Quote:
Originally Posted by kdtipa
Are you looking for ideas on things the Forerunners might have left behind that might still be active? Or maybe ways the beneficial-plague might have changed?
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"Yes." :)
I've been thinking more on this myself, which has let me expand a bit on the foundational worldbuilding - pinning down the Forerunners' goals more precisely, and how that would have affected their choices in setting up the ecologies. (Ie, the existence of something parallel to an Institutional Review Board to check the ethics of the available approaches, and to suggest more-ethical alternatives when those don't reduce the odds of the project's success, massively narrows down my search-space. :) )
For example, in order to avoid certain runaway effects that would wipe out any keystone species, they'd have wanted to constrain evolution from nudging things too far out of balance; so they could have chosen to reduce the mutation rate by improving every critter's resistance to radiation damage, by making a Cross-Species Plague Proteus Virus that repeatedly applied the "Radiation Damage Repair" genetic-surgery. I'm currently trying to think through the implications of Proteus Viruses that reduce evolution rate by reducing general turnover of individuals by enhancing individual longevity, but I keep running into the fact that human instincts are terrible about how critters respond to odd evolutionary pressures. (Ie, when some scientists predicted that applying a certain pressure would lead to individual critters reducing the number of offspring they had, they found the actual result was to induce cannibalism.)
From a completely different perspective, I am sufficiently amused by the consequences of a particular Proteus Plague going out of control and giving every last critter around a marsupial pouch (Proteus Virus: Skin Transformation Virus: Payload 5) that I'm probably going to have that have happened. :)
I'm also thinking of tweaking Proteus Plagues so that the main carriers are limited to small environments - eg, a small lake apiece - and secondary carriers are non-infectious, so that there'll be at least one site PCs can go to experience the effects of the Metabolic Reset genetic surgery (ie, a fairly literal fountain of youth), and have incentive to go exploring for new sites with as-yet-undiscovered and possibly useful effects.