newnumber6 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
newnumber6) wrote2006-05-12 06:36 pm
newnumber6) wrote2006-05-12 06:36 pm
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The XET Diaries, Part 2
Okay, I think it’s about time to do another edition of the XET Diaries. Last time I talked about the drug plot. Well, in the back of my mind I had a second plot that would spring off that and lead into a wacky, time-travel adventure. In this edition, I’ll be tackling that, as well as discussing some of the ideas we had for the Ultimates. So, let’s get started behind the cut.
The Ultimate Time Travel Road Trip! aka Part 2 of the Drug Plot
Okay, it’s a pretty silly idea all in all, but I really liked it.
One of the drugs in Delta Green is called Reverb. What it does is it sort of bounces the user’s perceptions backwards and forwards in time very short amounts, so sensations seem to reverberate and cause seems to precede effect, and all that jazz.
Another thing we were going to be playing with is that certain drugs, when combined with Nextacy have… unexpected side effects, and when added to mutant physiology, even stranger ones. One of those would have been reverb. A drug cartel would discover that reverb laced with a tiny amount of nextacy makes the person who gets it into their bloodstream disappear. Typically they become 'unstuck in time' until finally attracting the attention of Something Nasty and getting eaten. It becomes a handy way to get rid of people without leaving any evidence for cops to find.
Some mutants are investigating the resurgence of Nextacy and the growing popularity of Reverb. When some of them get too close, they get caught by the drug lords who inject them with the cocktail… but because they’re mutants, it has a slightly altered effect. They bounce back and forth between two time periods (maybe more, but most of the action would take place in two). One of them is the present, but they’re not there very often at all. The other… 1969.
Yes, for the most part, the group in this plot is stuck in the 60s, the summer of love. But they still have occasional, intermittent jaunts back to the present, where they can, for short periods, interact with the present and let them know what’s going on. The people in the present do analysis and learn that LSD will probably neutralize the reverb in their systems that’s causing them to hop in time, and will stabilize them. The problem is, they have to take it in the past to be pushed back in the present.
Where are they going to get LSD in 1969? Well, as we all know from TV and movies, anytime anybody time travels back to 1969, it’s absolutely mandatory for them to visit Woodstock. So, that’s what happens. The group gets a hippie van and makes it all the way to Woodstock to score some acid, getting in wacky hijinx on the way (maybe meeting younger versions of characters like Wolverine or Professor X, or parents or such). Eventually they take the acid and get back to the present. I was thinking of tying in the whole ‘Do not take the brown acid’ story in with it, saying that in XET it was because people who took the brown acid (that is, the PCs) simply disappeared. Eventually they’d get back and all would be well, it’d just be a fun random adventure. Aside from completing Hastur stuff and the Dreamlands plots (Which will be in future posts), this is probably the biggest unstarted plot I wanted to do but never got around to.
Of course, as is often the case, I had in my head this happening to the Columbia Branch, but in actual practice it would have been open to almost any group who wanted to get in on it... But there would be a bitchin' hippie van in the plot somewhere no matter who was involved! ;)
Backwards time murder
Which reminds me of another… not so much a plot, but a scene. It probably would have to happen right at the beginning of Reverb becoming known in NYC, perhaps to set up the idea of time manipulation.
Basically, someone would hear a commotion, a screaming, but very strange. They’d investigate, and see a body, nearly torn apart, but still alive. Almost certainly dying. The person only seems to speak in gibberish, and has some strange reactions to events. Gradually it’s noticed that he’s getting better, not worse. Blood’s actually running up into him
The scene would end with hearing another commotion, another guy screaming, and when they go out they see it’s the same guy, and he’s being chased by something shadowy, but perfectly healthy. Dying guy suddenly lurches to his feet and Running-guy runs into him just at the second they’re both pounced by the weird something, and all of them disappear forever.
What happened? He’s a reverb addict and was being chased by a Hound of Tindalos, a creature that prowls the angles of time (Mankind is descended from the curves. Don’t worry, it’s not supposed to make sense). Anyway, reverb users drive the Hounds crazy. Crazier. At least if they’re nearby, but that’s extremely rare since Hounds usually hang out millions of years in the past. Anyway, it caught up with him and pounced him so hard it started him travelling backwards in time from when he was hit, and then left because people (the people who found him) were there and it preferred to work in private. It came back for them before they arrived, which from Dying Guy’s perspective was them leaving him to die.
I just thought it’d be a cool scene to do at some point.
Oh, and since we’re talking about Time Travel, a long long time ago XET staff was talking about, down the line, a Time Travel plot where the characters meet Merlin (by a different name of course, the historical one that I can’t remember right now) and also possibly working in The Black Knight. Can’t remember any of the specifics and it wasn’t my plot anyway,.
One last word on Time Travel plots. Before XET died the first time we had Swarm's plot where his mind was swapped and he was back in the distant past with the Yithians. One scene we never got to do that I really wanted to was a 'Yithian Abductee Group Therapy' scene, where people from different points in history and different planets, who were trapped in the bodies of Yithians that had mind-swapped with them, were allowed to meet each other (because, aside from abducting people's minds and replacing them for years at a time, the Yithians were rather nice fellows, as mythos entities go). Any player would have been welcome to NPC one of these people, picking up almost any type of role they wanted, and just had fun talking.
On to the Ultimates...
Ultimates Plots
We never really got the Ultimates off the ground, but there were a few plots lurking there. Aside from the Ultron one (which again, not my plot so I won’t go too in-depth), there was an idea that the MLF attacks that kicked off XET 2.0 were actually a diversion – the MLF leadership used the distraction to infiltrate the Triskelion and plant certain backdoors. We weren’t sure what it was going to lead to, but it was there.
Anyway, in terms of XET’s lore, Ultimates had an interesting status, since it was government, but Nick Fury himself was a Delta Green agent, as was Captain America (sorta). But MJ-12 also had a serious hands in the Ultimates behind the scenes, so Fury had to do a balancing act. He'd use the Ultimates to strike out at big Mythosy threats when he could, but he also had to be answerable and subject to political decisions. For example, the idea of making the Ultimates flashy-costumed superhero characters was not to his liking, it was a move that was decided would be good for PR.
We originally had an idea of having a number of new, non-canon characters be the first wave of Ultimates – and have most of them die in a mission against one of these threats, to show how dangerous they could be (since in a consent based game deaths are low, although XET had its share of good ones).
Traditional Ultimates/Avengers plots that might have cropped up include a version of the Skrulls that are perhaps based more on the Serpent People (who change shape using the Consume Likeness spell) than aliens. Taking down the Hulk might also have been in play at some point.
We had an idea for Rogue joining the Ultimates under the condition of amnesty for her part in the 'permanently absorbing Monet' affair, and their help with reversing the process, although secretly being a spy for the Brotherhood at the same time.
There was the country overthrown by a machine-controlling mutant and eventually becoming a mutant-run states. We never really dealt with it, but one of the original plans was that the country being liberated with the help of the Ultimates, and a local hero with the last name Genosh. Yes, it’s obvious, but once it was liberated, it would become violently anti-mutant and take the name Genosha (and then maybe, if we were still around, Magneto might conquer it years down the line and make it a mutant homeland). Plus a lot of fun in general with the Ultimates leading a strike on a team of powerful mutants.
Other idly-considered plots involved the Ultimates going up against the ‘national superhero teams’ of other countries. These would be populated from various sources, including New Universe which had a heck of a lot of cool foreign characters. In particular, I wanted to see the Ultimates go up against Rodstvow. Rodstvow (Russian for Kinship) was a major villain in the later half of the Psi-Force series... he was a Russian Paranormal... now that I think about it he was almost like Jono (although conceived at least 5 years before hand), except the deadly biokinetic furnace (they didn’t use that term specifically) could only be contained by a special plastic skin provided over the areas his power burned away (which was mostly his eyes and an arm I think). Maybe in XET they’d both be descendants of an Azathoth cultist named En Sabah Nur. ;) Anyway, like in the comics, Rodstvow’s powers drove him crazy leading him to start an international incident and be a huge threat. Omega Red could also potentially be involved somewhere (though I always thought him being a long-forgotten outgrowth of Stalin’s experiments with ghouls… still could be worked in together). Other canon plots might have been Alpha Flight trying to recruit Wolverine under the theory that he’s a Canadian citizen, and the Alpha Flight plot they had where the Jade Dragon, a chinese paranormal, attempted to defect.
The Ultimates also would have been one of the vehicles through which to bring in parts of the wider Marvel universe... there was an idea to start having non-mutant supervillains to start appearing due either to direct Ultimate involvement or the 'superpowered arms race' leaking out into private thugs and organized crime. This could get the Kingpin on the scene.
Some Ultimates character concepts
I don’t recall if we ever made it explicit in canon (and to be fair, this was mostly Ubbo’s work, but I think it was really cool and I think I did help out in the ‘bouncing ideas around’ stage), so I’ll share it. Captain America was a Majestic 12 project. Specifically, Steve Rogers was a WWII vet who survived the war and led a normal life afterwards. Initially idealistic (and even connected to Delta Green) he eventually became part of the Majestic 12 conspiracy. As he was old and dying, he was approached to be a test subject in a project that would transfer his mind into a new, cloned, young, perfect body. He agreed. Unfortunately, what nobody realized was that the process had a flaw... it wiped his memories up until the age of his newly generated body. So he emerged, in the 21st century, with the memories of a man who just finished WWII. He was back to being the idealistic soldier ready to fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Because he had friends still in the project, they more or less let him go, created a new backstory for him and he was prepped for the Ultimates. Sweet way, IMHO, to get the 'man out of time' aspect to Cap when XET’s history explicitly rules out any 'super soldier formula' or a public hero.
I had a bad idea for working the Spider-Man Gwen Stacy/Mary Jane love triangle in a really bastardized way into the game. Since in a game like that, supporting characters are really hard to come by (nobody wants to play Mary Jane), the idea was that Black Widow, in order to 'sell' her to the public, had a doctored up All-American backstory… under the name Mary Jane Watson. She and Peter might get to dating eventually but would start out allies and maybe eventually friends, with him helping her on some Russian missions. And then, down the line, he starts seeing someone, a lovely blonde girl named Gwen Stacy. Except Miss Stacy is really a Russian Agent trying to eliminate the original Black Widow (a defector), and her real name is Yelena Belova, also known (in normal continuity) as Black Widow II. Giving Spidey's lovelife a slightly more Alias twist. It would have been an awful idea and yet IMHO have some strange coolness factor to it, but the Black Widow player we had lined up did not continue.
Speaking of Spidey, of course the Symbiote would eventually have come into play, probably as something mythosy uncovered when the Ultimates raid a 'terrorist lab' designed to manufacture supersoldiers and exploit mutant science. In reality it was a mythos entity they were simply studying, and it attaches itself to him and all seems to go great at first, but then of course something like the traditional Venom story commences. (This might have been one of the things the MLF sabotage was involved in, that they broke in the first time to make it easier to break in later, and in one of the later ones they summoned something mythosy for the costume)
I would have liked to see the Giant Man formula have eventually been derived from the blood of the MLF member Tower (captured in our re-opening scene).
Thor was always the Ultimates member that I felt was hard to work into XET. If he was just a mutant, it doesn’t seem as interesting. If he had a hypertech hammer that CONTROLLED THE WEATHER, it’s hard to sell him to the public. He could be sold as a mutant or something and eventually come to believe that he was a God and go crazy and the Ultimates have to cover up his madness to the public. But I did have another idea that I never really shared widely (I think), because it was more of an idle fancy than an idea. Replace Thor on the team with another god. Perhaps Loki, but also perhaps something like Hercules… someone who could have a plausible origin in XET's science (super strength might not be all that out of the question for a process you could give to a normal human, given advances in XET tech, whereas a weather controlling hammer is not). So he might still go through the whole 'going crazy and thinking he’s actually a God' plot of Thor. Ares is another possibility (he could go mad and be a villain). Another possibility is not have a god on the team, but have a Norse Mythological figure, and just have Valkyrie.
There was of course the old idea of Tony Stark as the first Sentinel, either that being his initial code name or his design being used in later Sentinel Squadrons… although rather than giant robots they’d probably be battlesuits at first.
In the next XET Diaries post, Secrets of XET’s past! Plus, what do you get when you cross a nazi with a cannibal? And some of the longer term ongoing plots and what was going on behind them…
The Ultimate Time Travel Road Trip! aka Part 2 of the Drug Plot
Okay, it’s a pretty silly idea all in all, but I really liked it.
One of the drugs in Delta Green is called Reverb. What it does is it sort of bounces the user’s perceptions backwards and forwards in time very short amounts, so sensations seem to reverberate and cause seems to precede effect, and all that jazz.
Another thing we were going to be playing with is that certain drugs, when combined with Nextacy have… unexpected side effects, and when added to mutant physiology, even stranger ones. One of those would have been reverb. A drug cartel would discover that reverb laced with a tiny amount of nextacy makes the person who gets it into their bloodstream disappear. Typically they become 'unstuck in time' until finally attracting the attention of Something Nasty and getting eaten. It becomes a handy way to get rid of people without leaving any evidence for cops to find.
Some mutants are investigating the resurgence of Nextacy and the growing popularity of Reverb. When some of them get too close, they get caught by the drug lords who inject them with the cocktail… but because they’re mutants, it has a slightly altered effect. They bounce back and forth between two time periods (maybe more, but most of the action would take place in two). One of them is the present, but they’re not there very often at all. The other… 1969.
Yes, for the most part, the group in this plot is stuck in the 60s, the summer of love. But they still have occasional, intermittent jaunts back to the present, where they can, for short periods, interact with the present and let them know what’s going on. The people in the present do analysis and learn that LSD will probably neutralize the reverb in their systems that’s causing them to hop in time, and will stabilize them. The problem is, they have to take it in the past to be pushed back in the present.
Where are they going to get LSD in 1969? Well, as we all know from TV and movies, anytime anybody time travels back to 1969, it’s absolutely mandatory for them to visit Woodstock. So, that’s what happens. The group gets a hippie van and makes it all the way to Woodstock to score some acid, getting in wacky hijinx on the way (maybe meeting younger versions of characters like Wolverine or Professor X, or parents or such). Eventually they take the acid and get back to the present. I was thinking of tying in the whole ‘Do not take the brown acid’ story in with it, saying that in XET it was because people who took the brown acid (that is, the PCs) simply disappeared. Eventually they’d get back and all would be well, it’d just be a fun random adventure. Aside from completing Hastur stuff and the Dreamlands plots (Which will be in future posts), this is probably the biggest unstarted plot I wanted to do but never got around to.
Of course, as is often the case, I had in my head this happening to the Columbia Branch, but in actual practice it would have been open to almost any group who wanted to get in on it... But there would be a bitchin' hippie van in the plot somewhere no matter who was involved! ;)
Backwards time murder
Which reminds me of another… not so much a plot, but a scene. It probably would have to happen right at the beginning of Reverb becoming known in NYC, perhaps to set up the idea of time manipulation.
Basically, someone would hear a commotion, a screaming, but very strange. They’d investigate, and see a body, nearly torn apart, but still alive. Almost certainly dying. The person only seems to speak in gibberish, and has some strange reactions to events. Gradually it’s noticed that he’s getting better, not worse. Blood’s actually running up into him
The scene would end with hearing another commotion, another guy screaming, and when they go out they see it’s the same guy, and he’s being chased by something shadowy, but perfectly healthy. Dying guy suddenly lurches to his feet and Running-guy runs into him just at the second they’re both pounced by the weird something, and all of them disappear forever.
What happened? He’s a reverb addict and was being chased by a Hound of Tindalos, a creature that prowls the angles of time (Mankind is descended from the curves. Don’t worry, it’s not supposed to make sense). Anyway, reverb users drive the Hounds crazy. Crazier. At least if they’re nearby, but that’s extremely rare since Hounds usually hang out millions of years in the past. Anyway, it caught up with him and pounced him so hard it started him travelling backwards in time from when he was hit, and then left because people (the people who found him) were there and it preferred to work in private. It came back for them before they arrived, which from Dying Guy’s perspective was them leaving him to die.
I just thought it’d be a cool scene to do at some point.
Oh, and since we’re talking about Time Travel, a long long time ago XET staff was talking about, down the line, a Time Travel plot where the characters meet Merlin (by a different name of course, the historical one that I can’t remember right now) and also possibly working in The Black Knight. Can’t remember any of the specifics and it wasn’t my plot anyway,.
One last word on Time Travel plots. Before XET died the first time we had Swarm's plot where his mind was swapped and he was back in the distant past with the Yithians. One scene we never got to do that I really wanted to was a 'Yithian Abductee Group Therapy' scene, where people from different points in history and different planets, who were trapped in the bodies of Yithians that had mind-swapped with them, were allowed to meet each other (because, aside from abducting people's minds and replacing them for years at a time, the Yithians were rather nice fellows, as mythos entities go). Any player would have been welcome to NPC one of these people, picking up almost any type of role they wanted, and just had fun talking.
On to the Ultimates...
Ultimates Plots
We never really got the Ultimates off the ground, but there were a few plots lurking there. Aside from the Ultron one (which again, not my plot so I won’t go too in-depth), there was an idea that the MLF attacks that kicked off XET 2.0 were actually a diversion – the MLF leadership used the distraction to infiltrate the Triskelion and plant certain backdoors. We weren’t sure what it was going to lead to, but it was there.
Anyway, in terms of XET’s lore, Ultimates had an interesting status, since it was government, but Nick Fury himself was a Delta Green agent, as was Captain America (sorta). But MJ-12 also had a serious hands in the Ultimates behind the scenes, so Fury had to do a balancing act. He'd use the Ultimates to strike out at big Mythosy threats when he could, but he also had to be answerable and subject to political decisions. For example, the idea of making the Ultimates flashy-costumed superhero characters was not to his liking, it was a move that was decided would be good for PR.
We originally had an idea of having a number of new, non-canon characters be the first wave of Ultimates – and have most of them die in a mission against one of these threats, to show how dangerous they could be (since in a consent based game deaths are low, although XET had its share of good ones).
Traditional Ultimates/Avengers plots that might have cropped up include a version of the Skrulls that are perhaps based more on the Serpent People (who change shape using the Consume Likeness spell) than aliens. Taking down the Hulk might also have been in play at some point.
We had an idea for Rogue joining the Ultimates under the condition of amnesty for her part in the 'permanently absorbing Monet' affair, and their help with reversing the process, although secretly being a spy for the Brotherhood at the same time.
There was the country overthrown by a machine-controlling mutant and eventually becoming a mutant-run states. We never really dealt with it, but one of the original plans was that the country being liberated with the help of the Ultimates, and a local hero with the last name Genosh. Yes, it’s obvious, but once it was liberated, it would become violently anti-mutant and take the name Genosha (and then maybe, if we were still around, Magneto might conquer it years down the line and make it a mutant homeland). Plus a lot of fun in general with the Ultimates leading a strike on a team of powerful mutants.
Other idly-considered plots involved the Ultimates going up against the ‘national superhero teams’ of other countries. These would be populated from various sources, including New Universe which had a heck of a lot of cool foreign characters. In particular, I wanted to see the Ultimates go up against Rodstvow. Rodstvow (Russian for Kinship) was a major villain in the later half of the Psi-Force series... he was a Russian Paranormal... now that I think about it he was almost like Jono (although conceived at least 5 years before hand), except the deadly biokinetic furnace (they didn’t use that term specifically) could only be contained by a special plastic skin provided over the areas his power burned away (which was mostly his eyes and an arm I think). Maybe in XET they’d both be descendants of an Azathoth cultist named En Sabah Nur. ;) Anyway, like in the comics, Rodstvow’s powers drove him crazy leading him to start an international incident and be a huge threat. Omega Red could also potentially be involved somewhere (though I always thought him being a long-forgotten outgrowth of Stalin’s experiments with ghouls… still could be worked in together). Other canon plots might have been Alpha Flight trying to recruit Wolverine under the theory that he’s a Canadian citizen, and the Alpha Flight plot they had where the Jade Dragon, a chinese paranormal, attempted to defect.
The Ultimates also would have been one of the vehicles through which to bring in parts of the wider Marvel universe... there was an idea to start having non-mutant supervillains to start appearing due either to direct Ultimate involvement or the 'superpowered arms race' leaking out into private thugs and organized crime. This could get the Kingpin on the scene.
Some Ultimates character concepts
I don’t recall if we ever made it explicit in canon (and to be fair, this was mostly Ubbo’s work, but I think it was really cool and I think I did help out in the ‘bouncing ideas around’ stage), so I’ll share it. Captain America was a Majestic 12 project. Specifically, Steve Rogers was a WWII vet who survived the war and led a normal life afterwards. Initially idealistic (and even connected to Delta Green) he eventually became part of the Majestic 12 conspiracy. As he was old and dying, he was approached to be a test subject in a project that would transfer his mind into a new, cloned, young, perfect body. He agreed. Unfortunately, what nobody realized was that the process had a flaw... it wiped his memories up until the age of his newly generated body. So he emerged, in the 21st century, with the memories of a man who just finished WWII. He was back to being the idealistic soldier ready to fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Because he had friends still in the project, they more or less let him go, created a new backstory for him and he was prepped for the Ultimates. Sweet way, IMHO, to get the 'man out of time' aspect to Cap when XET’s history explicitly rules out any 'super soldier formula' or a public hero.
I had a bad idea for working the Spider-Man Gwen Stacy/Mary Jane love triangle in a really bastardized way into the game. Since in a game like that, supporting characters are really hard to come by (nobody wants to play Mary Jane), the idea was that Black Widow, in order to 'sell' her to the public, had a doctored up All-American backstory… under the name Mary Jane Watson. She and Peter might get to dating eventually but would start out allies and maybe eventually friends, with him helping her on some Russian missions. And then, down the line, he starts seeing someone, a lovely blonde girl named Gwen Stacy. Except Miss Stacy is really a Russian Agent trying to eliminate the original Black Widow (a defector), and her real name is Yelena Belova, also known (in normal continuity) as Black Widow II. Giving Spidey's lovelife a slightly more Alias twist. It would have been an awful idea and yet IMHO have some strange coolness factor to it, but the Black Widow player we had lined up did not continue.
Speaking of Spidey, of course the Symbiote would eventually have come into play, probably as something mythosy uncovered when the Ultimates raid a 'terrorist lab' designed to manufacture supersoldiers and exploit mutant science. In reality it was a mythos entity they were simply studying, and it attaches itself to him and all seems to go great at first, but then of course something like the traditional Venom story commences. (This might have been one of the things the MLF sabotage was involved in, that they broke in the first time to make it easier to break in later, and in one of the later ones they summoned something mythosy for the costume)
I would have liked to see the Giant Man formula have eventually been derived from the blood of the MLF member Tower (captured in our re-opening scene).
Thor was always the Ultimates member that I felt was hard to work into XET. If he was just a mutant, it doesn’t seem as interesting. If he had a hypertech hammer that CONTROLLED THE WEATHER, it’s hard to sell him to the public. He could be sold as a mutant or something and eventually come to believe that he was a God and go crazy and the Ultimates have to cover up his madness to the public. But I did have another idea that I never really shared widely (I think), because it was more of an idle fancy than an idea. Replace Thor on the team with another god. Perhaps Loki, but also perhaps something like Hercules… someone who could have a plausible origin in XET's science (super strength might not be all that out of the question for a process you could give to a normal human, given advances in XET tech, whereas a weather controlling hammer is not). So he might still go through the whole 'going crazy and thinking he’s actually a God' plot of Thor. Ares is another possibility (he could go mad and be a villain). Another possibility is not have a god on the team, but have a Norse Mythological figure, and just have Valkyrie.
There was of course the old idea of Tony Stark as the first Sentinel, either that being his initial code name or his design being used in later Sentinel Squadrons… although rather than giant robots they’d probably be battlesuits at first.
In the next XET Diaries post, Secrets of XET’s past! Plus, what do you get when you cross a nazi with a cannibal? And some of the longer term ongoing plots and what was going on behind them…