[Agemegos]

I have an idea for a campaign, which needs a little kicking into shape.

The idea is that the PCs are [Australian] soldiers on the Western Front in December 1917: exhausted, disillusioned, alienated, and jaded by two and a half years of the industrial butchery of infantry combat in WWI. They are caught in the effect of an experimental weird-science weapon, which tears other men apart, but which fortunately transports them bodily to another world. (Where they arrive in the midst of piles of Flanders mud, pieces of weapons and kit, and body parts of other men who have been only partly caught in the beam.)

In keeping with contemporary tradition (E R Burroughs, especially Master Mind of Mars) the other world is Mars, a desiccating, dying, dusty world, home to a decadent culture. I'm torn between using Schiaparelli's map and laying a bit of water on a modern relief map of Mars. Likewise in keeping with tradition, I intend to make the Martians comfortably human enough for romantic motivations &c.

The idea is to make the culture of Mars pretty violent, but romantically, dashingly, heroically so—in contrast with the ghastly impersonal violence of trench warfare. The PCs will get to swash their bucklers, and to feel as they do so that they are fighting bad men who deserve to die. Do I need an establishing sequence in France to make the contrast?

Decadent Mars is basically sword and sandal, with a strong dash of sensawunda provided by relict TL10 or TL11 bits and pieces, both High Tech and Bio-Tech. This will be indistinguishable from magic at the start of the campaign, but I want the PCs gradually drawn in to the plots and intrigues of a nearly-immortal caste of engineers who, though they no long have access to the industrial base to use the stuff, at least know what it does, and can use it effectively, even repair it using cannibalised parts.

Relict tech, especially lethal weapons, is rare enough that the PC's SMLEs, Webleys, and Mills bombs will give them an advantage in early encounters. But running out of ammunition will force them to take on local weapons and kit, and then they will gradually accumulate heroic outfits of relict stuff. Bio-tech relics, at least such of them as are self-reproducing, will be more common than hard tech ones, but less inclined to be weapons. There will certainly be improbably-useful plants: battery bushes and gobsmackingly useful medicinal berries.

Initially the PCs won't speak [ the | any ] Martian language. I am thinking of putting them in circumstances that will force a long overland march with a Martian or party of Martians, perhaps fleeing pursuit along a canal choked with desert sand, with the spires of lost cities sticking up out of it. Give them a few weeks to pick up enough lingo to get by. I'm thinking that the PCs might get placed to rescue a beautiful Engineer from the machinations of his or her enemies without realising what is going on, and that he or she might guide them and accept their escort in a flight of a thousand miles or so: teaching them Language and showing them survival tricks unknown even to most Martians. That should get them to arrive on the littoral plains with enough lingo to get by.

Can I run a campaign in which the PCs are the allies and champions of an NPC wizard who is striving to regain her throne? Or won't players cope with playing the second fiddle? Can I make ally/champion a first-string position without making the wizard unattractively weak?

What relict bio-tech ought to be available? What ultra-tech?