Campaign Toybox
The Story: So it turns out the Mayans were right about 2012: it is a whole new world and it is an Awakened one. Only the things that Awoke were machines, and instead of becoming sapient, they just started evolving. Anything more complicated than a wall clock gained both an animal intelligence and a desire to adapt itself to fulfilling its natural needs as efficiently as possible. And with so very many fleshy bodies around, humans were #1 on the menu.
Within weeks, cities were desolate. Humans run for the country (although freeways, littered with tribes of deadly Car-nivores, are death-zones) or underground. And it turns out, people were surprisingly good at adapting. After the initial enormously death-tolls, people went back to hunting, gathering and agriculture relatively easily. But there’s more to life than just dusting crops. Inside those abandoned skyscrapers that tower above the savage badlands below are safes full of money, which people still value, and technology that can be “killed” and used. Inside apartments and palatial homes are precious jewels and beautiful decorations worth millions of rat-burgers back home. Of course, to get them, you have to get in and get out alive, which means being something more than just your average person. Welcome to a whole new kind of dungeon delving….
Style and Structure: What continues to fascinate me so much about what could be called the Gygaxian universe is that although it came from a lot of sword and sorcery sources, it really is unlike anything else in existence. Most notably because much of the staples of this fantasy world construct arise from nothing but the needs of a game. So we have creatures that have somehow evolved not only to work on graph paper but also to suit whatever a 1974 GM decided his players might be doing carelessly. Forgot to check the ceiling? Piercer gets you (or a Lurker Above). Pick up a gold medallion? Yellow mould in the face. Opened a chest or picked a lock? Mimic or lock lurker. Thought the bunny on the stump was cute? Turns out it’s a Wolf-In-Sheep’s-Clothing that will totally kill you. There are monsters that look like swords, cloaks, hoods, coins, boulders, statues, stone, wood and even houses. Hell, there are even monsters that have evolved to look like other monsters. There is much hilarity in imagining the consequences of this kind of unnatural and enormously hostile evolution. There are also options to apply it to other settings. So now, imagine a group of military infiltration specialists working their way up (as opposed to down) through what appears to be an ordinary office building or set of apartments, except Everything Is Hungry.
In the adversarial spirit of Gygax, all the things your players take for granted in their house or in their daily commutes can now be used to punish them for making assumptions. Plus, you also get to play the name game, with puns and port-manteau words like the Flail-Snail, the Book Worm and the Bowler. Mobile-Phoneys look useful until you try to make a call and they shoot their deadly barbs into your skull. Couch Hogs are leathery-skinned pigs that you can only detect if you sit down. Snaptops seem like normal laptops until your hands go near them and they snap shut with razor sharp teeth. Troll-ies litter mall carparks, waiting to grab your wrist and drag you screaming towards the trolls inside. Zoomorphic phrases like dustbunnies, cash cows and codemonkeys write themselves.
Obviously, one long tired monster manual parody will tire, nor do you want to turn this into a bad remake of Power Kill. By emphasising the Tom Clancy Rainbow Six feel, you can avoid both, and that’s the heart of what makes this fun. Everyone likes to imagine their workplace turned into an awesome action scene, and this allows it complete with Gygaxian surprises to keep them guessing.
PCs and NPCs: The kind of people willing to go treasure hunting are many and varied, but as with D&D, all of them are going to need some way to deliver damage or provide survival skills. Infiltration experts, ninjas, saboteurs and assassins, whether military, police or criminal or even self-trained are all possible. Modern-day tomb raiders are more action-oriented than the archaeologists and scholars of yesteryear, but knowledge of the “dungeon” environment is still useful, and ditto the wilds around the skyscrapers. So civic engineers, town planners and urban efficiency experts may all prove useful, and likewise experts in the new biological processes of hyperevolution. There could even be people who have adapted hyperevolution to their own needs, evolving their own flesh or farming evolved creatures to suit each situation. Obviously that may take some work to model in game, but following through these ideas with a dollop of pseudo-scientific grounding could produce some awesome concepts. Finally, the players could even play themselves or something like them: white-collar workaday schmos who spent twenty years in the building in question, battling the coffee machine and the photocopier, and are ready to make the battle up a notch.
Plots and Villains: We’ve discussed the monstrous threats above, and dungeons tend to lack low-level villains that aren’t monsters. However, there’s no reason why there can’t be the equivalent of tribes of semi-sapient monsters to negotiate with, such as kobolds (watchdogs?) or goblins (janitorangutans?) or orcs (locustodians?). The big wizard or lich or whatever at the centre of the dungeon will depend on the nature of the building. You can imagine offices having some kind of Dilbert-esque Pointy-Haired-Boss ruling over coffee-zombies and ghoul fridays while a mall may have a Security Overlord mustering mallcopper dragons, or security monitor lizards. Apartment buildings no doubt have a Super Intendent lurking somewhere, controlling all the locks and lifts.
For a campaign, there’s always tracking down the wizard/super-scientist who triggered the hyper-evolution in the first place, and rebuilding the world back to what it used to be.
Sources: For the worker-revenge scenario, watch Office Space for inspiration and then check out Simon Pegg’s awesome Hot Fuzz, the climax of which is all about turning the everyday world around you into combat zones filled with surprise threats. For monsters that can look like anything, check out the Polymorph episode of Red Dwarf, where Lister is attacked by his own boxer shorts. Stephen King has written almost constantly about killer machines and objects (Christine, Maximum Overdrive, The Mangler, Lawnmower Man, Chattering Teeth etc etc etc, with the recent Cell having a “all over the world” aspect of particular note) and sapient houses with haunted devices are a horror staple (see the Amityville Horror, Poltergeist and the series one X-Files episode, Ghost in the Machine for an office building take). For some looks at the strange eco-system of the office world, the TV comedy of the Upright Citizens Brigade has Staircase People and Dilbert (of course) has the very similar Post-It People. Evolutionary postulations pop-up a lot in Gary Larson’s The Far Side (the tie-snake, for one) and is a great well of inspiration for creatures.
RPGs: John Tynes is probably not the first to realise the massive parallels between D&D and Tom Clancy, but it’s rarely been evinced so eloquently as it was in the 3rd ed adventure, Three Days to Kill. He also wrote Power Kill and it and its spiritual cousin Violence parody different aspects of D&D but are still worth a look for doing your own parodies. Modern day D&D is easy to find thanks to D&D Modern and the excellent Spycraft; the former’s Urban Arcana is also very much in the spirit of this whole idea, putting giant chunks of D&D tropes into modern settings, including trapped emails. And don’t forget to go back to the source: Monster Manual 1 and 2 for first ed and second ed (not to mention Unearthed Arcana and the Fiend Folio and all their friends) are nigh-endless sources of insanity-cum-genius and sadistic player torture. Hackmaster and any other D&D clone will also provide, but the original is the craziest and cruellest of them all. Although Paranoia’s R&D devices (and indeed, anything in Paranoia – even a toothbrush) are also core reading on the art of destroying PCs. And killing a PC with a toothbrush is a great day’s work.
