Setting musings: Uplifted Transhumans

[DrPraetor]

So the basic premise is that you play as enhanced humans who were the elite of a now-overthrown alien government on Earth. Significant influences include (I need to expand this list):
[*] The human-alien hybrids from X-files.
[*] The transhuman soldiers of the Combine Overwatch from halflife.
[*] alienated teenagers everywhere.
[*] https://xcom.fandom.com/wiki/ADVENT

You are assumed to be members (in fact, agents) of the Worldwide Benevolent Association, which was an organization for transhumans to do refugee relief work during the civil war, that developed into a front organization for the human side. This is meant to achieve the following design goals:
[*] The PCs have some kind of official status, in spite of being members of a despised minority - human partisans can't just shoot you on sight
[*] The WBA continues to operate, providing a structure around monster of the week narratives and other X-files episodes.

It's social commentary on the nature of post-colonial societies, as well as teen-angst body horror. The default structure of a session is that you get a request from a WBA contact or superior to go deal with some situation, and you have to solve it through some combination of legwork and firepower.

I'm still thinking about how soft to make the science fiction. Part of the motivation of the aliens in creating trans-humans with partially-alien emotions and sensibilities was to preserve their culture. This only makes sense if the aliens are deep into a cycle of cultural decay, which is very Lovecraft but not very hard-science fiction (I mean you can just make super-intelligent robots, right?). Making the super science work like magic also opens up the power fantasy elements and the space of character conceptions.

The map has a lot of purposeful ambiguity on it, but the political situation is very messy. So in most countries/regions the aliens took power in soft coups or through electoral politics; the degree of control exercised by the aliens varied tremendously, and there are countries (Switzerland will be given as an explicit example) that maintained political continuity throughout by dealing with the aliens until it become advantageous to join the human side. Other places (let's say Russia) were conquered but then became centers of the eventually-victorious resistance.

The neocolonial social commentary is that, in general, regions that collaborated with the aliens are better developed economically and collaborators have education, technical skills and so forth. The PCs have actual superpowers and so are an extreme example of this. Resentment by the (victorious) human rebels is therefore a major theme.

The aliens were completely overthrown give or take 10 years ago, so there is also concern that the aliens (or their transhuman proteges) will similarly seek to subvert society. Other transhumans will have plots like that which you will need to foil, with extra credit for not exposing transhumans in general to bad press.

Space Marines make great villains, being a jock-Nazi counterpart to the goth-hipster transhuman protagonists. So there are farflung but not densely populated human space colonies, and those colonies won a war in space against the aliens. They are mostly xenophobic and ultra-militaristic. The civil war on Earth only really started *after* the aliens had been defeated in space, and part of the rationale was to keep the space-based humans from claiming all legitimacy on Earth.

Officially, the Earth-based rebels and the Space-based alliance are the same team, but there's an ongoing cold war. The space-based humans have their own transhumans, who are essentially space marines (albeit can be of either sex), who are engaged in missions with often-conflicting political objectives to the PCs.

The alien/PC conversion to a transhuman involved being genetically / surgically / chemically altered, with lots of being strapped to a gurney in bondage gear and conditioned to have inhuman thoughts. Thanks dad. The aliens are deliberately left somewhat vague, so you can add an alien faction that fits your character conception as needed. The alien cultural programming has to fit a few game-mechanical requirements as a social handicap that all the PCs share, but other than that it can be any weird thing.

Mechanically, I'll be utilizing After Sundown with factions and powers reorganized.

This is a more developed version of ideas from ancient posts but I wanted to start over from scratch.

I'm posting this to solicit criticism, so go nuts.

[Mechalich]

This sounds a lot like a post X-Com 2 world to me, with the PCs being former members of the ADVENT. The overall backstory elements you've mentioned seem to match up well enough to the events of that game and the War of the Chosen expansion that I'm wondering if you might not be better of just doing that world (with or without the serial numbers filed off).

Is the idea is that the PCs are suppossed to be hunting down the nasty leftovers of the alien occupation in order to preserve the place of transhumans in a society that hates or is at least extremely suspicious of them now? If so, then there's a question as to why the now dominate human authories are allowing this as oppossed to doing it themselves. Perhaps the transhumans are the only ones who can properly operate certain forms of alien tech due to genetic encoding or some other technobabble reason.

[DrPraetor]

This sounds a lot like a post X-Com 2 world to me, with the PCs being former members of the ADVENT. The overall backstory elements you've mentioned seem to match up well enough to the events of that game and the War of the Chosen expansion that I'm wondering if you might not be better of just doing that world (with or without the serial numbers filed off).

Certainly, if someone described an ADVENT trooper and wanted to play one, you'd have to let them - at least approximately.

My intent was that the transhumans would be able to pass as human, but that they'd look unsettling:

Hot but in the uncanny valley, like Liv Tyler.

I'm thinking of a setting with aliens somewhat more sympathetic than the aliens in XCOM, and with rather more complicated politics. I'm happy to rip off whatever conceits, but I don't want to be tied down to XCOM's assumptions.

Is the idea is that the PCs are suppossed to be hunting down the nasty leftovers of the alien occupation in order to preserve the place of transhumans in a society that hates or is at least extremely suspicious of them now? If so, then there's a question as to why the now dominate human authories are allowing this as oppossed to doing it themselves. Perhaps the transhumans are the only ones who can properly operate certain forms of alien tech due to genetic encoding or some other technobabble reason.

More or less.

The level of toleration is intended to vary from country to country. So you live in a country with a high transhuman tolerance level (Switzerland), and if you go on a mission to a country that has transhuman pogroms (Russia), then being exposed is a constant risk.

The idea is that the elite of many societies - successful businessmen, university professors, and so on - were mostly collaborators themselves. Think of post-colonial India. So the elite don't want a policy of pogroms against transhumans because it would set a nasty precedent for them, but it's intended to be a risk within the setting. Other countries have a very different leadership - explicitly revolutionary, like in Algeria.

Then the WGA fought with the humans during the civil war and there are many sympathizers as a result of that, even if there is also widespread hatred against transhumans in general. People are capable of a lot of cognitive dissonance so this does not stretch my suspension of disbelief.

Finally, the Earth-Rebel authorities are prone to keep the transhumans around as a deniable asset in their rivalry with the humans in space.

There will also be technobabble, of course - but if I can hold the setting conceits together without technobabble, that's better.

[OgreBattle]

I like that xcom went in that direction, I played a bit of the 3D xcom pre expansion and it felt like the drama was “race traitor libs are blood mixing with Star foreigners... my god this cop is mixed blood!!”

I think daoist influenced countries are gonna care less about trans human stuff as there’s various mythological figures of monster lineage, and lots of monster girl hentai.

[Josh_Kablack]

As much as would be tempted to turn this into gonzo satire on conspiracy theories, I'm just gonna ask some world-building questions:

Is the world map basically the same countries we have in the real world? How long were the aliens in charge? What were the big strategic advantages that allowed them to conquer the planet? Or what were the soft power carrots and sticks they used to negotiate compliance in collaborator governments?
How did the human resistance overcome those strategic or soft power advantages? How did the space humans beat a technologically superior alien force in a shooting war?

[Grek]

Something to remember about player affiliation: no matter how you write the setting, whichever side the PCs on is going to be the sympathetic side. If your game is 'social commentary on the nature of post-colonial societies' and you are having all of the PCs be the armed agents of the former imperial powers intervening in the former colonies, you are inherently suggesting that when powerful countries use their militaries to interfere with their former colonies, they are right to do so. This is especially true when you make the armed imperial agents impossibly beautiful superhumans who struggle to comprehend the base emotions of the natives. (The Space Marines thing doesn't change matters much, it just admits to the possibility that there might be bad imperial powers who, unlike our good imperial powers, should stop meddling and let our handsome, sensitive and noble marines do as they please.)

[DrPraetor]

Is the world map basically the same countries we have in the real world? How long were the aliens in charge? What were the big strategic advantages that allowed them to conquer the planet? Or what were the soft power carrots and sticks they used to negotiate compliance in collaborator governments?

Yes and yes. The World Map is more similar to the modern map than is the map from Shadowrun. The aliens were more-or-less in charge for about 40 years, but without any hard break point.

Actual war was limited, and the aliens didn't even dominate the entire planet. So the aliens never had decisive strategic advantages, they had success in recruiting a lot of human collaborators to their agenda for either economic reasons or actually endorsing the agenda of making transhumans.

How did the human resistance overcome those strategic or soft power advantages? How did the space humans beat a technologically superior alien force in a shooting war?

The space humans found caches of precursor technology that enabled them to catch up, and to listen in on the alien communications. So the space humans had a decisive signals intelligence advantage, which the aliens didn't figure out until the war was functionally over.

The aliens are dying out, and the humans outnumber them by orders of magnitude. This is a very Lovecraft element of the setting but almost requires a supernatural element. The galaxy is full of hostile ruins and abandoned superweapons and shit, with only tiny communities of aliens in hiding. Most aliens aren't interested in the project of uplifting humans, and are probably upset with the other aliens for starting a space war with a numerous species that is actually interested in fighting. So the space humans did a WW2-style mobilization building warships and suchnot while the aliens didn't.
This doesn't matter much for the game since Earth remains the setting.

The rebels never really overcame the aliens' soft power advantages, and the alien administration had a lot of supporters up to the very end (cf. British India, the Irish Free State, and South Vietnam.) But, once the xenophobic and highly militant space humans had control of air and space near earth, combined with the moderate opposition to pro-alien polities around the world, there was a domino effect and the pro-alien regimes collapsed. Many of these regimes bent to the new reality instead of collapsing, so maybe 10% of earth is governed by transhuman-friendly regimes.

The aliens are brutal and manipulative, and place little value on individual humans. But, I mean for them to be way less villanous than the Combine from half-life or the aliens from V, and even slightly more sympathetic than the aliens from X-files. You can have friendly relations with individual aliens just fine.

[DrPraetor]

Something to remember about player affiliation: no matter how you write the setting, whichever side the PCs on is going to be the sympathetic side. If your game is 'social commentary on the nature of post-colonial societies' and you are having all of the PCs be the armed agents of the former imperial powers intervening in the former colonies, you are inherently suggesting that when powerful countries use their militaries to interfere with their former colonies, they are right to do so. This is especially true when you make the armed imperial agents impossibly beautiful superhumans who struggle to comprehend the base emotions of the natives. (The Space Marines thing doesn't change matters much, it just admits to the possibility that there might be bad imperial powers who, unlike our good imperial powers, should stop meddling and let our handsome, sensitive and noble marines do as they please.)

The PCs are meant to represent the privileged class of natives in post-colonial societies, rather than the colonial power per se. You don't play as - or fight for - the aliens.

So the PCs are not members of the armed elite of the former imperial power - but they weren't completely committed to the rebellion either, at least typically.

Likewise, the PCs are meant to be undergoing a similar identity crisis to the elite in post-colonial societies, who have often adopted cultural trappings and modes of thought from the colonizing country.

As a construction, it ends up privileging the experiences of the educated elite, but I'm making that statement deliberately, murk and all. The educated elite in Cambodia and Algeria collaborated with the French; the post-colonial purges were horrific, and very destructive to the societies. So what do you do about it?

I agree that formulated in this way it has some ugly baggage, but I don't see anything pro-imperial intervention in it.

[OgreBattle]

What kind of goals do different player characters have, and can a mixed party be possible

[DrPraetor]

What kind of goals do different player characters have, and can a mixed party be possible

It's assumed that all of the PCs are loyal to the WBA, and will cooperate to achieve various WBA missions, such as:
[*] Go expose and kill this alien infiltrator,
[*] Prove that those transhumans were framed, preclude a pogrom where they are
[*] Break into this covert research center of the space-based humans, figure out what they're up to.

etc. So you have WBA contacts who give you shadowruns / X-files episodes and the social contract is that your PC is keen to go along.

You're supposed to write down 1 or 2 orthogonal goals for your character, and the characters are supposed to be on good enough terms to take turns helping eachother out. So Mikuru wants to become a pop star, there's a good chance that the team of superhuman commandos of which she is a member can assist in some way.

I'm going to write a bunch of playable types - not quite as many as in After Sundown, but at least 8 - and you can mix and match those how you want.

You can play as space marine who's joined the WBA for some reason. There are other types of transhumans you can't play, and you can't play the aliens themselves.

Does that answer the question? I'm not sure what you mean by "mixed party"?