Cordo said:
Something no one mentioned that I have to tip my hat to is the Transhuman Space GURPS setting. It's a wide open hard SF setting with an evocative theme - What is the definition and what does it mean to be *human*? The amount of detail and the thought that has gone into this setting blow me away.
I second that.
Transhuman Space has no faster-than-light-drive, no alien life forms (apart from a few microbes on Europa), and no supernatural powers. Yet it probably has the widest range of possible character types of
any RPG setting. You could play:
- An artificial intelligence.
- An uplifted dog, dolphin, octopus, elephant, or any of the other animals humanity has given the dubious gift of sapience.
- An elder statesman - 140 years old, still healthy thanks to modern medical technology, and fully intending to be around forever.
- A human upgrade - your parents made sure only the very best human genes made it into your DNA.
- One of the myriad variants of parahumans - your parents weren't willing to stop with merely
human DNA. You might be stronger, faster, or even smarter than most ordinary humans - or perhaps you are adapted to a special environment, such as the arctic wastes, the oceans, the surface of Mars, or even Outer Space! And that only begins to scratch the surface - the Hyppolyta parahumans of Margaret Station, for example, can control their pregnancies and produce only female offspring, while rogue elements of the Transpacific Socialist Alliance are rumored to have created parahumans that would make the perfect docile citizens...
- A Ghost - a person whose brain has been cut into tiny slices and recreated as a software personality simulation. This entity is legally considered to be the same person as the original in most jurisdictions, and now, free of the limitations of the flesh, effectively immortal. But is that worth the price? You be the judge...
- A bioroid - an biological android assembled piece by piece in a bio-factory. Created to be slaves or servants, most have been conditioned to enjoy their station in life. But some of the older ones yearn to be free...
And all of these could reasonably be
in the same party!
The author, David Pulver, says it best in his Designer's Notes:
My purpose in writing Transhuman Space was to break away from the prevailing medieval paradigms that dominated past science-fiction roleplaying games and create a modern, hard-science future setting. What are these paradigms? They should be familiar: one or more of them appear in most fantasy and science fiction games:
* that our ancestors (or ancient aliens) knew more than we do.
* that there will be a dark age, global war, or fall of civilization, often with billions of dead, before the new order is rebuilt on its ashes.
* that the future will be worse than the present.
* that changing the human body inevitably corrupts and destroys the mind or soul.
* that there will be one world government on Earth.
* that "machines" can't be the narrative equal to humans, and that humans as they exist today will continue to dominate Earth-descended society.
* that the laws of physics, as we understand them today, will be broken, in order to achieve fast space flight or star travel, psionics, or anti-gravity, and that this is easier and more likely than sapient machines, human genetic manipulation, or developments in psychology and social engineering.
Mission accomplished. And how!
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