The Gaming Den

A setting I've been mulling over.

I enjoy the world building of Resident Evil's Umbrella Corp scheming, especially how horrible zombie crisis and mutant tyrants are part of immortal scientist-warrior Wesker's goal to become emperor of humanity with an army of superhuman soldiers.

It feels like a solid backstory for an eventual grimdark dystopia crumbling space empires/megacorps run by horrible immortals and their horrible monster soldiers prone to spontaneously growing tentacles, claws, and extra mouths.

A nice wiki covering Umbrella weapons research:
https://residentevil.fandom.com/wiki/Bio_Organic_Weapon

Doesn't need to actually be 40k years into the future, could be more Shadowrun, Blade Runner scale of "a few decades from now"

Factions and distinct monster categories that come to mind.

Golgotha virus: RE2, the G-Virus super mutates hosts into survival monsters. So these guys are your 'alien' faction, the G-Virus drifted into deep space, took over some far away planet, and is now coming back hitching a ride from unknowning 'normal human' miners and so on. Like Alien, they're no longer 'human'. Maybe they have a hive mind, maybe they have different hives with different evolutionary paths. Largely an NPC faction, though perhaps they can do the genestealer cult proselytizing thing too.

Tyrant Virus: Superhuman soldiers, like Mr. X. No will of their own though so relegated to NPC's or minion. Can have a religious vibe to spread, like Bloodborne healing church

B.O.W research: mass zombification to the precision of engineered hunters and lickers. Maybe a subset of Tyrant virus.

Nemesis: mind control parasites to enhancing symbiotes, attach to human or animal hosts.

Psychics: Not all as powerful as Tetsuo and Akira, perhaps a psychic disaster is also responsible for interstellar collapse. Around Shadowrun mage power level as a cap.

Cyborgs n' power armor n' Nanomachines: Could fit some Metal Gear in here too, gives you shadowrun street samurai to Incal n' Admech tech priests. The most 'normal' human power set.


Various factions are in cold proxy war with one another, like God-Wesker's tyrant soldiers vs G-Virus cults vs remnants of US stellar government vs Liquid Wesker's insurrection vs independent kingdoms.

I feel "zombie plague ruined human civilization and now freaky powers are the only pockets of stability" makes for fun adventurer/shadow runner/freedom fighter adventuring.

An adventure anywhere from earth to expo planet to orbital colony can just start as "derilict ship crashed into it and zombies/G-Virus came out"

To get around VAH, perhaps all 'original humans' died out in the zombie plague and psychic disaster, so everyone is descended from the engineered or mutants.

Wesker ruined Resident Evil for me. He's not an interesting character and for all intents and purposes he's basically the evil wizard that lies at the heart of everything. Which is unfortunate because I feel like I'm getting rickrolled every time he shows up.

I'd like to see a Rick Astley-esque memetic character as the face/heart of some horrifying cyberpunk conspiracy.

I think you'd be interested in Twig. There's a lot of biotech overlap, except Twig takes place in 1921 with British colonialism turned up to 11 and then some. Scrolling through its tvtropes at least should turn up some good ideas.

I like this. You could have your Eldar/Elves expy's be genetically modified people that actually worked. So they could be crazy rare but saying there was some experiment or some percentage that all their genetic experimentation totally worked amazing on is kind of cool. It could let you have hyper xenphobic fortified enclaves full of beautiful long lived dextrous geniuses.

Mr X is close enough to space marines to work. I like the idea that Umbrella has absolutely spawned apocalyptic monsters that will probably destroy everyone but they're also the only ones who can make the 10 foot tall super soldiers we need to keep them at bay so they still get to be in charge.

Putting all of this in the Sol system gives you about as many environments and places as 40k was ever interested in anyways. If the tyrants have conquered lots of Asia but the catachan-ass Vietnamese fighters have made an absolute stop-gap in south asia that's cooler than separating everything by infinity miles.

You could even have some actual aliens or alien tech we found somewhere if you want something like the Necrons or just any crazy xenos race.

Dean wrote:I like this. You could have your Eldar/Elves expy's be genetically modified people that actually worked. So they could be crazy rare but saying there was some experiment or some percentage that all their genetic experimentation totally worked amazing on is kind of cool. It could let you have hyper xenphobic fortified enclaves full of beautiful long lived dextrous geniuses.

I love the theme of craftworlds and maiden worlds, so they can be your humans modified for space exploration. It could be an accident like "cryo freeze failed, survivors woke up early and modified their next generation to be long lived and able to retain huge amounts of knowledge. Culture of passing on knowledge and individual excellence, strictly guarding against selfish decadence that will destroy such a colony shift (banished into Dark Eldar Space Pirates).

Mr X is close enough to space marines to work. I like the idea that Umbrella has absolutely spawned apocalyptic monsters that will probably destroy everyone but they're also the only ones who can make the 10 foot tall super soldiers we need to keep them at bay so they still get to be in charge.

Yeah the Talos shows up in a later game, it's a tyrant armored for conventional human war



Also gives you mutant 'chaos' marines:


Perhaps they're just mindless berserkers, or maybe this mutation gives them back some sentience so they really are rebel chaos marines hiding at the borders of humanity

Putting all of this in the Sol system gives you about as many environments and places as 40k was ever interested in anyways. If the tyrants have conquered lots of asian but the catachan-ass Vietnamese fighters have made an absolute stop-gap in south asia that's cooler than separating everything by infinity miles.

You could even have some actual aliens or alien tech we found somewhere if you want something like the Necrons or just any crazy xenos race.

Afghanistan holding out against umbrella marines would be interesting.

Sol System wide I can see...

Mercury- Scorching daylight but very slow days, so the surface has massive moving mining-cities, the underdark has catacombs doing a reverse geothermal thing where they draw from surface solar stations to power their cool dark homes.

Venus- Megapressure surface from gas, but floating gas cities is cool. So scenarios there revolve around how strict you gotta be to not damage the floating cities, but then umbrella monsters may be lurking. Perhaps a strain of G-Virus made it to the surface and occasionally infects Venusians to go off world.

Earth- Home of Umbrella and other horrible megacorps. Gray skied polluted world with little flora and fauna left. A few points of overpopulated mega cities and wastelands infected with virus, left over monsters, rebel hideouts.

Mars- Successfully terraformed. Similar to Earth, whatever becomes of Earth you can have Mars be different enough to be a setting for different kinds of stories.
Phobos-Deimos: I like the idea of turning them into hollowed out spinny-gravity space colonies, maybe even colony ships for craftworld not-Eldar.

Asteroid Belt- About 4% of mass of Earth moon total, half mass contained in Ceres the ice 'planetoid', good place for megacorp mining powers and secret bases.

Jupiter- Gas giant full of Helium-3, can do the Gundam thing where the trading company that brings this precious fusion resource back to Earth sphere has become its own militant empire.
Saturn- Whatever you do with Jupiter you can do something different with Saturn

Here's a photo of their moons: https://www.dreamstime.com/image-repres ... e107830886

Could do the 2001 Space Odyssey Thing and Jupiter is ignited by mass increasing monoliths into Lucifer star, thus Ganymede Callisto Io Eropa become life bearing 'planets'. Maybe mass increasing monoliths also make them earth sized so gravity differences don't need to be factored in. So then Saturn is harvested for Helium 3, maybe the moons are cannibalized to make floating ring colonies like Gunnm.

Uranus- Whatever you do with Neptune you can do something similar but different with Uranus.

Neptune- Has a 1.2 earth mass rocky core, so draining the gas for water (to supply other planets and moons terraforming? leaves an earth-like water planet: https://terraforming.fandom.com/wiki/Neptune
To stick with the nautical name it'd be a water planet. For more exoticism... neptune gets turned into a gas-then-water planet with a deep ocean rocky core so everything there is sea questy.

Kuiper Belt- Pluto is included in this area. About 1/10th the mass of Earth spread out across vast distances. Like the Asteroid Belt but even more remote. Can have G-Virus turn into bio-metal Bydo tyranids from Pluto and surrounded bits.

Can insert some Shirow in there too for cyborgs and AI mind machine Buddhist Daoist awakenings

Putting your brain in a cyborg shell also sounds a lot more appealing in a world full of zombie monster viruses and evil assholes that control them

OgreBattle wrote:I love the theme of craftworlds and maiden worlds, so they can be your humans modified for space exploration. It could be an accident like "cryo freeze failed, survivors woke up early and modified their next generation to be long lived and able to retain huge amounts of knowledge. Culture of passing on knowledge and individual excellence, strictly guarding against selfish decadence that will destroy such a colony shift (banished into Dark Eldar Space Pirates).

How about the idea that the Eldar were made to explore space in the golden age of this setting. If we're terraforming and genetically engineering and so on we've clearly reached a very high technology level. My assumption is that the setting would look like Farcast and be full of space madness and transhuman AI if everyone weren't constantly being fucked with by zombie viruses. But since society is getting torn apart constantly the height of technological possibility can be very high while the daily reality for everyone is still dystopian and shitty. The Eldar expys could be made at the height of this setting. Humans designed to live lengthy lives aboard colony ships, all tall and frail from zero-g, and with a detached and slightly alien outlook that comes from their entire breeding pool coming from astronauts who were specifically chosen for their ability to keep calm and not go crazy on 16 year space journeys. The Eldar can share a little of the Solar Macharius flavor where they discovered and braved these worlds that are now full of hellish monstrosities. They were there in the golden age of discovery and now see only ruin for humanity around them. The Eldar believe they're the last hope to re-establish a forgotten and bygone age that they are the final living relics of.

Yeah the Talos shows up in a later game, it's a tyrant armored for conventional human war

Also gives you mutant 'chaos' marines:

Perhaps they're just mindless berserkers, or maybe this mutation gives them back some sentience so they really are rebel chaos marines hiding at the borders of humanity

To make any functional role-playing setting out of 40k you need to cut down on the "mindless berserkers" by about 99%. The 40k setting evaporates on contact with air and every product they've ever made about it where talking is supposed to be involved struggles massively with that. So your Chaos space marines should be much more like ADAM than Kharn


Scary mutants who talk in a deep voice about "The end of the human age" are functional villains in a way that an army of mindless berserkers who somehow have transportation and supply lines isn't. Now don't get me wrong I totally support them having t-virus'd monstrosities that are their equivalent of war animals. But the whole faction can't be that. They should be Rutger Hauer from Bladerunner. Individually scary and better than you but with small enough numbers that they have to operate on the outskirts of society as a chaos element. They're terrorists and one day they want to be a planet conquering force but they don't have the numbers yet.

I really like all the terraforming stuff. For Mercury I like the idea of a roving mining city but that's just one cool thing. It also has "Twin cities" built on opposite sides of the planet where the bustling New York city types live. Every 30 days you take an 8 hour bullet train to the opposite city. When the cities go dark they become like a tourist town in the off season. Lots of locals and poor working class folks hunkering down for the 30 day "off season" before the place bustles again for another month. Honestly having every surface city work like Alaska for the working class is cool. Where there's hard divisions between winter work and summer work and every summer you prepare for winter and vice versa. So you have your solar station job where you make good money and your vent defroster gig that keeps you eating during the dark months.

Venus having cloud city is solid and I really like Neptune being your water-world.

Can you spoiler that map? It's stretching the thread.