My GIN Campaign Setting

Fox · 04-29-2005, 06:16 PM

Apologies if this is the wrong place to post this; I looked around for a more suitable place, really I did.

The place: Santa Cruz, California. If you have ever seen the movie "The Lost Boys", with the vampires, Santa Cruz is the town it was filmed in.

The time: Present day. Actually, as close to real-time as I can get it. I use the Santa Cruz Sentinel Online to get game ideas, sometimes.

The Deal:
Santa Cruz has one of the few Tethers to Novalis left, and enjoyed a long time with no demonic Tethers. A few years ago, Malphas got a tether nearby. But that was my old campaign, and none of that matters any more.

An "etheractive" drug whose street name is Out is running rampant in the youth culture in Santa Cruz. Originally created by servitors of Blandine, the good form of Out ("White Out", and I apologize profusely for that and all upcoming puns) let humans travel to the Ethereal plane between dreamscapes. But everything good can be perverted, and so when Beleth got a sample, she and Vapula worked to corrupt it. The bad form of Out ("Black Out") lets humans both dream lucidly and share dreamscapes with each other. The doesn't sound so bad, but imagine what a group of violent, or horny, teenagers would dream up if they could share dreamscapes...

What the users of (Black) Out don't realize is that its widespread abuse is slowly eroding the barrier between the Corporeal and Ethereal Planes. Every once in a while, a human on Out gets physically pulled into the ethereal plane... and every so often, an Ethereal being wanders too close to a weakened border and gets pulled into the Corporeal.

In this setting, anyone who is known by a lot of humans gets an ethereal "presence" on the Ethereal Plane. There's an Ethereal George Bush who is an amalgam of popular perception of the Corporeal George Bush, for instance, and the two are very difficult to tell apart. In one game I ran, it was discovered that the "real" Boy George had died in 1994, and that the one that had a comeback a few years ago was actually his Ethereal counterpart who found a way to come to, and stay in, the Corporeal Plane.

There's a twist to this. Lots of television characters become actual Ethereal entities this way, even though they are fictional. The main NPC who interacts with the PCs is Fox Mulder. It's not David Duchovny playing a character named Fox Mulder, it's the collective-consciouness-created Etheral Fox Mulder. He is more Fox Mulder than Duchovny is.

The job of the PCs, who are all Celestially aware, is to find out where these Corporeal/Ethereal breaches occur, and undo the damage caused by them. Sometimes this means doing the opposite of what you would think; in the Boy George game, for instance, some clueless Ethereals came through to pull the Ethereal Boy George back, and it was up to the PCs to make sure that he stayed here!

You might think that Fox works for some Celestial, but he doesn't. (Here's where it takes a 180 from being canon.) Since the big purge of the Pagan Gods all those years ago, they have been licking their wounds and recovering. Most of them have joined forces and want to eventually get so powerful that they can make a mutual non-aggression deal with the Celestials. They don't want to take over; they just want to be left alone. But this barrier erosion is threatening to muck up their plans. What the Pagan Gods want is simple: they want this problem to stay under the radar of the Celestials. The PCs are reactive damage control; there's another group of humans who do the just-say-no thing to Out users. The PCs have met the ringleader of the Pagan Gods and Fox's boss, a muscular little Mediterranean guy with a silver breastplate and a scar that runs from his left ear to his right kidney, but they don't know for sure who it is yet.

This setting is a blast to play in, if I do say so myself. Almost anything can come through the breach, and since the Ethereal plane is so uncharted in the published stuff, there's a lot of room to just go nuts in. I've found GURPS Creatures of the Night to be invaluable.

04-29-2005, 06:16 PM	#1
Fox Join Date: Apr 2005	My GIN Campaign Setting Apologies if this is the wrong place to post this; I looked around for a more suitable place, really I did. The place: Santa Cruz, California. If you have ever seen the movie "The Lost Boys", with the vampires, Santa Cruz is the town it was filmed in. The time: Present day. Actually, as close to real-time as I can get it. I use the Santa Cruz Sentinel Online to get game ideas, sometimes. The Deal: Santa Cruz has one of the few Tethers to Novalis left, and enjoyed a long time with no demonic Tethers. A few years ago, Malphas got a tether nearby. But that was my old campaign, and none of that matters any more. An "etheractive" drug whose street name is Out is running rampant in the youth culture in Santa Cruz. Originally created by servitors of Blandine, the good form of Out ("White Out", and I apologize profusely for that and all upcoming puns) let humans travel to the Ethereal plane between dreamscapes. But everything good can be perverted, and so when Beleth got a sample, she and Vapula worked to corrupt it. The bad form of Out ("Black Out") lets humans both dream lucidly and share dreamscapes with each other. The doesn't sound so bad, but imagine what a group of violent, or horny, teenagers would dream up if they could share dreamscapes... What the users of (Black) Out don't realize is that its widespread abuse is slowly eroding the barrier between the Corporeal and Ethereal Planes. Every once in a while, a human on Out gets physically pulled into the ethereal plane... and every so often, an Ethereal being wanders too close to a weakened border and gets pulled into the Corporeal. In this setting, anyone who is known by a lot of humans gets an ethereal "presence" on the Ethereal Plane. There's an Ethereal George Bush who is an amalgam of popular perception of the Corporeal George Bush, for instance, and the two are very difficult to tell apart. In one game I ran, it was discovered that the "real" Boy George had died in 1994, and that the one that had a comeback a few years ago was actually his Ethereal counterpart who found a way to come to, and stay in, the Corporeal Plane. There's a twist to this. Lots of television characters become actual Ethereal entities this way, even though they are fictional. The main NPC who interacts with the PCs is Fox Mulder. It's not David Duchovny playing a character named Fox Mulder, it's the collective-consciouness-created Etheral Fox Mulder. He is more Fox Mulder than Duchovny is. The job of the PCs, who are all Celestially aware, is to find out where these Corporeal/Ethereal breaches occur, and undo the damage caused by them. Sometimes this means doing the opposite of what you would think; in the Boy George game, for instance, some clueless Ethereals came through to pull the Ethereal Boy George back, and it was up to the PCs to make sure that he stayed here! You might think that Fox works for some Celestial, but he doesn't. (Here's where it takes a 180 from being canon.) Since the big purge of the Pagan Gods all those years ago, they have been licking their wounds and recovering. Most of them have joined forces and want to eventually get so powerful that they can make a mutual non-aggression deal with the Celestials. They don't want to take over; they just want to be left alone. But this barrier erosion is threatening to muck up their plans. What the Pagan Gods want is simple: they want this problem to stay under the radar of the Celestials. The PCs are reactive damage control; there's another group of humans who do the just-say-no thing to Out users. The PCs have met the ringleader of the Pagan Gods and Fox's boss, a muscular little Mediterranean guy with a silver breastplate and a scar that runs from his left ear to his right kidney, but they don't know for sure who it is yet. This setting is a blast to play in, if I do say so myself. Almost anything can come through the breach, and since the Ethereal plane is so uncharted in the published stuff, there's a lot of room to just go nuts in. I've found GURPS Creatures of the Night to be invaluable.