African traders and soldiers have colonized bits of Europe, plundering art and artifacts from their roaming giant fortress-tanks in the Degenesis equivalent of gunboat diplomacy. Africa was spared most of the meteor damage and climate shock, so it is now dominant. Every region, every city, every new shoot of civilization has a plot idea or two. The world of Degenesis is like Griffin was put through six months of Navy SEAL training and then went on a Saudi-financed cocaine binge. I’m the kind of guy who read page after page of Runequest’s Griffin Mountain (later Griffin Island) in wonder. If you buy it, you’ll be spending a long time with it, equally enthralled, impressed, and frustrated.Ĭhaosium’s Griffin Mountain (1981 Games Workshop edition) and Griffin Island (1986 boxed reprint)
#Weird west rpg adventure hooks full#
The Primal Punk book is a vast sandbox full of plot hooks, apocrypha, and the occasional WTF moment. There’s a fair amount of this sort of thing in Degenesis, so your playgroup may need a touch of “Forget it, Jake, it’s Sixmorevodka” when they get attacked by a Balkan/Balkhan mutant crayfish controlled by a psychonaut and somebody asks why there weren’t any mutant crayfish in Hybrispania.
Every region’s psychonauts wield a few weird abilities, and each bears a mysterious design on a different chakra marking the crater of origin. In the France-equivalent of Franka the psychonauts emit powerful pheromones that brainwash you into obedience and draw and command swarms of insects, kind of like my wife’s Chanel No. Each of the main meteor craters produces a different kind of Psyconaut. Here’s one of the many places it gets weird. A final existential confrontation of homo sapiens vs homo degenesis is building. Some of the spores carrying the primer have been deactivated or neutralized for use in drugs called Burn, because if thousands of years of human history have proved anything, it’s that people will try to get high by any means necessary. Humans who have been taken over by the Primer (the process is generally called Sepsis) eventually become Psychonauts or Abberants, two names for the same deadly syndrome. To make matters worse, the meteors brought with them a spore-like form of life called “Primer” that is radically altering flora, fauna, and us. Maybe the year is a hat tip to Fallout, I dunno, but Earth went through hundreds of years of cloudy hell and now there are a few hints of a Renaissance for a radically altered world. What is this world? Refreshingly, it’s set in Europe and North Africa five hundred years after a 2073 meteor storm changed the face of the world (called the “Eshaton” but I think they meant “Eschaton”).
Page after page of imagery usually reserved for a couple of splash pages in most game books. I’ve never seen a game with this level art throughout. The art alone is worth the purchase of the slipcased two-volume edition of rules Katharsis and worldbook Primal Punk (Retailing at USD “If you have to ask you can’t afford it”). There’s another reason I feel safe recommending this beast. Luckily, John’s editorial standards enjoy a certain amount of flexibility when it comes to old friends, and let ye who have not passed judgement on a game without playing it cast the first stone. The main problem holding me back is that I haven’t played it yet with people, just dinked around testing things. I’ve been meaning to write a review of Degenesis, the doorstop of a post-apocalyptic RPG from the “there has to be a story behind that name for your company” SIXMOREVODKA creative team for a while now.
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