Gamers generally like to explore and even create different worlds, some of them  just variants on this mess we call the real world.  Some games are just the 'real word', with Cthulhu for example. Others are like the real with, with 'cyber'.

Well, for about a year or so there's been a lot of talk about UFOs and people admitting they exist, and seem to do things beyond any possible human aircraft of known natural phenomena .

So if you rule out known possible natural phenomenon or human aircraft, well, what's left? Some type of craft of hon human origin that is vastly advanced over anything humans have today?

I'm wondering what the world we have today would be like if absolutely irrefutable evidence of basically alien craft existing and operating in earth's skies were made public and even governments admitted, as they slowly seem to be doing, that they are real.

Say that nothing about the actual aliens were known, just the fact they exist and are here in some ways was finally made clear.

What happens to the world then?

Any ideas?

IIRC, this is one of the possible futures of Conspiracy X. Then the bulk of the reptilians escape from the event horizon of the singularity that's held them for millions of years and they come to reclaim their planet from humans.

They probably are real, but they're not who they claim to be.  It's another conspiracy for RPGs to explore.

StellaGamma Publishing produces a campaign setting for Cepheus Engine called "These Stars Are Ours" for this.

I want two tickets off this rock by next Friday?

Even with all the cheese and tackiness, I liked the "Taken" TV miniseries of the early 2000. It provided a multi generational arc of three very different families tackling with real and mysterious aliens. It had both a Government/Army point of view and the one of the common man (lot's of choices for the PCs in such a campaign).

And the aliens were scary even if, at the end, well intentioned, because they were... literally alien, and so they didn't understand how evil and harmful many of their acts were. They had a definite endgame too, which is always useful.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289830/

An episode was also devoted to the "Ancient Aliens" concept. It was the most hated, because it temporarily derailed the main plot to go to Alaska and the ancient burial grounds up there, but I found it fascinating - and the seed of another way to explore such a plot.

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 25, 2021, 08:04:33 PM
StellaGamma Publishing produces a campaign setting for Cepheus Engine called "These Stars Are Ours" for this.

A good reply, this cepheus engine seems to be quite the little platform, might have to look at it sometime.

Quote from: Reckall on May 26, 2021, 01:47:20 AM
Even with all the cheese and tackiness, I liked the "Taken" TV miniseries of the early 2000. It provided a multi generational arc of three very different families tackling with real and mysterious aliens. It had both a Government/Army point of view and the one of the common man (lot's of choices for the PCs in such a campaign).

And the aliens were scary even if, at the end, well intentioned, because they were... literally alien, and so they didn't understand how evil and harmful many of their acts were. They had a definite endgame too, which is always useful.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289830/

An episode was also devoted to the "Ancient Aliens" concept. It was the most hated, because it temporarily derailed the main plot to go to Alaska and the ancient burial grounds up there, but I found it fascinating - and the seed of another way to explore such a plot.

That certainly has potential.

 The world or a game world?   Irrefutable evidence and I suspect the world falls into chaos  -or- looks to a big strong leader-daddy to tell them what to think.  I also think aliens are smart enough to realize this is what humans would do, so they find and prop up a leader-daddy as fast as they possibly can. 

   I also think it would depend a whole lot about what sort of evidence was presented.  Video and a narrative can completely and utterly control a reaction from the general public.  So it will only be irrefutable if it is an all out attack on a fairly wide scale, multiple sightings with good video in multiple areas, or the powers that be have decided to make it a real thing.

   If we were to see what look like hostility, such as a raid on a town or military installation (but still small scale) I could see a complete and utter breakdown of society in a week from people all  developing an every man for himself attitude and stealing toilet paper and canned goods (people were fighting in grocery stores over fucking cleaning products).   I can see immediate factions forming in the population, some who will suicide bomb themselves against the aliens, and some who can not wait to surrender and offer aid for a chance to get a leg up.   Basically people will be people and if the aliens are in fact tech superior to us, our "leaders" will quickly sell it to us that working with the aliens is not so bad (by that I mean giving them anything they want, including 1 month old babies to eat) and it will be "good for us in the long run".

    Game world I just run it like X-com.   Probably focus more on the low key ship crashes or landings and have a team investigate (GURPS for this, for me) and create adventures from there.

Quote from: The Thing on May 25, 2021, 06:29:05 PM
Say that nothing about the actual aliens were known, just the fact they exist and are here in some ways was finally made clear.

What happens to the world then?

Any ideas?

You know how skeptics deny and challenge everything, and believers argue with them?

That's what happens, and it looks no different from reality.  I mean, we have people who argue the earth is flat.  You think accepted reports of UFOs will change anything?



You need a better hook to get a gamer's interest.  I'd recommend going the Roadside Picnic/Stalker route, but dialed up to an 11, and have aliens come down and that their mere presence does -something-. 

The aliens themselves stay in their ships; we never interact with the aliens, but even the skeptics can't deny that the 2.7km sized "disc thing" that's hovering over Chicago and mucking up gravity underneath it isn't of this earth.  After that, accepting the immortality people claim the Tendrils of San Francisco brings is real is much easier.  All around the world, people find more and more places where "aliens" have arrived.  Maybe they're still around, maybe they've already left (seemingly).  Regardless, they've changed the world around them, and now humanity is trying to deal with the changes.  This isn't a post-apocalyptic setting though!  People still go to work, food is still grown and shipped around, climate change and peak oil and riots and all the other worries people about like the news tells them to still happens. 

But there's no hiding that aliens have been here, are still here, and the world is changing.

The governments tried to block off impacted areas.  But once they realized how widespread the areas are, they gave that idea up.  Now they try to control people.  You can still live in Seattle for example, but you're not supposed to use any of the hundreds of (known) "summoner crystals".  And if your subconsciousness activates one, as scientists believe is pretty common, you may be held accountable for whatever criminal actions your "daemons" commit.  If they can trace it to you of course. 

Meanwhile, Russian agents (and Chinese, and German, and Iranian, and Canadian, and...) are inflitrating America at every angle to see what they can learn/steal.  Lots of potential spy stuff here!  Or maybe the aliens are worldwide, and foreign agents investigate everything but are stretched really thin.  Sure the pyrokinesis everybody in Sydney has is neat and all, but it's already been established that you need three or more people holding hands within 10km of The Ifreeti for it to work.  And the Ifreeti is a loudly glowing (sic) cylinder estimated to weigh 700 tons and is 80 meters tall.  It's not going anywhere easily.  Except... the Australian government has put guards and scientists around it and have learned they can chip away pieces of the Ifreeti, and its power is at full strength even with a piece.  (Although the Australians don't realize the Ifreeti's pieces will grow into new cylinders with use.)

Like I said, this isn't a post-apocalyptic setting.  But we're probably rapidly sliding into a pre-apocalypse. 

Well i was thinking the real world, and how to model that into games that simulate the real world more or less.

For one thing I believe it could lead to a real renaissance in modern science around the world. I mean, if it were proven beyond all doubt that alien craft that could outperform any human technology and operated on principles of physics that we can't grasp yet, it could lead to a global effort to make new scientific progress. Fuck, it might get american kids taking college physics courses again! it might get education funding raised!  Science might become cool again.

Fuck you, i can dream.

For a campaign I would like more for my aliens to be remote, almost urban legends, and scary. The PCs could, at the beginning, even not be sure if these "aliens" are real, or if they are the cover story for some secret government activity or such. "Abductees" could develop fake memories of being examined by "scary doctors", because their brains can't elaborate correctly the experience aboard an alien spaceship. And then, what's the aliens endgame?

There is this other movie, "The Fourth Kind", which sadly damages itself by presenting both a fake "found footage" about some events in Alaska and then the "Hollywood" version. They should have chosen a road and stayed with it: using both ruined the immersion. The story, however, is truly scary, with incomprehensible aliens that use humans like guinea pigs for unexplained experiments only to discard them incurably broken both in spirit and body.

I would absolutely use SAN rules but, for once, avoid "lovecraftian" ideas. Greys, strange lights and the "Ancient Aliens" series on History Channel would suffice (in my game world 95% of the "documentaries" contents would be balloonery - it would be up to the PCs to discover what is true among all the dreck).

And then there is the interesting point made in "Taken" that I mentioned earlier. In that miniseries the aliens are revealed to be well intentioned, but their methods are very often evil and scary. The destroy people's lives, sometimes killing innocent civilians. Victims go crazy. Males and females are kidnapped, forced to copulate, and then minwiped "to produce superior beings".

So, the initial approach could turn into a conundrum for the PCs: Can we actually try to "understand" these beings, communicate and find a common ground? In a "government" milieu this could be a debate between the military and the scientist, but also among "daring civilian researchers" opinions can be split. And a sadistic GM can of course keep in his pocket the absolutely evil aliens of "The Fourth Kind" should the players decide that "of course this is a metaphor for communicating and understanding!"

So, a lot of X-Files, Ancient Aliens, Urban Legends, fear and SAN loss for me. The "ID4/X-Com" approach can be he start of a second phase, but I liked how both "Taken" and "The Fourth Kind" reached their very different endgames with only a relatively small group of people destined to know the truth.

Quote from: The Thing on May 27, 2021, 12:18:32 PM
Well i was thinking the real world, and how to model that into games that simulate the real world more or less.

Problem is, really real world generally makes for unpopular game settings.  The closer you get to mundane life, the more people have no reason to play when they could just go outside and live.  I'm not convinced "pilots confirm UFOs are real" makes for much of a game.

Quote from: The Thing on May 27, 2021, 12:18:32 PMFor one thing I believe it could lead to a real renaissance in modern science around the world. I mean, if it were proven beyond all doubt that alien craft that could outperform any human technology and operated on principles of physics that we can't grasp yet, it could lead to a global effort to make new scientific progress.

Maybe.  But we're assuming a lot of stuff here: 1) UFO skeptics become the new Flat Earthers.  2)  UFOs are assumed to actually be using some great new physics that we don't have (as opposed to, say, advanced holographic technology).  3)  UFO-related research pans out in life-changing tech within the PCs lifespans.  4)  All of this results in a game that's more than just an excuse for a "mundane" real-world espionage campaign.

Quote from: The Thing on May 27, 2021, 12:18:32 PMFuck, it might get american kids taking college physics courses again! it might get education funding raised!

When I was a kid, the joke went "science is questions without answer, religion is answers without question."  Looking around today, by that metric science has become another religion.  If UFO science indicates that our current understanding of physics is all wrong, expect people pushing back -hard-.  And subsequently being unable to make heads or tails out of what they're looking at .  All that funding and renewed interest means squat if colleges can't convince kids to ignore a few decades/centuries of scientific progress that was in the wrong direction, and they have to think in ways that would be deemed wrong a short time before, if not outright maddening to the human mind ("alright you research nerds.  Make a SAN roll!"  "Bah!  I'm already hardened to science-based SAN rolls.  I'm a quantum physicist!  I'll just take the minimum SAN loss, thankyouverymuch.").

Granted, with UFOs around, people will be more inclined to try out all sorts of stuff that folks used to scoff at.  Ley Lines are real, Pyramid Power works, the Necronomicon (paperback edition) lets you summon Sumerian demons, and Telekinesis is possible if you drink enough caffeine.

Quote from: The Thing on May 27, 2021, 12:18:32 PMScience might become cool again.

It's plenty popular, if only in a "I'm in the IFLS Facebook group!" kind of way.

Quote from: The Thing on May 27, 2021, 12:18:32 PMFuck you, i can dream.

I'll be blunt, you're using a tone like you might use with people you know.  You don't know me, I'm not your friend.  Save the "fuck yous" for your family.

Quote from: Habitual Gamer on May 27, 2021, 02:08:31 PM
If UFO science indicates that our current understanding of physics is all wrong, expect people pushing back -hard-.  And subsequently being unable to make heads or tails out of what they're looking at .

I don't know. I'm not sure, for example, that there would be a single, uniform reaction.

Let's say that a U.F.O. crashes in the United States after pulling some physics-denying stunts. I'm sure that the military would like to know how a flying object can turn on a dime while going at 600Kts. What if the Russians or the Chinese deploy all of sudden some advanced technology? Were their scientists simply better than expected, or they got some crashed U.F.O.s too and now are further into understanding formerly unexplored scientific fields? The paranoia would run high.

[I remember an Italian comic book with a story that started with the Soviets launching the Sputnik, and the US President calling the Army and angrily demanding "Why the studies on the Roswell's U.F.O. were so unsuccessful?" - only to be told that no U.F.O. had crashed at Roswell. The story proper was, then, about the attempt by the C.I.A. to gain access to the technology that the Soviets had gained at... Tunguska! Those were the days  ]

Quote from: Jam The MF on May 25, 2021, 07:57:23 PM
They probably are real, but they're not who they claim to be.  It's another conspiracy for RPGs to explore.

My theory for them is that they're some sort of interdimensional being/thingy.