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The
Mutant Epoch Setting
While a game
master could take whatever sections of the TME rules and
create his or her own setting, at any time in the future,
The Mutant Epoch, as published, takes place in the mid 27th
Century a couple of hundred years after the collapse of the
former civilizations. It is a new dark ages for humanity,
where might is often right, where nature has become twisted
by ancient human science and accelerated evolution, where
people live in small, often remote communities, fearful of
strangers and growing eccentric in their isolation. It is a
time when only a few hard pressed townships have formed
factions, often in response to some external threat, where
communities have taken on a more or less feudal system,
employing technology more reminiscent of medieval Europe,
mixed with the highly prized relics left behind by the
ancients. In places, digger towns have emerged on the edge
of great ruined cities of the oldsters, where daily
expeditions by excavators pierce the dangerous junk heaps in
search of wondrous treasures, as well as answers as to how
and why the civilization of the old ones ended.
Beyond the relative safely of the
scattered towns, are the vast wilds and shallow seas, broad
wastelands where ancient battles took place, impenetrable
woodlands, stinking swamps, badlands and great dune wastes.
All of these areas are littered with the remains of dead
cities and installations, and rusted machines of war, often
buried under meters of ash or compacted mud and rock, but at
other times, protruding kilometers into the sky in vast
urban ruinscapes. Everywhere, newly evolved plants and
animals, which seem as hostile and merciless as the
landscape, wait to devour the unwary, the slow or the weak,
even as emerging clans of fierce sub-humans and man-killing
machines claim their own domains, and plot annihilation of
the old kind, the humans, and their off-shoots.
The creatures found in the Hub Rules
and the Mutant Bestiary One book, are basically of
North American descent, when based on any present day
animals at all. Furthermore, the fiction and published
regional settings take place in south western Untied States,
with the Crossroads Region located directly over a
portion of greater Las Angeles.
The
name of the game being The Mutant Epoch implies much
about the setting itself, being ‘an age of the mutants’.
While mutants certainly do play a huge role in the setting,
a variety of other astounding beings and factors are also
present, including synthetic humans, robots, cyborgs,
digital beings, sub-humans, dimensional entities and
portals, as well as plenty of unmutated peoples and species.
In addition, there are pockets of the old culture still
surviving, often in pure stock dominated fortresses or
territories, including the numerous orbital colonies which
survived the devastations and wars of old. These hold over
complexes are often very advanced, and while their resources
are few and their enemies many, they do manage to produce
most of the synthetic humans and cyborgs found in the
current age, as well as limited advanced weaponry and
robotics. The mecha, or mechanicals, are another element
which greatly affects the new reality, whose androids and
robot armies, often serving a mother computer in a hive-like
structure, continue their war of extermination against their
former human masters.
To
sum up, the world of The Mutant Epoch would hardly be
recognizable to present day people, and is a unique era in
human history, an era where pure stock humans no longer hold
the reigns of power; for in this new world there are now
more mutant life forms than non-mutants. This is an age
where new cultures rise upon the ruins of the old and hold
out corporate strongholds struggle against mecha and mutant
factions. It is also a time when unlikely heroes rise up and
make a stand against the onslaught of barbarian marauders,
blood thirsty beasts, humanoid raiders, the mecha hives and
newly emerging, hostile powers. For many intelligent beings,
especially mutant humans, it is the beginning of the
greatest age in history, when the former dominance of the
pure stocks has faded, and the opportunity to seize power
and territory is within reach of the fit, the brave, and the
adventurous. “No guts, no glory” shout the former slave
races, as they make their forays into the ruins to claim
their inheritance from careless, arrogant forefathers.
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