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patchwork · 03-14-2021, 02:29 PM

Dynasts

Worldlines are clustered in groups of about fifty; we could call these groups Quanta, but we're gonna call them Fiefs. There's about a dozen known Fiefs, each with a single Dynasty of world-jumpers that wanders the landscape in search of truth and fun. Each Dynasty's Jumper power works slightly differently (different power modifiers). Dynasts capable of crossing between the Fiefs are the exception, not the rule, and tend to handle diplomacy between the Dynasties, all of whom are touchy, possessive sorts, even if most of them only rule a few primitive worlds directly and keep a low profile in high-tech worlds or similar dangerous areas.

And you could play members of these great Dynasties, like a sort of multipolar Amber, but one Fief has gone pear-shaped. On a world much like ours but perhaps with better and cheaper biotech, a Dynast jumps in to traffic and winds up in the emergency room, comatose or nonresponsive. Dr. Paul van Zandt sends blood and tissue samples off for testing, sequencing, etc. Then the patient disappears from her bed, in front of witnesses, on camera, all that. Van Zandt, being both quick thinking, visionary and perhaps of nonconventional morality, dumps the vanished patient's genome into a bank of stem cells to start churning out blood et cetera at his own private expense. When he has eight liters he gets a similarly flexible colleague to do a full blood replacement on himself and makes his first jump.

By selecting people with exemplary fitness profiles, pretty much all of van Zandt's synthetic Jumpers can cross Fief boundaries. A full blood replacement makes one a Jumper for about a year. A liver transplant will make a permanent Jumper who requires antirejection drugs for the rest of their life and all that entails, so Van Zandt strongly prefers the temporary blood route. It also places a time limit on potentially rogue employee-partners. Although one of the first things he did was set up a biotech lab on an isolated worldline so he had a base of operations in case relations with his governments turned poor.

If you want a secure but self-interested operation, Dr. Van Zandt destroyed all the records on Homeline he could reach as soon as his offworld lab was up and running. Adjust local privacy laws and medical practices to suit. If not, one or more Homeline governments have successfully reconstructed the cloned blood and tissue from samples and records. If you want a few, paranoid and unpleasant variations on Van Zandt, have the government jumpers quickly run afoul of the local Dynasty, which blasts Homeline with nukes or something, causing poverty and disorder but definitely not getting all the synthetic jumpers. Players can thus be basically Swagmen under Captain Van Zandt, or agents who lost their home country and are now looking for both revenge and a new home country. Or Dynasts.

03-14-2021, 02:29 PM	#105
patchwork Join Date: Oct 2011	Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds Dynasts Worldlines are clustered in groups of about fifty; we could call these groups Quanta, but we're gonna call them Fiefs. There's about a dozen known Fiefs, each with a single Dynasty of world-jumpers that wanders the landscape in search of truth and fun. Each Dynasty's Jumper power works slightly differently (different power modifiers). Dynasts capable of crossing between the Fiefs are the exception, not the rule, and tend to handle diplomacy between the Dynasties, all of whom are touchy, possessive sorts, even if most of them only rule a few primitive worlds directly and keep a low profile in high-tech worlds or similar dangerous areas. And you could play members of these great Dynasties, like a sort of multipolar Amber, but one Fief has gone pear-shaped. On a world much like ours but perhaps with better and cheaper biotech, a Dynast jumps in to traffic and winds up in the emergency room, comatose or nonresponsive. Dr. Paul van Zandt sends blood and tissue samples off for testing, sequencing, etc. Then the patient disappears from her bed, in front of witnesses, on camera, all that. Van Zandt, being both quick thinking, visionary and perhaps of nonconventional morality, dumps the vanished patient's genome into a bank of stem cells to start churning out blood et cetera at his own private expense. When he has eight liters he gets a similarly flexible colleague to do a full blood replacement on himself and makes his first jump. By selecting people with exemplary fitness profiles, pretty much all of van Zandt's synthetic Jumpers can cross Fief boundaries. A full blood replacement makes one a Jumper for about a year. A liver transplant will make a permanent Jumper who requires antirejection drugs for the rest of their life and all that entails, so Van Zandt strongly prefers the temporary blood route. It also places a time limit on potentially rogue employee-partners. Although one of the first things he did was set up a biotech lab on an isolated worldline so he had a base of operations in case relations with his governments turned poor. If you want a secure but self-interested operation, Dr. Van Zandt destroyed all the records on Homeline he could reach as soon as his offworld lab was up and running. Adjust local privacy laws and medical practices to suit. If not, one or more Homeline governments have successfully reconstructed the cloned blood and tissue from samples and records. If you want a few, paranoid and unpleasant variations on Van Zandt, have the government jumpers quickly run afoul of the local Dynasty, which blasts Homeline with nukes or something, causing poverty and disorder but definitely not getting all the synthetic jumpers. Players can thus be basically Swagmen under Captain Van Zandt, or agents who lost their home country and are now looking for both revenge and a new home country. Or Dynasts.