tour of duty.
Equipment: Modern Mormon military equipment is designed to dominate the battlefield at all levels. It includes the General Motors M113D Rhino, the Chrysler M1B4 Land Raider, and the Ford Lemon Russ MBT, among many others.
Typical Battle Cry: “Line ‘em up and burn ‘em out, men, or we won’t be home for Wednesday evening church group! My wife’s making pie!”
Europe:
In the face of darkness, Europe turned inward. Its people crowded into dense cities as the countryside filled with the immigrants of the third world. Reproduction virtually ceased as Eternal technology stretched life expectancy to infinity. Europe built its seawalls highest of all, but close around the cities, turning them into isolated worlds of craft, wine, and pleasures of the flesh. The manifest destiny of years past has given way to a “manifest guilt” over the state of the world. The average European is well over a hundred years old, jaded, ambivalent, and tired. They are the oldest people on the planet, which has earned them their vernacular nickname: the Eldar.
Equipment: Eldar equipment is electronic and sophisticated, with the many failsafes necessary to protect an eternity of mortal tenure. Properly used, it can carve through a battlefield like a hot knife through butter, but at the slightest loss of life the weary eternals have been known to fade away.
Typical Battle Cry: “<sigh> Well, if we must.”
The Third World:
Who will be there for the poorest of all? There was a day when Europe took it upon itself to “civilize” the entire world. It toppled chiefs and kings, culled ivory, and dug salt mines deep into virgin jungle. Yet at the end, when the waters rose, the children of overpopulated poverty had nobody but one another
European guilt has run higher on this issue than any other. The EU once commissioned a study into building seawalls around Africa and Asia, but the cost was prohibitive. Evacuation was explored, but to where? At the very end, it fell to a consortium of Eldar gene wizards to craft a solution that would balance the White Continent’s social debt.
The M3Q15 Gene Serum, introduced into multiple Third World vector points by carrier virus, was intended to make the coming calamity survivable by all. Algal photosynthesis coupled with increased omnivorous digestion capacity was meant to solve the perpetual food crisis. Muscle growth hormones would increase the physical labor output, substituting a “green” power source for an insufficient industrial base. Gills would make the current coastal cities habitable even when underwater. Side effects of irritability and accelerated dental growth were never fully resolved, but the oceans were rising and the EU was out of time.
In the field, the photosynthesis proved to be a bust and the gills never developed. Muscle growth profiles were nearly as expected, and the irritability factor exceeded any lab results on record. It took less than a month before the world’s most populous nations were dominated by violent, overmuscled brutes with jagged teeth and skin green from inert chlorophyll. In another victory for first-world nation building, the Orkish Horde was born …
Equipment: Whatever they can weld together from junked automobiles and ancient Soviet weapon imports.
Typical Battle Cry: “Waaaagggh!” (You expected anything else?)
How China became the Eye of Chaos:
China is perhaps Earth’s greatest and most ancient nation, but its path into the Machine Age has been tortuous indeed. Building on millennia of laws and emperors, it clove doggedly to a totalitarian path but was rewarded only with poverty. Finally, at the turn of the 21st Century, the hold of the exhausted Communist state began to slip. Unwatched citizens began unapproved businesses, bringing in unprecedented foreign exchange. Beijing reacted tentatively, loosening laws little by little and bracing for a collapse of civilization, but the result was more free trade, more innovation, and more wealth. Like a great ship at sea, the prow of the Central Kingdom had begun to turn.
By 2100 AD China’s liberalization had nowhere left to go. Anything could be had in the anarchy of its great cities: vice, drugs, genetic enhancements, weapons, and more. The world’s greatest demons haunt its high society, where any alteration, no matter how vile, can be had for a price, and where the rivers of foreign exchange can be tapped to pay.
Equipment: China tends to import mechanical hardware, but fields wildly gene-modified creatures capable of unpredictable fury on the battlefield. These are molded from the flesh of those citizens who have little value on the free market, and can thus be thrown carelessly into the maw of war. A Chinese chaos-host is a fearsome thing to behold, for it respects neither life, nor liberty, nor property, nor any thing but the hunger of the demon that finances it.
Typical Battle Cry: <Inarticulate slurping sound, coupled with the crackling release of horrific energies>
Mother Earth:
“Is it actually required of us to battle war on Mother Earth's behalf? Or is Earth older and wiser to know when it is time to respond by simply flushing our civilizations out?” - Comment on WorldWatch Institute forum
Mankind has turned against his mother, has ravaged her resources and poisoned her finery, and now she fights back! In the war-torn world of 2100 AD, the very Earth has risen to remove the human pestilence.
Could man have ever imagined that he alone understood the secrets of the genome? The molecular coil from which Gaia built us all is her preserve of power, and with subtle twists she summons forth hosts worthy to challenge the metal monsters of her progeny. She envisions a new, cleansed world in which a tyranny of nature shall restore the biosphere to its eternal balance.
Equipment: Insects not only outnumber Man, but exceed him two to one by weight as well. Tiny beyond measure, they slip between the eyes of humanity’s sentinels into a sensitive place, and then – with the pinch of a double helix – they grow larger than trees, and topple skyscrapers. The Earth’s new tyrants can build a hive anywhere, beneath the noses of their foes. Then tyrant and tyranids will burst from the soil, savaging the landscape like cleansing locusts.
Typical Battle Cry: <The vibration of a low-level earthquake morphs into the buzzing of wings … and then the floorboards begin to crack …>
The Scotch is empty, the coffee brewing. I hear their cars pulling up outside. It’s going to be a great game, a game like I’ve never run before. The ecstasy, the angst, the compelling moral dilemmas …and I won’t even have to buy any new figures.
Lucky me.
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