In the far future, humanity had raised cities across the solar system, and succeeded in terraforming Mars; but experiments performed upon preserved organisms in the Martian ice resulted in a plague of biological horrors that brought down civilisation. Mars was quarantined, leaving the survivors to fend for themselves in a post-apocalyptic world. Now, wheeled warriors race across the Martian deserts, competing with each other for resources whilst fighting the twin threats of the Nergal mutants, and the drones and cybernetic soldiers of the ARES corporation.

The grand idea of posting ideas and art every day isn’t really panning out, so I’m switching to a weekly schedule. Maybe at some point I’ll flesh out some of these RPG ideas. Maybe.

In the closing days of 1946, Operation Highjump reached Antarctica. Ostensibly a mission to establish a new American base on the continent, the real objective was to investigate strange ruins seen emerging from the ice. In doing so, the naval personnel somehow let the Spheres into our world.

 

Even many years later, nobody really knows what the Spheres are. They vary wildly in size from as small as a marble to as wide as a city, hanging impossibly in the air. Some Spheres roam about randomly, others are static. They do not respond to interference, but they have caused devastating effects through their influence.

 

Each Sphere alters reality in a radius around it that is proportional to the size of the Sphere. Within their influence, strange creatures and phantoms appear, the environment and beings within it are altered.

 

The Spheres are all different in appearance, and that appearance is related to the effects that they generate; a solid black Sphere might create shadow monsters, a rocky and cracked Sphere covered in channels of lava might turn the area into a volcanic hell full of fire elementals, and a Sphere that looks like a mechanical device might spawn a race of robots.

 

The arrival of the Spheres has obviously plunged the world into chaos, and the survivors must use their dieselpunk technology to defend themselves against the myriad dangers conjured into existence.

 

In the near future, humanity is an endangered species. It wasn’t until the world had fallen apart that the cause became apparent; a code hidden within fast radio bursts from an extragalactic source. An unknown agency embedded the code into viral media, somehow inducing cognitive changes in a substantial percentage of those that viewed it, as well as causing strange errors in any electronic system which the code passed through. Many of those affected began to propagate the code, either online or via such means as graffitiing public spaces with mathematical symbols.

 

The behavioural changes gradually became more violent, leading to an upsurge in horrific crimes and widespread civil unrest, a situation that dissolved into chaos as computer systems succumbed to serious malfunctions. Physical changes followed the mental ones, people mutating into rampaging reptilian horrors. Where these mutants were concentrated, in the major cities, the environment began to change; a hostile, alien ecosystem seemingly spreading out of nowhere.

 

This is where humanity finds itself now, driven into enclaves in the wilderness as the planet turns against them. There is hope, however, in those few who have experienced a different response to the code, developing bizarre new powers with which to fight back. Combined with as much cutting-edge technology as the survivors could savage, the fate of Earth is not yet sealed.

 

In a retro-future, humanity has conquered the solar system, for the most part unaware of the true dangers of the void they move through. That blackness is what ancient cultures called the underworld, the place where the dead dwell, and it is up to the brave few who have the necessary knowledge and powers to drive spectres and hungry ghosts back into the dark, to keep humankind safe from what lurks in the gulf between worlds.

With tensions running high following NATO’s Able Archer exercise of 1983, various branches of the Soviet scientific apparatus are tasked with improving military capabilities or finding ways to ensure continuity of the Communist Party in the event of nuclear war. Project Shlyuz is a group that straddles both objectives, having found a means to open gateways into parallel universes.

Mir-711 is a colony established by Project Shlyuz on a world that is very similar to Earth in many ways, whose native inhabitants have reached a medieval level of technology, hardly tapping into the vast natural resources available. Paranormal phenomena are common in this place, as are strange creatures and races; most striking are the Blyudtse, vast flying discs of ice, the upper surfaces of which are carved into cities. Abandoned by the beings that created them, these cities are nonetheless riddled with strange dangers, and can have devastating effects on the body and mind of those that explore them.

Project Shlyuz is equipped with technology from shadowy departments across the USSR, technology considered science fiction in the 1980s; micronised computer systems, massive transport VTOLs, powered armour. With science and Russian spirit, the bizarre new world will be conquered for the benefit of the USSR.

The cities and factories are swallowed by forest now, forest in which the wolf-folk, the skin-changers, hold dominion. No longer repressed by human knowledge, by the straight-jacket of scientific fact, magic moves through the trees, it dances in the sky as eerie light.

Man is not yet gone, but confined to the last industrial enclaves, farmed for blood by vampiric masters, the rulers of a technological underworld. There are battles yet to be fought between the surface dwellers and lurkers below, and alliances to be made with strange spirits and rogue machines.

The werewolves can be roughly divided into the Midguard, who can shift from human to wolf, though most often assume a form somewhere in-between; the Primals, who live wild as giant wolves, and can at best morph into a humanoid wolf-form; and the Junk Dogs, ostracised by the others for maintaining human language and technical expertise, they live as humans and can only shift into a wolf-man form.

There is a reason no human has set foot on the Moon since 1972; NASA left nearly one hundred bags of human waste on the lunar surface. Exposure to cosmic rays has mutated the gut bacteria in those bags into a seething, colony organism; the Procellarion. Hibernating on its barren, airless prison world, this monster waits for warm host bodies to arrive and carry it to more hospitable climes. Until NASA can figure out a way to destroy the shit-spawned abomination, the Moon is off-limits to manned expeditions.

A world dominated by vast jungles, where for untold aeons the Jormungandr conducted experiments mingling magic and science; they constructed vast cities, some silently hovering above the trees, and engineered thousands of strange new species.

Whether they succumbed to their own esoteric arts, or simply abandoned the planet, the Jormungandr are now gone. The Dokkalfar have followed in their footsteps and unraveled some of their secrets; these new conquerors are now armed with mystical technology. This technology is a necessary defence against the things in the jungles, and the Draugr; humans who discovered Quetzalheim and succumbed to a virulent curse, becoming a marauding army of the undead.

It began with a hole in the riverbank somewhere near Oxford, but the otherworld it reached has spilled into ours, an alien influence spreading inexorably across England. Anywhere the stain of that place touches, natural laws become malleable and reality itself is subject to change.

The British Isles are under quarantine, and the remaining residents now mingle with the strange inhabitants of the otherworld, while the army of Queen Victoria fights with aetheric weapons against the invading soldiers of the Red Queen.