It's the year 1850 -- the War for the West has commenced in earnest.
It's difficult to understand quite how terrible the coming war for the open plains of Northern Laurasia will be without a bit of historical context. You see, the strange world of Ehrth is both like and unlike our own world...
In the distant past, during the Devonian Period (419-359 million years ago), the world was ruled by a highly advanced 'Silurian' civilization of reptoids that, it is believed by modern archeologists who have studied their legacy, traveled to other worlds and dimensions. Some researchers even believe the Silurians to have originated on Mars.
Alongside the Silurians, the remains of a prehistoric civilization of intelligent and highly advanced synapsids (a clade of prehistoric vertebrates that combined mammalian and reptilian features, the most well known representative of which was the sail-backed Dimetrodon) have also been discovered in the extensive network of tunnels which lie deep beneath the Antarctic -- these creatures apparently referred to themselves as the Khor (also spelled Khorr/Khoor/Khar/Khaur/Khaar), and they may have journeyed to Ehrth from the Sun.
Whatever the truth, the vast and long-lived civilizations of the Silurians and Khor fell in great disasters, but their legacy was taken up by the Empire of Atlantis in the 'time before history'. The Atlanteans colonized every corner of the globe, and also pioneered the use of gene-editing alchemy to create the first mutant animals -- walking, talking fauna that lived alongside, and sometimes in conflict with, their human creators.
The Atlantean legacy was revived by the ancient Greeks, who handed on this legacy to the Romans, and then to subsequent civilizations. As a consequence, the world of Ehrth has consistently enjoyed a comparative level of technology roughly three centuries advanced beyond that of our own Earth, though this technology has an occult flavor based on the Silurian and Khor legacy upon which it was established -- alchemical processes and 'philosopher stone' engines, black Vril-energy machines, ethererum-powered ornithopters, and so forth.
Nothing seems to have gone quite right in the world of Ehrth since the Gotterdammerung, a 1 teraton Ethereum Nuke, was detonated over the Princely States of Germania, specifically the Rattenreich 'throne city' of Kroenigsburg, at the close of the 30 Years War. The perpetrators of this dreadful deed remain unknown, but its effects are undeniable. The Central Plain of Europa was transformed into a polluted wasteland of blast-riven cities populated by mutants and the living dead. The mutated Kommandants of the Rattenreich of Prussien now command vast legions of zombies and mutants as they strive against their fellow warlords and the other powers of Europa for mastery of the lands of their once flourishing empire.
At the same time the Gotterdammerung was detonated, the lands of Ehrth,from distant Nippon to the Dominions of New England, endured a strange phenomenon known as the Three Days of Darkness, where the sun failed to rise for a fearful 72 hours. Mysteriously, some portions of the globe experienced this event as Seven Days of Darkness. Since that day, the world has been plagued by increased demonic activities. Reports of encounters with ancient cryptids and supernatural terrors have also become more frequent.
Alongside the Three Days of Darkness, the despoiling of Central Europa, and the re-emergence of the leylines, a mysterious illness killed off 99.9% of the human population. The world now belongs to the mutant animals, and has for roughly two and a half centuries. These four great cataclysms -- the bomb, the rifts, and the days of darkness, and the great plague, were also followed by the opening of the 'gates' -- the openings in the continental icewall that surrounds the central territories of Ehrth into the Outer Seas. Atlantis and Atilla, along with other lost continents such as Mu, Thule, Hyperboria, and Lemuria, were all rediscovered or re-arisen.
Now, the malign forces of Hades and Dyval, two infernal dimensions with designs upon Ehrth, both seek to make new inroads in this age. The 'Dominions of New England', a confederacy of mutant animals which dominates the Northeastern and central Atlantic coast of Northern Laurentia, is, in particular, riven by the influence of these two infernal powers...
Got that? Let's return to the 1850s -- several centuries of mutant animal rule have done little to alleviate the warlike tendencies of civilization. Tensions between the Glimmering Confederacy of the Golden Triangle, a vicious compact of slaving city-states and their dependencies, and the technologically-inclined Dominions of New England are quickly escalating. A war between these two powers of Eastern Laurasia is expected in the next 1-2 decades. The Capetian Dominions, still united closely with the Napoleonic Empire of New France, wait patiently on the sidelines for their opportunity to take advantage of the conflict. To the West, tribes of the Great Plains seek to fend off advances from the Republics of Monte Rey, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, Baha, and Houston to the south, and the 'Mormonite' colonists of the Great Salt Basin. The quickly-multiplying tendrils of the seemingly endless rail tracks laid the great Locomotive Guilds of the Dominions of New England throughout the Western plains of Northern Laurasia threaten to consume the heretofore pristine lands of the Great Prairie...
Ah -- the Glimmering Confederacy of the Golden Triangle, also known as the Empire of Agony. This cruel, avaricious realm, whose power was built up upon the whip-stricken backs of its legions of enslaved magic-users and elementals, is now facing a surprisingly tenacious revolt within its Mesoamerican territories. Rumors abound that the ancient powers of Aztlan -- the blood-soaked realm of the camazotzt, the mutant animal vampire-bats who once ruled this region -- seek to take advantage of the new disunity and reassert their power, rising from their places of refuge in the deep earth. Other reports herald that the fabled Fountain of Youth has been located -- the brightest jewel of Moctezuma's lost treasury held in the fabled glistening city of El Dorado. If either the sanguinomancers of Aztlan, or the psionic slavers of the Golden Circle were to locate the Fountain, the fallout could lead to the conquest of the entire continent by one of these baneful powers.
Enterprising heroes with a talent for subterfuge are needed to infiltrate the mysteries of the Valley of Mexico, rendezvous with the sore-beset cells of the revolution, and keep the power of the fabled lost city from the hands of evil doers.
Greetings fellow mythweavers. I'd like to try to run a game I had in mind for the Palladium system in a slightly simpler rpg engine -- the open d6 system: https://ogc.rpglibrary.org/index.php?title=OpenD6. All the rules are completely free. I listed the game as 'mini D6' because open d6 was not an option.
The basic game mechanism is relatively simple -- you have a pool of d6s and you roll them against a target number. One dice in the pool is a 'wild dice' which can have additional effects like in Savage Worlds. The dice can explode. There are attributes and skills and powers, but no classes. Progression is essentially getting more dice for the pools. There is a lot of room for homebrewing/customization in this system. I'd imagine having a long list of abilities and skills and access to a number of powers to try to model the diversity of character options in other systems. However, even if the character sheets are long, the underlying system is extremely simple and it actually shouldn't take a long time to make a character -- mostly just assigning 3D, 4D, 5D to ability and skill pools and picking some equipment and powers out of the magic book. I'll come up with the full details if there's enough interest. The characters would be mutant animals.
CharmingSatyr
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Brian Skies
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igordragonian12
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