Setting

A few decades into the future, humans on an alternate Earth perfect bioengineering and develop a process to infuse animal DNA into humans to create chimeras, which are treated as subhuman for a while despite their superior physical abilities, and biomods to enhance their capabilities. At some point, dragon fossils are discovered, and intact DNA is extracted, allowing for the production of Draconids, at first classified as just another form of chimera. Chimeras eventually rival humans in number, and start rioting to gain more rights, ultimately developing into a full-blown war after the chimeras carve out large areas of territory for themselves; in response, humans begin investing heavily into electronic and mechanical technology in order to keep up more efficiently. However, the Draconids shortly decide as a collective that they’re better than “the rabble”, declaring war on both humans and chimeras and acquiring substantial chunks of their own territory. Somewhere along the way, some insectoid exoskeletons are discovered, and a group of Draconid necromancers decide to resurrect them as minions; they are subsequently slaughtered, and a race of zombie insects begins spreading like wildfire through everyone’s territory, the threat coming to be known as the Husks. Thus, a four-way war is currently occurring, with a lukewarm sentiment between humans, chimeras, and Draconids only because the Husks represent a much more notable threat in their eyes.

Races

Humans - Baseline humans, similar to the real world. Tend to work with a lot of technology, up to and including exoskeletons akin to power armour and reasonably advanced AI, to keep up with the extremely superhuman chimeras.

Chimeras - Humans modified with DNA from up to three other animals, becoming highly superhuman in the process. Prefer their natural weapons as a consequence of changes to mindset and their own strength, but are also likely to utilise biomods to further augment themselves.

Draconids - Humans modified with dragon DNA, an extinct race almost unique for certain magical properties. They all possess wings capable of magically-assisted flight, and magic-based breath weapons corresponding to the type of dragon they acquired DNA from; they are very physically powerful, but due to magical inclinations and extreme pride have a lot more mages than other races.

Husks - Extinct parasitic race resurrected as zombies; now spreading across the environment, killing people and using their corpses as hosts to create new Husks. Extremely variable external biology due to nature of infection, with insides converted into necrotic goo.

Technology

Biotech is a lot more powerful than in the real world, developing roughly in tandem with standard IRL technology, and it is possible to modify a being’s DNA on a massive scale to, for instance, alter a person’s gender, create human-animal hybrids with notably superhuman abilities, or generate biological technology to augment what is already possible. Artificial technology is about what you might expect from a few decades of advancement from modern standards - that is, massive interconnection, perfected cybernetic augmentations, high-quality AI (albeit with certain restrictions that keeps them from being truly sentient or as qualitatively intelligent as humans and other biological races for the time being, though there may be extremely rare exceptions), and overall greater sophistication, in particular many advances in offensive and defensive technology derived from wartime conditions, though the latter two are mostly concentrated in human territories.

Magic

Magic exists in this setting, and though it is prevalent in the world, it is very rarely used. There are many reasons for this: many people simply lack the capacity to use magic under normal circumstances anyway, but adding on to this, a group called the Ordo Obscurum was keeping its existence under wraps until just a couple of decades ago, when internal conflict led to catastrophic devastation that the group could not hide, leading to the reveal of magic to the general public and the Ordo Obscurum's dissolution for want of purpose and loss of membership. As a consequence of this and other damaging events, magic has a reputation as a force primarily geared towards destructive rather than constructive purposes, and not without good reason, as many mages have noted substantial extra effort is needed to get magic to do most things beyond destroying objects. Notably, most mages are not all that powerful, having about the destructive capacity on their own of between a pistol and a few pounds of high explosive - very dangerous on a personal level even with modern technology, but not exactly W.M.Ds, and even those few with more power than this tend to max out well before the greatest known evokers of history, capable of obliterating an entire city at a time. One city. This is perhaps for the best: beyond a certain threshold, magic tends more and more toward twisting to purposes that actively detriment the user, with a recent example of such being the Draconid ritual that resurrected the Husks as undead creatures. Overall, the rate of magical use is around 1 in 100,000 amongst humans, chimeras, and Husks, but 1 in 1,000 amongst Draconids for reasons of hubris and innate magical power.

Dragons, and Draconid Similarities

Dragons were large creatures, with adults ranging anywhere from the height of a small house to that of a skyscraper in length alone, which are extinct in the modern age. Which is surprising to some, since based on analysis of their DNA, they were near-unique due to possessing native magical abilities not directly based on individual magical strength as in humans and other modern sapient races. Based on those semi-passive traits which have been passed on to their “heirs”, the Draconids, they were likely capable of flight in spite of the square-cube law, and could breath great quantities of magical energy as a sort of breath weapon, as dictated by scale colour. The colours and associated breath weapons, and so the types of modern Draconid, are as follows:
Red - Fire breath, wide cone. Scales range from dark red to bright crimson.
Blue - Ice breath, see above. Scales range from dark blue to icy turquoise.
Green - Acid breath, narrow cone. Scales range from very dark green to brightly acidic green.
Yellow - Lightning breath, narrow cone with slight redirection capacity. Scales range from dark gold to bright yellow.
Orange - Petrifying breath, narrow cone. Scales range from very dark orange to medium orange.
Purple - Hallucinogenic breath, wide cone. Scales range from dark purple to light purple.
White - Laser breath, directed beam. Scales range from cream to blindingly white.
Black - Necrotic breath, wide cone; very rarely variegates to disintegrative breath, directed beam. Scales range from coal to pitch black.

This looks pretty damn cool. Should my schedule be free enough, I'll be joining for sure. Would you mind giving some examples of Biomods, though? Thinking about characters and wanted to see what you meant by that.

This looks pretty damn cool. Should my schedule be free enough, I'll be joining for sure. Would you mind giving some examples of Biomods, though? Thinking about characters and wanted to see what you meant by that.

I'll be co-hosting this game, and came up with the game together with BC, so I can answer your question.

Biomods are basically body modifications that are biological or organic in nature. For example, replacing your arms with a pair of new arms that have web spinners in the hands, allowing you to imitate Spider-Man. Another example would be a bony exoskeleton grafted onto your skin, which can receive nutrients from your bloodstream to repair itself. Such biomods are used mostly by chimeras, since their already superhuman constitutions are required to adapt to the biomods and make them function properly; this allows them to fight on par with the humans' advanced mechanical weaponry. On the other hand, in most cases only humans can install cybernetic modifications to themselves, and not chimeras, since the physiology of humans is much more thoroughly understood than that of chimeras.

Another question (hate to ask two in a row but hey, whatever) What's the aesthetic generally? Cyberpunk, Sci-fantasy, apocalyptic, ect.

Interested.

@Kafka Komedy Given the nature of the setting, I'd say a combination of cyberpunk and biopunk, with placement on the sliding scale based on the faction you're talking about.

@BlytheChi And I'm glad to hear that.

I've updated the initial post with some more information about magic, by the by, which basically explains why magic hasn't been quite prevalent in human society until recently.

@BCTheEntity Ah, thanks. So a character like this:


Is that cool?

@Kafka Komedy Yeah, probably. As a fair warning, and with regards to the picture you supplied in particular, chimeras rarely utilise cybernetic limbs due to how there's not really been much input toward designing them for chimera users, in much the same way that bionetic enhancements on humans are often either watered down or overly dangerous due to insufficiently strong biology. Unless Star Fox there has access in some form to a source of cybernetic limbs designed for him specifically, the legs would have to be normal legs, not robo-legs.

@Kafka Komedy: I should add that there are three main ways a chimera could feasibly get cybernetic augmentations:

1) Have them custom-made for him through massive amounts of wealth and/or some other form of influence.

2) Buy them off of a black market of some sort. Of course, with shady deals like these, safety is nowhere near guaranteed when using them.

3) Be a cybernetics expert and make them himself.

These are all pretty significant things, so they'd need to be a pretty important part of your character's backstory if you want to go that route.

@JohnSolaris So if he had a particularly famous father, a war hero of some kind maybe, would that net him some cybernetics?

@Kafka Komedy: That alone wouldn't be enough, unless his father actively exerted his influence and pulled strings to get the cybernetic legs made. However, getting bionetic leg replacements for him would be much easier, for something with equivalent performance to cybernetic legs, so it doesn't make much sense for him to get cybernetic legs over bionetic ones unless he has some specific reasons. One idea I have is that maybe your character was the victim of some disease or poison that caused his legs to rot away, which made him want legs that wouldn't be vulnerable to such things. Keep in mind that while cybernetics are unaffected by disease or poison, they do not have the advantage of self-healing that bionetics have, and thus must be manually repaired.

@JohnSolaris Ah. So say James (That's what I'll call Fox for now) has cheetah-type legs. They're able to give him incredible bursts of speed and allow him to stick to surfaces. The reason he got these legs is because his father, a famous war hero, had his career cut short and died from a leg disease. James escaped said fate thanks to his father drawing attention to the disease and his legs were replaced with sweet new legs that could do cool stuff. Is that good?

Another question (I have a lot, you see) what will the focus of this RP be? The war itself? Exceptional members and key players in the war? The day to day lives of soldiers, or something else entirely.

@Kafka Komedy Well, he could probably get the legs regardless, but yes, that works well enough as justification. I ought to mention, for your sake and everyone else's, that chimeras as a race (or "race", depending on how you see things) are less than fifteen years existing, and the war probably less than five; unless James is a child soldier, chances are he wasn't born a chimera, since that'd be literally impossible unless he were younger than when they were initially discovered.

As for the RP's focus, I'd say mostly the exceptional members, i.e. the PCs. If you want to play as a faceless peon in one side's army, or even a generic civilian, feel free. Just be aware that you'll be dragged into the thick of things sooner or later. And at the mention of sides, it's perhaps worth bringing up that there'll probably be inter-factional disputes too, since "all humans" aren't exactly unified in the modern age, and I wouldn't necessarily expect perfect unity of that sort from any given race even several decades on from now.

@BCTheEntity Ah, damn. I might find a way to make that work but if that's the case, I might play a human instead. For the humans, which of these two fits their aesthetic more?





Would either of these not fit, or be out of place?

I'm interested.

@Kafka Komedy I'd say they'd both work in different fashions, though for the sake of not getting stabbed in the weak points, or worse, I might propose making sure any exoarmour covers their entire body. Y'know, because superhumanly fast and strong mutants will probably win against bare human flesh, and all.

@Saint Girralo Glad to hear it. Any thoughts on your character? Same for you, @BlytheChi, since I forgot to ask you earlier.

@BCTheEntity I have a few ideas. Just need to refine them

Are Neuroaugmentations a thing?

Are Neuroaugmentations a thing?

Yes. The cybernetic side has brain implants, and the bionetic side has... superdrugs or something, which only chimeras are tough enough to (safely) use. There could also be some magic that does that kind of thing, if you're really skilled, enough to pull it off despite magic's usual destructive tendencies.

<Snipped quote by Lucidnonsense>

Yes. The cybernetic side has brain implants, and the bionetic side has... superdrugs or something, which only chimeras are tough enough to (safely) use. There could also be some magic that does that kind of thing, if you're really skilled, enough to pull it off despite magic's usual destructive tendencies.

Cool, thinking of playing as a cybernetically modified civil rights activist/arcane scientist.

Or an AI Mage created by ordo obscurum who was given human level problem solving skills in order to aid in the study of magic.

Also I'm getting SCP vibes from ordo obscurum.