Earth 6047: Extrahuman Sentience

So here’s my new plan: I’m going to work on Earth 6047 until school starts while doing a new setting in the background, and then I’ll be done with it, until I feel inspired to add some more on. When school starts, I’ll have a detailed and well-designed campaign setting to show all y’all.

On to business.

Several anomalous species have evolved since the war. It isn’t known if they’re post-human or not, and if so, if they evolved out of natural causes or due to genetic engineering by the Strain. Regardless, they’re extremely frightening and mysterious – they don’t appear human, but they seem to have sentience and a strange, raw hatred for all the post-human species.

Deepwalkers

Easily the most terrifying of the extrahuman species, the enigmatic and reclusive Deepwalkers are feared by the humans because of the sheer unlikeliness of their creation: most humans have a conception that the war created their forms, and that they were all one people eons ago, whether they know about fallout mutation or not. The fallout couldn’t possibly have reached the home of the deepwalkers; thus, they must have evolved on their own, making them the first nonhuman threat to survival the human or post-human race has had since the last Ice Age. They hail from the dark depths of the ocean, having evolved from one of a multitude of deep-sea mollusks. Their frightening alien-ness is helped along by this fact: they are large Cthulhoid monsters, basically. They have typical gelatinous mollusk bodies and oblong heads, with no noticeable mouths, and six powerful tentacles, two of which are covered with four opposable sub-tentacles. This lets them grasp things – often weapons and occasionally human heads – and use them with frightening veracity. They are the scourge of the Pacific Homo Aquae population, striking out of the depths in brutal, unheralded raids to attack and often destroy coastal settlements. Those water-dwellers who were not killed are typically hardened against them, responding to their raids as the ancient Anglo-Saxons defended against the Vikings. In the extreme northern reaches of the Great Barrier Reef, a constant, shifting three-way war is fought between the Homo Aquae, who are merely defending their lands against an unwarranted attack, the Deepwalkers, who want the land for reasons unknown, and the carnivorous, mutant coral, which thrives on battlefields. Thus, after a large battle, the coral begins to spread, and the victorious party is forced to advance quickly or be subsumed and destroyed by the coral forest. The Deepwalkers began to attack generations ago, for no known reason and possibly even out of fear that the humans would start it first. They appear totally organized – attacks are always coordinated, and their don’t appear to be warring factions at all. The only comfort the embattled humans can realistically take is that the Deepwalkers don’t appear to be able to attack the land – yet.

Ice Colossi

The only remotely nonthreatening extrahuman species, the Ice Colossi are a mystery to most uneducated posthuman, but are in fact a “failed” experiment by the Strain humans – in their desire to crush the planet’s resistance quickly, they attempted to genetically engineer a superhuman race rather than evolve one. The early Homo Glacialis abductees were transformed, over very few generations, into hulking monsters capable of killing ten posthumans with each blow. They did not feel pain, remorse, or mercy. They were to be the perfect soldiers with which to conquer Earth. The only problem was that they were really, really dumb. They could barely follow orders, and, even worse, couldn’t distinguish between enemy and master on the battlefield, which led to disaster all the time. They couldn’t possibly all be killed, and they were peaceful unless provoked, so the Strain-humans allowed them to flee into the remote north and south of the planet, where they scattered and wandered, eventually learning to eke out a living on plants. They are feared and respected by the mountain- and steppe-dwellers, similar to yetis. Offerings are left to the great, apelike beasts, and the posthumans basically stay the hell out of their way otherwise. Getting ripped limb from limb isn’t very fun.

Grass Sharks

The name says it all, except for the fact that sharks don’t have an advanced tribal civilization and ambitions to destroy human civilization. The Grass Sharks, which is merely a human vernacular name for them (their species name is something closer to “Kchrshaskriskashn”), are a species that has terrorized human settlements on the plains of Africa for years, but has only recently begun to launch organized raids on them, even reaching as far east as the remaining Turkic steppes. They are considered to be descended from the lions of ancient years, but have evolved the ability to stand upright for limited periods of time (certainly long enough to bite your face off), and have also apparently become quite sapient. They are becoming a legitimate military threat to both the breakaway plain-walkers and mainstream desert-walkers, able to cover extreme distances and attack in an eyeblink. In fact, they serve more or less the same role as the Deepwalkers of the Pacific, which is to say they’re scary and they’re coming for you.

That’s all for now. These can be monsters or PC races. I’ll add some more soon.

~ by pieboy on August 30, 2007.