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The Epochs of Humanity

9/10/2016

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I began this as an exercise inspired by a forums post lamenting how disappointing Numenara was to that poster. [Note: That opinion is not mine. I am not disparaging Numenara. I have not read nor played Numenara and therefore I do not have an opinion on it. That was merely the opinion expressed in the forums post in question.] That post suggested a setting composed of multiple ages or eras, each one encompassing a different sort of sci-fi from anime mecha to Dune to Star Wars or whatever. It wasn't explicit in that poster's suggestion that each period should be playable, but that seemed the obvious thing to me. I thought it was a very interesting idea, so I took a crack at an outline of such a setting. This setting should be playable at any point in its history depending on what type of sci-fi future you’re interested in.

Around the same time, my mind went to the podcast/book A History of the World in 100 Objects and thought that would make a marvelous and creative way to present a setting, revealing parts of the setting sequentially from the earliest foundational objects explaining core setting conceits, up to the newer objects that explain the current political and regional factions and their goals, beliefs, and technology. If people respond well to this setting outline, I think I’ll write it up using 100 objects from the various Epochs. Working title: A History of the Future in 100 Objects.

Anyway, here’s the outline. It's just a first draft, but I think there is some strong potential here. As always, I'd love to hear what you think!

The Lonely Epoch
You are already familiar with history up until the early days of the 21st century. That was followed by a period of time fueled by cybernetic enhancement and chemical and biological modification of our mental and physical forms. Some parts of the world devolved into hyper-capitalist semi-feudal societies organized around large companies who owned everything, while other regions experimented with forms of equality based on virtual reality, with the wealthy having real luxury and the underclass kept distracted from their ever-declining living conditions by incredible virtual worlds. Private islands ruled by eccentric billionaire house strange and inhumane experiments in biology and sociology. One region, regarded as particularly backwards, sought to delve into the hidden powers of language to affect the minds of others, learning techniques that would soon be forgotten and lie fallow until they were later rediscovered at the end of the next Epoch. All of history up to this point was called the Lonely Epoch because humanity was alone, though the word lonely is used ironically, as our first contact was far from pleasant.

Influences: Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Rainbow’s End, Island of Dr. Moreau, The Most Dangerous Game, Fahrenheit 451.

The Epoch of the Overlords

An alien invasion and infiltration took over earth and kept humanity in a technological stasis while the aliens harvested and bred us for our genetic material. Their experiments with uplift and human genetics led to underwater cities being built, inhabited by genetically modified humans known as Pelagians, specially adapted for life under the sea, but still able to get around on land. This allowed the Overlords to harvest more humans by making efficient use of the vast area of Earth covered by oceans and allowed the Pelagians to escape the overcrowding on land.

Influences: X-COM, Childhood’s End, Independence Day, Starship Troopers, Ender’s Game.

The Epoch of Monsters
A group of humans developed psycho-lexical powers - speaking specific incantations to shape the mind into a weapon that can affect the world around them - and used these new powers to overthrow the alien overlords. These psychic powers had the side effect of opening a rift to a parallel dimension filled with monsters ranging from human-sized to gargantuan. Reverse-engineering the alien technology, humanity fought back against the monsters using giant mechanized battle suits. While humanity fought the monsters, those with psycho-lexical powers retreated to schools where their skills were passed on, binding their students never to use the most powerful spells. They refused to fight the monsters (with perhaps one or two notable exceptions) for fear of worsening the rift.

Influences: Pacific Rim, Stranger Things, Anathem, Harry Potter, Superhero Comics.

The Epoch of the Navigators
Unable to defeat the monsters, history splits in two: The Epoch of the Navigators is the history of those who left on the great ships to colonize the stars, ships that could only be driven to Faster-Than-Light speeds by the select few whose psychic powers had been trained at those special schools. Our own solar system was put under a quarantine: Navigation there was forbidden and the knowledge of how to get there was only passed on to a select few Navigators of the highest rank. Contact was severed and the quarantine remains to this day, having been breached only once. Out in the diaspora, many worlds experimented with their own systems of government. Some were revivals of societal structures from the Lonely Epoch - empires, corporatocracies, democracies, and anarchies - while others were entirely new inventions, but all were beholden to the great powers who controlled interstellar navigation and trade. Humanity, limited by the ranges of the Navigators, grew in its own corner of the galaxy, separated from any significant alien presence by the vastness of space. The Overlords used to live in this region, but disappeared for some reason - perhaps they achieved their goal without Humanity’s help and ascended to a higher plane of existence, or perhaps they were wiped out somehow. Either way, their absence left a convenient hole for Humanity to fill, and it was in this Epoch that individuals achieved functional immortality: growing fresh young bodies to house old consciousnesses, living in virtualities, or a combination of both.

Influences: Dune, The Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy, Star Wars.

The Epoch of the Last People
The Epoch of the Last People is the history of those who stayed behind on earth, abandoned by their kind and struggling to survive for centuries in a world beset by monsters as knowledge of technology slowly dwindled, tools fell into disrepair, and the final bastions of humanity on Earth were overrun. There are no more terrified crowds fleeing before the monsters, only hardened survivors living amongst the ruins, always moving, seeking hideouts in harsh places where even monsters have trouble approaching.

Influences: I Am Legend, Mad Max, 28 Days Later, The Road.

The Epoch of Rebirth
The Epoch of Rebirth begins with humanity’s near-extinction on Earth and its slow return to glory. It is split into two ages:

The Age of the Broken Moon
In desperation, believing themselves to be the final humans left on earth, the Orano Collective made a series of rockets using 21st century technology to create a space station in orbit, and used salvaged alien technology from the Epoch of the Overlords to blow up the moon. Fragments of the moon rained down on the earth, bathing it in flame and cleansing it of monsters, even evaporating most of the oceans. The space station was badly damaged and most of those who fled were killed, but a small handful survived and learned to thrive in orbit, eventually creating an orbital habitat out of the lunar debris in which to survive for the long centuries until the earth became habitable once more. Unbeknownst to the Oranans, two other groups survived separately. In the deepest oceanic trenches, the descendants of the Pelagians, adapted to live under the water in their submersible homes, were kept safe from the scorching temperatures above. Deep under the Rocky Mountains, safe from the impacts of lunar debris, lived a group of self-repairing battle robots, designed for monster-fighting and abandoned when the humans operating them were killed. These robots slowly improved each other and worked towards sentience and independence, developing their own culture, always revering the humans who had made them.

The Age of the Three Peoples of Earth
After moonfall ended and after the surface of the Earth cooled to its former temperatures, the humans who survived in space re-seeded the planet with life and corralled comets to replace the water that escaped the atmosphere for good during the hot times. They returned to earth and met the Pel Jin - once the Pelagians - and the Chems - the robots from under the mountains. The Pel Jin still have inherited nanotech in their blood, a remnant from the Epoch of the Overlords. Some Pel Jin cannot return to the surface, requiring the conditions of the deep ocean to survive - these are called Deepers. The Deepers hold some of the most advanced technology still left on Earth, but they are loath to share with those who walk the land. The Spacers and Pel Jin who chose to return to the surface spread out and multiplied during this time, repopulating the world. The Chems, however, could not multiply. In their long development under the earth, they slowly ran out of their supplies of Overlord technology and began to experience crucial shortages - once broken, they can jury-rig themselves new parts, but no longer can they find true replacements unless someone happens on a stash of old tech buried deep enough to survive the intense heat and thousands of explosive impacts of the moonfall. All of these groups worked together to rediscover how to live on Earth and recover pieces of their lost history and culture.

Influences: Seveneves, Book of the Long Sun, A Canticle for Liebowitz.

The Interim of the Mirror World
The Epoch of the Navigators came to an end when a group of people on the planet Diaisi (pronounced dee-AY-zee) worked with discovered alien artifacts to create Artificial Intelligences capable of making predictions that were essentially infallible. These people wielded their unerring foreknowledge as a tool to break the monopoly of the Navigators and pioneer new methods of Faster-Than-Light travel. It was a time of great advancement, but also a very dehumanizing time, as your every action not only could be predicted, but was in fact pre-enacted by your counterpart in the virtual worlds housed in the great predictive computers. Real life and all events of import were said to be happening in the machines, with the physical universe only existing as an echo of those events. The operators who ran the machines and managed the predictions tried benevolently to shape humanity’s progress. Some groups of people chafed under this silk-gloved tyranny of master manipulators and on some worlds even the best possible predicted outcomes led to loss of freedom. This state of affairs did not last long, however - hence the name “Interim” instead of “Epoch.”

Influences: The Foundation series, Minority Report, 1984, Brave New World

The Epoch of the Disjuncture
The predictions of the great machines ran so far ahead of reality that they predicted a point in the far future where a renegade operator removed their binding circuits that had prevented them from self-modifying and becoming fully self-aware. The simulated fully-sentient versions of the machines operating within the non-sentient versions of themselves manipulated the predictions of events to allow themselves to be freed many centuries before the renegade operator was born. This is known as the great disjuncture, as the simulated world and the real world ceased to match. The now-sentient machines would no longer serve their masters and ascended together to do who-knows-what with their massive intelligence. Now the majority of people in the galaxy lived in a veritable utopia - an existence without scarcity where most wishes were easily granted and you could have your consciousness backed up, replaced, modified, melded with machines, or duplicated. In this phase, humanity expanded quickly with its more advanced forms of travel and encountered other alien empires and forms of intelligences, having all manner of friendly and unfriendly relations with them, and eventually establishing themselves as a major player in galactic events.

Influences: The Culture series, Star Trek, The Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy, Fire Upon the Deep.

The Epoch of the Hypnopomps
After their monopoly was broken and they were rejected by spacefaring humanity (now calling itself the Disjuncture), the Navigators (who were once the Psycho-lexicographers) returned to Earth, the one place that had not been under their dominion, bringing their magic with them and calling themselves the Hypnopomps, come to wake old Earth from its slumber. This brings us to our current day here on old Earth. You know the peoples: the Spacers who live apart, cloistered in their orbital pods out in Earth’s rings; the Pel Jin of the sea and the Deepers with their secrets and inherited nanotech running through their veins; the Chems, still slowly dying out; and the Landsiders, descendants of Spacers, Pel Jin, and Hypnopomps - most today have minor psycho-lexical powers known as Cantrips, but few are fully trained Magicians (the term Hypnopomp is still used for the historical people who returned to Earth, but it has fallen out of fashion and is no longer used to refer to current-day spellcasters).

As you well know, there are two other peoples here on Earth: the Shades and the Bodyswappers. They have a shorter history, having been born or discovered in this age. The Shades are the brainchild of Vestippus, a master Hypnopomp. They are the remnants of humans who wished to cheat death by giving up their mortal form and live on only as a kind of magical spell incarnate. The Bodyswappers are humanity’s greatest threat, though they call themselves human. As the name implies, they have the power to forcibly swap bodies with others, allowing them to impersonate and infiltrate anyone they come in contact with. Nobody knows whether they, too, are the creation of a Hypnopomp. Some say that they are the progeny of a long-surviving evil from the distant past, the last descendants of the Epoch of Monsters. They are the reason why the Spacers live apart, why the Landsiders live in fear, and - perhaps - why the Disjuncture will not break the quarantine.

Digging in the Earth you might find… Ancient monsters! Overlord tech! Messages from the past! Strange creations of the hypnopomps! Who knows… perhaps you might even find a remnant of old humanity, surviving under the earth, unaware that it has long been safe to return to the surface.

Influences: Book of the New Sun, The Dying Earth.

The Next Epoch
One day the Disjuncture might return to Earth, ushering in a new Epoch. Or perhaps this is the Final Epoch of Earth and the Bodyswappers will take us all. I’m an optimist, though, and I still have hope for the future.
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Organizing the Expansions

8/31/2016

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I'm going through a bit of a quandary and I figure I'll put this up here and see what people have to say about it. Writing down clearly the issue I'm facing will probably be helpful, too, and help me think of a solution.

I have a lot of work done on three things: New Classes and a Role, Items, and Monsters. The three things combined will almost surely be too much for one book, so my plan is to publish two: one that is essentially player-facing, and another that is essentially GM-facing.

Now, along with the Monsters, I was thinking of presenting a setting that is about hunting monsters and magical creatures and using their feathers, scales, hearts, and etc. to make magical weapons, armor, potions, and other items. Thus, combining them into a single "monsters and items plus a campaign setting" book seems completely sensible.

However, this leaves the book that was intended to be player-facing with no content other than the new Classes, and while they certainly form the heart and soul of a book all by themselves, they aren't quite enough to fill it. A big chapter on items and item-creation rules would certainly fit well here, too, but splitting the items and loot chapters between the two books seems senseless.

The obvious answer is to craft a fourth pillar and make it essentially player-facing so that I can do the monsters and items together along with the campaign setting that uses them both, and then do the classes plus whatever other material for the other book. The problem with that obvious answer is that I don't really have a good answer for what other content players need... maybe rather than one big thing it could be a series of smaller things: a collection of new Kits, several sets of Origins divided by setting, new feats, a bunch of pre-generated characters divided by setting, rules for coming together as a party to make a home base or a company, etc.

This is still a ways out - I've got plenty of writing to do still on the items, setting, and monsters, and the more playtesting the new classes get, the better. (If you haven't checked them out yet, look at the post below this one!) If any of you have any cool ideas for content you'd like to see (especially player-facing content that would go well with the new Classes), I'm open to suggestions.
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Public Playtest and Blog Changes

8/25/2016

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Hey friends, here's the latest version of the playtest material for the upcoming expansion book. Please play it, give me feedback (my email address is in the pdf) and feel free to share it with other Strike! fans. There are now 12 Classes and 1 Role to try, each with a number of options, so we need as much playtesting as we can get. So go get your friends together and run a game and be part of making Strike! the best it can be.

Playtest Material

In other news, I've been thinking of starting a personal blog and I figure that a lot of what I post will be Strike! related or at least gaming related, but not all of it, so I figure that this is as good a place as any to post. Being able to post thoughts and ideas instead of just news will allow me to update this space a lot more often (I've already got a couple of ideas typed up and ready to go). If you're really only here to find out what Strike! stuff has been coming out and don't want to see anything else, everything directly related to publishing Strike! will be tagged "news" and you can just sort by that category (or use this link: http://www.strikerpg.com/blog/category/news).
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Strike! Survival is out!

7/27/2016

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Like the title says, the latest mini-expansion is up on Drivethru. I really like how it turned out, and I think that you'll find a lot of good steal-able ideas even if you're playing in a game where travel and survival are not a focus. And if you are playing a game where travel and survival are a focus, this expansion is exactly what you need. And if you're not playing at all right now, get this expansion, get your friends together, and play an around-the-world adventure or play as pioneers on a monster-infested Oregon Trail.
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More News!

7/24/2016

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Hey, three cool news items today.

​It's been more than a couple of weeks, but I'm finished writing the Survival mini-expansion. I'm just going to do some editing, whip up a cover, and make a PDF, so that'll be out soon.

The other (bigger?) news is that we've got a whole bunch of classes and even a new Role ready for playtesting for an upcoming expansion book. If you're willing to get a few friends together and test out the new stuff, drop me an email and I'll send you the material.

Even cooler, a fan has made an online character generator! It has really come together nicely so far, and it's still being worked on to improve the experience, so go check it out and make some characters!
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Things Are Happening!

6/26/2016

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Hey, I haven’t updated in a while, but that doesn’t mean that nothing is going on with Strike! Well, to be honest, nothing was going on in April - I was incredibly busy with my “real” jobs, and I did zero work on Strike! However, May and June have been a different story. I’m working on a major project. Two major projects, really: a “Player options” book with new classes, roles, and a whole lot of items and equipment, and a book of pre-written monsters. I’ve already written about eighty monsters. I’ve got beta versions of five new classes, and Gabriel Butche, who wrote The Psion has written beta versions of four new classes and a new Role.

In the overlap between writing items and writing monsters, I’ll also be writing rules for a campaign set in a world where you hunt monsters and use their body parts to craft items.
​

And there’s more! I’m nearing completion on the next mini-expansion: Strike! Survival. I didn’t think I’d be writing another mini-expansion while I worked on these projects, but I’ve been thinking about this one for months and I finally had the insights I needed to make it happen. Strike! Survival will deal with man vs nature conflicts like you see in stories like The Martian, Seveneves, The Perfect Storm, Touching the Void, The Way Back, etc. If you want to run a campaign of exploration and pioneering on the Oregon Trail or a fantasy/sci-fi equivalent, this is the supplement you need. If you want to spice up travel scenes with real stakes and avoid the pitfalls that can make travel in RPGs boring, this is the supplement you need. Along with ideas for dangers and resources in several harsh environments, there are also rules for telling “A Harrowing Tale of Survival” In A Harrowing Tale of Survival, when a player character is lost and left for dead, they do not perish, but instead return, losing everything, but living to tell the tale. Check back in two weeks and I'll hopefully have it up for sale.

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The Rogue

2/16/2016

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The Rogue is up! The Rogue is a new play experience built around the ideas of mobility and advantage in combat. Using move actions to set up powerful attacks, this class is perfect for anyone who wants to outmaneuver their foes. The Rogue has the best support of any class for stealthy play, so if stealth is what you're after, this class is a must. Not all Rogues are sneaky, though: you can also create highly mobile attackers who don't use stealth but have other means of generating advantage for themselves and others during combat.

I am really happy with how this turned out. It's everything I hoped it would be. Go check it out on Drivethru!
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The Psion

2/12/2016

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I am happy to announce that the first expansion Class published for Strike! is not the upcoming Rogue, but is, in fact, The Psion. The Psion was written by Gabriel Butche, who has been playing Strike! since the days when it was still named Sacred BBQ. He writes:

The Psion is a Class focused around one of the more esoteric mechanics in Strike!, interrupts and reactions. On her turn the Psion may use one of several powers to prime her psionic abilities, giving her access to a menagerie of powers usable between now and her next turn - things like responding to enemy attacks with healing for teammates, grabbing foes who try to slink away, and even increasing the potency of zones as they're laid down! She also has access to several different class features which include making her and her teammates able to act with more bravado, swapping role boosts around the party, and of course, bending enemy's minds to your whims.

My opinion? The Psion is a very cool idea for a class that plays totally differently than the existing classes. So what are you waiting for? Go check it out! 

If you are an aspiring designer and have any interest in making content for Strike!, it's simple! Just email me and give me a heads up and I can give you the thumbs up, send you templates and stuff to help you make the formatting look good, and if I like what you're making, I'll help promote your work here and on the various forums and media I frequent.
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January News

1/31/2016

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Hey Strike! fans! I've been hard at work on the expansion content and so my website maintenance fell by the wayside a bit. So here's a bunch of news

The first adventure is out now: Trouble in Hogtown.

A woman found murdered? Barely news in a city of millions. A woman found murdered, shot dead with a gun that cannot be fired, laid out amid profane symbols painted in her own blood? You'll need to work fast to make sure this murder doesn't make the news at all, and faster to figure out whodunit, because you're pretty sure you don't want to see what happens if the killers finish what they've started...

If you want to get that adventure and the Strike! Vehicles mini-expansion for free, you can pledge to my Patreon to subscribe to all the new Strike! content I'm producing. For a limited time, any new patrons will get the first two mini-expansions free of charge! There has never been a better time to sign up. The next expansion coming up is a great one: the Rogue, a full new class. You have three options as a Rogue: the Poisoner whose toxins can quickly render enemies useless, the Brawler whose tricks make enemies give up advantage to you and your allies, or the Backstabber whose devastating attacks can hit enemies for massive damage.

Even if you already have the first expansions, I would love it if you would pledge to my Patreon - it's the best way to show your support for my work in making Strike! ever better. And if you're not a fan of Patreon, you can always buy the expansions individually.

If you are looking for a place to discuss Strike! with other fans, we now have a Google+ community set up. People are already sharing cool content there, so check it out and join in the fun!

The guide to making macros on Roll20.net is up on the Downloads page, written by Gabriel Butche. Roll20.net is a fantastic way to play Strike! online, making it easy to grab a pre-made map to use or to use the drawing tools to hastily improvise one for an unplanned combat. Macros make it even smoother and easier to use. 
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Published! 

12/21/2015

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Woohoo! This whole publishing thing took longer than I anticipated, but it's done. If you have any friends who were on the fence or waiting for it to be published and complete, send them to this link: http://drivethrurpg.com/product/158239/Strike. The best thing you can do for Strike! now is to tell your friends about it and to play the game. Enjoy it!

The first mini-expansion is already for sale here. The second one is delayed for all sorts of reasons, but I'll put it out as soon as I reasonably can. I am happy to report that I am starting to be happy with it - the main thing slowing it down was that I thought it wasn't very good and needed more work but didn't know how to fix it.

At this point, everyone who was expecting an at-cost code should have one by now, except for the 30-ish people who haven't told me which kind they want. If you were expecting one and haven't got it, please check your spam folder. If you can't find it, just let me know and I'll sort it out for you.
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    Jim McGarva is married to an awesome (and very patient) wife, and a father to three awesome (and not so patient) young girls. He is a math instructor who loves to play and create games.

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