Flicking through some old 2000AD's and Rogue Trooper specifically, inspired me to have an idea but its a bit non standard.
In Rogue Trooper for those not familiar Rogue is a clone soldier. The force behind him worked out that training and skills had to be learnt but that they could grow new clone bondies easily in a vat.
So when you die your mind, experience etc gets stored to a bio-chip to be tansfered later to another body.
So background over.
This is the idea. If you abstract that concept and say that the Pc has the ability to transfer their mind to any other creature upon its death then you have a game where the PCs can swap bodies with things they capture or slay (if the slain stuff can be patched up).
Physical stats would of course be meaningless as you could swap your body out for another at any time. Skills and mental stats would be key.
Just a random idea.
Rather classic transhumanism/cyberpunk stuff. Go read up Altered Carbon.
Sure, that could be awesome. Bloodlust (French RPG published in the 90s by Siroz Productions) does something like this by having to PCs linked together. Basically you have players each playing two characters: an indestructible God weapon of power, comparable to Stormbringer, of any shape, with powers and shit, and a carrier of somebody else's God weapon.
Ok. Typical scenario, one or several carriers will be killed, but they are replaced by the new people picking up the God weapons they were carrying, right? So in effect, you always play the same God weapon in the group, but the carriers change constantly.
That's awesome.
Quote from: Rincewind1;514540Rather classic transhumanism/cyberpunk stuff. Go read up Altered Carbon.
Yes but .... here I am thinking you have to kill stuff so you can reanimate/control it.
Actually could be fantasy rather than Scifi....
Quote from: jibbajibba;514546Yes but .... here I am thinking you have to kill stuff so you can reanimate/control it.
Actually could be fantasy rather than Scifi....
Hm, I misread the first sentence a bit. Still - for the effect of such constant shifts on human mind, Altered Carbon'd be a good read.
The idea reminds me somewhat of the ancient game, Messiah (if I remember the title correctly). It's decent one, but will require a lot of book keeping, as the PCs could change into any monster they slay, as I understand.
Eclipse Phase is designed to do the whole body swapping thing.
There was a free RPG designed for this sort of thing too, called the Synapse RPG. I read it but can't remember much beyond being unimpressed, except that the art was very nice.
www.synapserpg.com/download (http://www.synapserpg.com/download)
Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;514559Eclipse Phase is designed to do the whole body swapping thing.
There was a free RPG designed for this sort of thing too, called the Synapse RPG. I read it but can't remember much beyond being unimpressed, except that the art was very nice.
www.synapserpg.com/download (http://www.synapserpg.com/download)
Thanks BSJ
Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;514559Eclipse Phase is designed to do the whole body swapping thing.
There was a free RPG designed for this sort of thing too, called the Synapse RPG. I read it but can't remember much beyond being unimpressed, except that the art was very nice.
www.synapserpg.com/download (http://www.synapserpg.com/download)
EP is pretty much Kovacs with horror elements added ;).
Whats Kovacs?
Sorry I should clarify too: Synapse isn't specifically about playing clone soldiers or anything, it just doesn't IIRC have physical attributes, which would help with the body swapping thing.
EDIT: interesting, seems the author of it was banned on rpgnet for being a spambot.
Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;514580Whats Kovacs?
Sorry I should clarify too: Synapse isn't specifically about playing clone soldiers or anything, it just doesn't IIRC have physical attributes, which would help with the body swapping thing.
EDIT: interesting, seems the author of it was banned on rpgnet for being a spambot.
The main character of famous Morgan's Trilogy that's pretty much the trademark of Transhuman/Cyberpunk fiction these days. First novel (and the only 1 I read so far, but got the other 2) is Altered Carbon, which I more then highly recommend.
Ah, will make a mental note of the name, though I haven't read alot of transhumanism stuff (some of John Varley's stuff is about it for me there). Haven't been doing enough reading lately, actually...too many dodgy RPG rulebooks to go through I guess...
Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;514596Ah, will make a mental note of the name, though I haven't read alot of transhumanism stuff (some of John Varley's stuff is about it for me there). Haven't been doing enough reading lately, actually...too many dodgy RPG rulebooks to go through I guess...
Kovacs is more Cyberpunk then pure transhumanism, especially in the spirit of the ancient joke about the difference between those two ;). I recommend it very much - I remember the day I picked up Altered Carbon. Then I remember three days later, when I had finished it, and crawled my way to the kitchen, to find some water.
It's relevant here, because of the cortical stacks (which are also featured in EP if I remember), swapping between bodies is very, very easy.
Funny enough, long before I even knew there was Transhuman Fiction, I wrote a game called Interaction (before the "modern" Internet.)
Its sol function was you were people stored in a vast supercomputer realm, since space travel hadn't developed FTL, and humans found the computerized self, rather more useful. Then, the Brain Trust as it were those who lived lives at superspeed in the supercomputer, developed FTL. Only catch? Computers couldn't control the ships. They get a bit scrambled in traveling at FTL speeds.
So humans "re-formatted" into biological bodies. The game had a "racial" cost for these space opera creations from pure humans to Dralasite like blob folk that were cheaper but had specialized abilities to sentient balls of plasma, all created as your body with SCIENCE!
They had a credit cost, traits had a credit cost, and so on. You were reformatted into a body to explore space. If you died, your signal flashed back at FTL speed, and when received they'd format you again. For a cost.
Of course I never worked out some aspects of it, like why the organic modems didn't scramble, or how you get dead party members back without a long delay in their exploration.
I was 13, give me a break. (The original idea was to market the game in a boxed set, with a set of disks. One with chargen software, one that installed a dice roller and several that ran a sort of "Choose your own adventure" video game for characters if you wanted to.)
Remember this was the age of floppies...
Should had published now and claimed that Richard Morgan was obviously influenced by your work.
Eclipse Phase is completely legally free online as a CC3.0 licensed PDF.
Boot up your bittorrent client and download it from here:
http://www.demonoid.me/files/details/2625856/44298900/
The printed hardback is lovely, but big. It's also a quite crunchy game but you may love that.