Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by (E)

Play the required insanity for that level of delusional as part of the setting. Add in more more illogical and even completely incompatible features. When the players notice, stress that it is normal and logical. Turn the situation around so the characters sanity is in question not the world.

In other words it's not a Bug it's a feature.

Edit
And it's not just vampires it's everything from horror literature. Carnivorous slugs, Frankenstein's monster, Jason Vorhese, the thing, John Carpenter's Mouth of Madness and so on

It would make me want to kidnap a native and expose them to another reality just to see if the delusional mindset is innate to the denizens or not.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

In Nightlife, vampires could and did feed on other monsters.

It really depends on how human in mind vampires are. Demon infested corpses wouldn't care about such trappings of life the way the tragic cursed blood drinkers of some more modern myths would.

[PTTG]

In this very early worldline, time passes at 1/100th homeline speed, but only on Earth. Earth is uninhabitably bathed in 100-fold magnified sunlight.

The strange thing is, the surface structures suggest that the date is 1945. Clearly something has "slowed" earth, and nobody knows what.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

It would make me want to kidnap a native and expose them to another reality just to see if the delusional mindset is innate to the denizens or not.

It's less like a delusional mindset and more like an instinctive impulse to not tell anyone unless you know they already know and to hide the evidence as best you can.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

It's less like a delusional mindset and more like an instinctive impulse to not tell anyone unless you know they already know and to hide the evidence as best you can.

Don't tell anyone about the wolf eating all the sheep and people that strangely no one misses, because you're afraid they might call you names?
That's not any better.
It's pretty much the insane self destructive sadistic idiocy required for zombie shows. People are selfish, but not that much and not that way unless completely unhinged.
But as a genre convention it's entertaining, until and unless outsiders come in and lampshade the whole farce. Like someone wandering into a musical and wondering why the heck everyone just breaks out into choreographed dance and song at random times.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by PTTG

In this very early worldline, time passes at 1/100th homeline speed, but only on Earth. Earth is uninhabitably bathed in 100-fold magnified sunlight.

The strange thing is, the surface structures suggest that the date is 1945. Clearly something has "slowed" earth, and nobody knows what.

That would turn the surface into magma, so I don't see how homeline probes would have survived long enough to detect much of anything. It would probably get written off as a non-viable reality or a "Vanish".

[PTTG]

Capgrass:

In 1977, a psionic static field appeared encompassing the Earth. The field disrupts the human ability to recognize individuals. Faces, names, and identity are simply disconnected; A
native looking at someone else simply sees a stranger. In effect, each person has Zeroed(Psionic), with all the implications. Long-term, everyone might be said to appear identical and generic except for the most broad statements of phenotype.

Society began to collapse immediately. Even parents can only presume that a child is their own by estimating age and apparent relation, and government officials could be impersonated with trivial ease. Within three days, an individual was gunned down while claiming to be the President, and the President was never conclusively identified thereafter, but noone can say for sure that the President was slain.

It's 1995 and a generation has passed never knowing their parents. Names are fading, and people are mainly known by their skills or abilities. Population has fallen dramatically, in part because disease is rising while the organization needed to inoculate and treat people has broken down. Food distribution is functioning only slightly better.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by PTTG

It's 1995 and a generation has passed never knowing their parents. Names are fading, and people are mainly known by their skills or abilities. Population has fallen dramatically, in part because disease is rising while the organization needed to inoculate and treat people has broken down. Food distribution is functioning only slightly better.

I think you have the primary effects backwards. Commercial stuff actually probably works reasonably well with nobody recognizing each other, verification is already mostly through having the right documents - invoice numbers, bank account numbers, denominations on the cash.... Tokens are also pretty common - the guy with the keys is the one authorized to take stuff out of here to sell it to someone else. It's the interpersonal stuff that is hit hardest - there may not *be* much of a generation growing up not knowing their parents if nobody recognizes their spouses or lovers.

I don't see how you can recognize people by skills if you can't recall which people have what skills. On the other hand, names still seem perfectly workable, everyone just needs a nametag. Eventually you want a state issued somewhat difficult to forge nametag I suppose, but really pieces of tape are probably good enough to keep society from collapsing.

[Flyndaran]

Capgras delusion is much worse than mere face/voice blindness. It's a short circuit where the brain rationalizes the lack of emotional identification of technically correct appearances with some internally consistent but insane explanation from fairy dopplegangers to aliens to spies.

[Flyndaran]

Capgras delusion is an interesting direction to go though.

Some infectious agent that causes massive numbers of otherwise ultra rare specific delusions could be its own designation of hell worlds.

Cotard delusion infested worlds where one completely believes themselves to be dead or not even exist could be a very weird tragic "zombie" parallel.