Weekend Weirdness (On a Monday)

In what I'm sure will set a terrible precedent, the first ever Weekend Weirdness is not, in fact, being posted on the weekend. I feel my defense that Alien Earth was not available to the public until this morning is pretty ironclad, however.

Every weekend, which includes Monday apparently, I will post some setting tidbit or game mechanic for use with Alien Earth. The kind of stuff that's too bizarrely specific or complicated to put in anything I have the audacity to charge for. I will also take requests if you post them to the comment on the current Weekend Weirdness. You can be as vague or specific as you want, but I reserve the right to refuse any suggestion for any dumb reason in my head.

On to this week's weirdness:

Food Plants of the Second Dark Age

The following are just a few of the genetically engineered superplants that dominate the Earth, having out-competed all of the similar natural plants to the point of near extinction. The abundance of these very healthy fruits and vegetables is one of the things that has made the hunter/gatherer lifestyle so attractive to many of the remaining human tribes. The names given here are the official pre-fall names of the species; many tribes have their own names for them.

The fruit of the Meat Catcus is a meaty slab that is a high source of protein and has a lot of the properties of flesh, especially when cooked properly. Meat cactus is very hardy and will grow almost anywhere.

The bright red Everyfruit contains all of the best properties of every fruit that existed at the time of it's creation. This makes it extremely tasty and nutritious. The wood of the everyfruit tree is also very strong and useful as building materials.

A single Vitaberry contains the entire daily recommended vitamin requirement (circa centuries ago) for an adult human. They are also surprisingly filling given their small size. Vitaberries grow in every color of the rainbow. Vitaberries grow like weeds and can actually be a nuisance to rare farmers attempting to cultivate other crops.

Milkroot plants grow tubers which contain a milky white liquid that is extremely nutritious, roughly analogous to milk. Milkroot grows very fast and can usually produce a full sized tuber in a few weeks after planting.

The bright yellow Honeygourd resembles a very large pale pumpkin. The innards of the honeygourd are sweet tasting and highly nutritious. Honeygourds form the staple of many Second Dark Age diets and a single decent sized gourd can often feed an entire family for several days. A hollowed out honeygourd also makes a decent pot.

...To A Given Value Of "Soon"

It's finally done. This has been a long time coming. Making this game destroyed my self esteem and strained many friendships, it took longer and cost more than it had any right to, but it's finished. It is finally in a playable form suitable for public consumption. My inner perfectionist cringes at the idea of releasing it without "just one more pass" but we all know what lies down that tunnel.

Alien Earth is finally available for download.

So here it is; I'm releasing my baby out into the wide world to be torn apart by the wolves therein. I hope it brings some joy to someone.

If you have problems with something, if you find typos or mistakes or omissions or imbalances or things that would work better, let me know what these are. Just because the game is finished doesn't mean I'm finished with it. I'm not much for editions, but I loves me some Orwellian revisions.

Who is even reading this?

Anyway Alien Earth is now available on DriveThruRPG. It's priced at $10 but you can pay whatever you like, even nothing. The more people who pay the more likely the book is to get further sourcebook support, however.

Coming Soon...

“All we know for sure is that our ancestors were functionally Gods and something still stripped their civilization to its bones.”
-Akira Jones, Tech Shaman of the Prometheans

As we always knew it would be the fall of humankind was one of our own making, although not in the way any of us predicted.

It happened in an instant. The collective unconscious, the shared imagination of all humankind, cracked open like a dam and fantasy flooded reality. The boundaries between imaginary and real came tumbling down. Volcanoes gave birth to dragons, and the monsters under the bed were made flesh. Fictional towns appeared from nowhere, populated with people who had decades worth of memories. The symbols of humankind's greatest ambitions and the fevered nightmares of it's most monstrous abberations came to life all at once. All of human myth and fiction, all the gods and monsters spawned by the human imagination over the millenia of our existence came crawling from our minds and into the real world.

Humans themselves were not immune from the effects of the Fall. Some people mutated into their bizarre self-images, becoming fox-people, magical hermaphrodites, demons and things stranger still. Those who remained human were killed by the billions as humanity entered an age of chaos and anarchy the likes of which had not been known since the stone age. Humans were hunted by fantastic new predators from the darkest recesses of their unconscious fears. Almost quaint by comparison, mass starvation in the early days of the Second Dark Age claimed hundreds of millions.

None know for sure exactly how long the Fall itself lasted, that period of seemingly impossible anarchy during which the fundamental laws of reality were suspended. Eventually these laws reasserted themselves, but not before the world was rendered almost unrecognizable.

When the laws of physics returned, those things that absolutely could not exist died, leaving behind only their impossible corpses. Those things that merely had not existed stayed, however, and many interbred with the more stable natural creatures. Even worse, some impossible things continued to exist in spite of themselves, finding their own bizarre niches. Earth would never be the same.