IS THIS TRAINSHOCK!?!? IM 110% OKAY WITH THIS, PLEASE, GO ON!

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From the Century of Progress World's Fair in 1939 to the Century 21 World's Fair in Seattle, 1963, a sense of technological optimism was born, and a new social status quo emerged out of the war resulting in the longest cultural decade - the 1950's, which lasted from the end of the war to the Kennedy assassination.

But what if one man's vision for a world of new cities, free from crime by grace of master-planning, for a future of unbridled progress, could have been made reality? What if one man had the wealth to finance a group of former Manhattan Project scientists, disillusioned by the reality of the atomic bomb and fearful for a future of nuclear war and Red Scares, and set them loose upon the project of building the arc in which he and his chosen could escape the impending cultural upheavals of the sixties?

And what conflict might arise from the Brains Trust, who breathe a future free from the mindset that led to the horrors of Hiroshima and the paranoia of McCarthyism, and their patron who wants more than anything to keep the 1950's suspended in time forever?

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"Dayle calls them his Visionaries, but it completely twists the meaning of the word. Its his vision he's talking about, they aren't allowed the luxury of dreams of their own. As the sign says 'We allow no geniuses at our labs.' What's the point of what we're putting in the water, giving everyone such magnificent brains, if they're being taught not to use them? It's like he wants to replace the Brain Trust with automatons.

So I was feeling a little rambunctious and decided to go talk to some of them. Dayle's got one group working on pills for the Mars Patrol. Protein pills, radiation pills, pills that let you lift a broken rover with your mind. So I asked one of them 'why not pills that you fly like a bird, or change the color of your skin, or be able to go outside the city walls and walk, unhindered, on the surface of Luna?

When Dayle finds out it'll drive him nuts. I can't wait."
- from the desk of Joe "Drummer" Feinstein

"I don't trust the Californians Dayle brought with him on the last run, the final supply mission from Earth. I get that Howard is the bankroll, but he's locked himself in the arcology and never leaves. And Bob fancies himself Daniel Boone in a space suit. And Jack? They say he's organized some kind of Satanic cult behind closed pod bay doors. But the worst of all, the worst by far, is Ron. There is something deeply wrong about that man."
- From the desk of Chien Wu Song

ITT
> Moon Bioshock
> Walt Disney, with his lieutenants: Howard Hughes, Robert Heinlein, Jack Parsons, and L. Ron Hubbard
> Manhattan project scientists that made the city possible now at odds with him
> Richard Feynman suggested to highly suggestible designer brains of the food pill project that they make plasmid pills, as a joke

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zcmLsIbFD0

That's from the 60's NY world's fair, in which Walt was trying to recapture the feel of the 39 one with his contribution. But perhaps more inspiring is the Seattle World's Fair of 63 -


>In "The Threshold and the Threat", visitors rode a "Bubbleator" into the "world of tomorrow". Music "from another world" and a shifting pattern of lights accompanied them on a 40-second upward journey to a starry space bathed in golden light. Then they were faced briefly with an image of a desperate family in a fallout shelter, which vanished and was replaced by a series of images reflecting the sweep of history, starting with the Acropolis and ending with an image of Marilyn Monroe (but, again, including a mushroom cloud).

>Next, visitors were beckoned into a cluster of cubes containing a model of a "city of the future" (which a few landmarks clearly indicated as Seattle) and its suburban and rural surroundings, seen first by day and later by night. The next cluster of cubes zoomed in on a vision of a high-tech, future home in a sylvan setting (and a commuter gyrocopter); a series of projections contrasted this "best of the future" to "the worst of the present" (over-uniform suburbs, a dreary urban housing project).

>The exhibit continued with a vision of future transportation (centered on a monorail and high-speed "air cars" on an electrically controlled highway). There was also an "office of the future", a climate-controlled "farm factory", an automated offshore kelp and plankton harvesting farm, a vision of the schools of the future with "electronic storehouses of knowledge", and a vision of the many recreations that technology would free humans to pursue.

>Finally, the tour ended with a symbolic sculptural tree and the reappearance of the family in the fallout shelter and the sound of a ticking clock, a brief silence, an extract from President Kennedy's Inaugural Address, followed by a further "symphony of music and color".

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See, I had no idea that Disney had actually met Hughes or prominent scientists, so it seems there is a rich vein being tapped here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Moonliner

So tldr, get your helmet on, take your protein pills, and prepare for a society built on futurism, derailed, in the impossible lunar sanctuary, Progress City

>>24093281
>>24090170

When you talked about Pills and Geniuses, i thought this was a Genius: The Transgression thread.

Whelp, at least now I know what system I'll use to run Bioshock: Progress.

>>24093836

That's where I got monorail of broken dreams and the idea to think about the Seattle World's Fair from.

But really all of the non-19th century national opening type world fairs - the ones that declared British, French, and American grandeur - are all basically about progress and tech, so drawing on the Century of Progress from Chicago 33, the Futurama of New York 39, and then the Seattle and New York fairs of the pre-cultural revolution 60's are good.

Finding the balance between full on retrofuture city of Progress and having monorails and not just flying cars, you know wanting to have a bit more of the streamline supersonic future and not just rayguns, leotards, and rocketships, is the question of course.

But the city almost designs itself given Disney's original epcot/Progress City designs based on the radial cities ideas of the late 19th century; and combining that with the various "Zones" of the 39 New York World's fair would produce something pretty cool.

So what do you think about the basic-set up, with analogues of the Oppenheimer side of the atomic scientist schism being not-Disney's original braintrust that make Progress possible, and then not-Hughes the additional funder and the freaks from the magic kingdom as Disney's lieutenants?

I just can't resist putting Heinlein, Hubbard, and Parsons into a Disney-led moon city.

I was thinking the Brains Trust of analogues of Oppenheimer, Feynman, and Szilard/Fermi composite being the trinity of scientists opposed to the military-industrial complex's domination of their Manhattan Project work.

The Brain Trust was then filled out with Vaun Braun* and Freeman Dyson* hired by Hughes* to make the atomic Moonliner a reality; and Buckminster Fuller* hired by Disney/Winters as they pretty much share the same vision on the design of habitats and use of materials.

Hughes* brings along on the final run from Earth to the moon the non and lesser scientists, as part of his coterie of fellow futurists. After all, Winters may have designed the city with the scientists to help make it a reality, but its Hughes' moonliner so if he wants to bring along some additional folks who is going to stop him?

This is amazing, a perfect adaptation of the Bioshock theme. OP, you get +10 internets for the idea alone. Hell, email it to the Bioshock writing team.

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Leadership, Mr.Duke. Leadership means that a group, large or small, is willing to entrust authority to a person who has shown judgement, wisdom, personal appeal, and proven competence time and time again.

On this planetoid, that person is me.

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One of the 19th century radial city designs that inspired Walt Disney's unmade experimental prototype community of tomorrow.

I like the epileptic farms and homes for waifs.

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The Horizons mural may be a good place to start, when trying to isolate besides "the Jetsons" what exactly a retro future moon city should look like.

>>24097174
This THIS 1000x THISSSS

While it makes no sense given the actual meaning of the term as Buckminster Fuller intended, I kind of want to call wonder pills Synergetics just for jargon's sake.

>>24099331
>>24089451
Same guy, sorry for jumping to the TRAINSHOCK conclusion, Moonshock is also more then fine. Allow me to throw my hat into the ring. I suggest you fill this out, It'll be a good primer to people who are familiar with Bioshock, to get them interested with the setting. I'm incredibly interested in this, in case you can't tell.

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>>24100612
I was a fool and forgot my image.

And people wonder why American culture dominates the world...

Oh god I fucking love this. You're doing God's work OP.

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>>24100622
Kind of took the piss as obviously one wouldn't want to just reuse the same plot formula, and we're working on a tabletop game set-up/setting/something here not a single-player videogame, but for the sake of the process I envisioned the FPS style lone protagonist as a gonzo journalist who is guided through the game following the clues of hobbyist safecracker, bongo player, and theoretical physicist Joe Fine (Richard Feynman), only for your Fine to turn out to be a CIA infiltrator while the real Fine has been locked up in the ARKology by Howard Mason (Howard Hughes).

I don't believe there's a challenge anywhere in the world that's more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities. But where do we begin — how do we start answering this great challenge? Well, we're convinced we must start answering the public need. And the need is not just for curing the old ills of old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a special kind of new community that will always be in a state of becoming. It will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future, where people actually live a life they can't find anywhere on Earth.

>>24100870
This is a great idea.

Cosmic rays got you down? Raygun Rick eats radiation for breakfast, thanks to High Red.

Remember to take your pills and to always check your helmet.

>>24100870
Richard Feynman's in this? Fuck yes. Everything's better with Feynman. He was one of the only professors I had at Caltech who wasn't terrible.

>>24100870
Alright, now that we've got that out of the way, let's star hammering down some of the "constants" across Bioshock games/settings, common elements that I've noticed are: The Lighthouse at the Beginning, an important child of science, an explanation for why some areas are inaccessible immediately (Water/broken in the first 2, or the floating island isnt connected in Infinite), a core set of defined ideologies,
These are just a couple things off the top of my head that I can point to examples of in 1, 2 and Infinite.
Also, have you any ideas for unique powers, or maybe what sort of weapons would be present in the setting?

>>24101041
>why some areas are inaccessible immediately

Well, this one's easy. They're full of vacuum. Or radiation.

>>24101023

Why else would you find an audio diary in a safe if not for him cracking the lock, leaving it in there, and then relocking it?

Plus someone has to fill in the self-replicating machine expert role given Von Neuman was a pro-military-industrial complex guy like Teller and wouldn't have left earth.

I assume the main enemy of order in the moon city will be Communists?

My suggestion: the player character should be an Apollo astronaut who is sent to a grid reference by NASA astronomers who spotted something unusual and stumbles on a fantastic space metropolis.

Continue, /tg/, and God bless America.

>>24101109
Probably. I mean, it's got Heinlein as an inhabitant.

>>24101122

Yeah, you get to the coordinates and it's a lighthouse.

On the Moon. Just standing there.

>>24101109
Bioshock is best when it's an enemy based on internal failings of the extremist philosophies rather than external enemies in my opinion.

Ryan fell to Fontaine who was more self centered than him. Lamb, er, well, there was just Delta who was more self giving? I don't fucking know.

And Comstock- okay, fuck it, I'm ignoring everything except the original here.

>>24101122
Hm... This thing took place around the 50s, so it's totally possible that an Apollo mission could stumble across it.

>>24101130

Some kind of Alpha Complex thing where there aren't any real communists but people keep flinging paranoid accusations around?

>>24101109
Hubbard's on board.

Scientology's gotta be SOMEWHERE, they're too much of a hideous corruption of the futurist's ideal in reality to not be exploited a bit.

>>24101150
Well, it says right in the first few posts of the OP that one of the things they escaped from was McCarthyism, so that sounds like it might be no.

What we need is: What could go wrong with the leadership of the Brains Trust, and what opposing extremist group could arise in response?

>>24101156

Could have some of the scientology pseudoscience shit be real. Like those "aura meters" or whatever that they measure people's... uh... potential for happiness with could actually work.

>>24101057
I figured there would be the stereotypical DOMES! for separating districts and the alike, I was wondering what would cause specific buildings or even rooms to be inaccessible. Radiation is a good explanation, actually. "The rad seals on this door have been activated, there's no hope opening it now. From the small, shielded view port, you can tell that the source of the leak was a meltdown in an Everspark Home Fusion generator. Bathed in the eerie glow of the melted, fire-hydrant sized device, are the now-skeletal remains of this apartment's former inhabitants"

>>24101179
Or it measures /something/, at least. Maybe they're looking for psychic potential or something else they can be harvesting horribly.

Also if we're doing 50s futurism there's always robots or aliens.

>>24101156
>>24101174

Maybe the cult formed by the combination of Jack Parsons: Black Magic Rocket Scientist and L. Ron Hubbard (even though they were enemies in real life, leading Parsons to, supposedly, summon a demon in revenge for Hubbard stealing his wife and his boat) is the other faction that opposes the utopian, secular and head-in-the-clouds Brains Trust.

>>24101202
(Or rather the threat of said creatures.)

>>24101191

There's always the simple slapping of a THIS BULKHEAD SEALED BY ORDER OF THE BRAIN TRUST sign on a door, with no further information available.

>>24101174

Whenever I read "Brains Trust" like that I think of brains in jars, like the Brains in that Fallout New Vegas DLC. Maybe that's what happened to the Trust here? They borged themselves and went insane?

Tone down the wacky people.

>>24101203
And the horrible twist is that it turns out Parsons-Hubbard IS on the Brains Trust, the minister of misery in charge of a controlled level of discontent and crime that's inevitable in any society but can be minimized through careful government control.

A total betrayal of the ideal that can be spun as adhering to it on paper.

>>24101174
Well... The Brains Trust is the utopian futurists. People like Disney, Dyson, and Heinlein. Their visions of the future tended to involve a lot of highly-planned stuff that didn't really seem to have any room for the failings and imperfections of real people. Maybe there's a discontent underclass who can't afford their shiny future toys or even the air they need to breathe, because the optimism of the Brains Trust overlooked the fact that real people aren't perfect.

/tg/, I've been kicking around this board for quite some time now, and I remember a time, a time some of you may recall as well, when shit, got, done. Gentlemen, I posit that this, right here and now, be the next thing we pull together and create. We've got the idea, now let's refine it. Let's build this wonderful city on the moon, let's engineer it's downfall. Let's start the open ended tale of the Apollo Astronauts who stumble upon it. After all of that is done, we eek out what system to use *cough*GURPS*cough*, we establish house rules, we test them to balance, and we play this glorious game!

>>24101240
Feynman, Hubbard, Parsons, Dyson, Disney, and Hughes were only slightly less wacky in real life. Parsons was arguably at the upper limits of human wackiness already. He uttered prayers to Pan before every rocket launch and claimed to have summoned a demon to fuck with L. Ron Hubbard.

>>24101109

I was leaning a bit more conventional, with essentially the schism between Winters' desire to preserve the 50's forever, only with supertech, rubbing against the Jewish, female, and leftist Brains Trust a few too many times, as Progress City is on the verge of expanding throughout the solar system (beginning with their current recon through the Mars Patrol).

Winters nostalgia and 50's social mores, and basically wanting Progress City to be more a theme park version of his vision of the future than a living society, makes him strange bedfollows with his friend Howard Mason's bunch, who all have their things going on but are all basically using the new society the way any weirdos in a new place where they're big fish might. So basically I was just inspired by Andrew Ryan setting up his lieutenants throughout Rapture to have this raygun gothic ubermenschen future city out of the Gernsback Continuum (if you've read that story) to be undergoing social shock at the hands of the lieutenants on one hand and the earnest SciFi civilization supporter types of the Brainstrust on the other.

Howard Mason is Mr.House in Space, Robert Valentine is one of two mercenary adventurers he brought in and has set himself up as Commander of the Mars Patrol and has set up a Zone of the city as an anarcho-capitalist freehold, Charles Foster has a crazy new religion based on scientist with him as the messiah, and Danforth may be a brilliant chemist but the man heads up an occult secret society and sincerely believes in magic.

Plus, even though he's great friends with the Brains Trust, Max von Raum (Von Braun) was hired by Mason to build the moonliner and retains (just like Von Braun, despite being nominally on the Oppenheimer side of things, science and military-wise) a weapons engineer's attitude - such as building the orbital weapons platforms (Von Braun actually suggested IRL) on behalf of Winters.

>>24101268

This might be best as a World of Darkness X: The Y game, actually.

>>24101254

There should be some kind of huge administrative computing system that assigns people positions in Luna based on a rigid battery of aptitude tests. Hell, with a moon colony being so difficult to maintain, a few people on strike or just bored of their jobs could cause a citywide disaster. Maybe the enemies of the order are proto-hippies, using drugs to forget the tedium of their lives and refusing to attend to their function?

>>24101278
That works too, way easier to get down, too. I just have an odd attraction to GURPS

>>24101274
I think I like your ideas better than mine.

I don't think you should have von Braun on the team, though. Without Braun, Apollo's never going to get off the ground back on Earth, and we're not going to be able to have anybody actually arriving at the Mysterious Lighthouse.

>>24101268

I know this is going to sound asinine, but I think the best way to run this would be in the form of a quest thread. After all, single player character, general unfolding of the plot, accumulating powers etc. It fits perfectly.

>>24101286
If it's a moon city where Heinlein is a founding member, there's pretty much got to be a huge administrative computing system.

>>24101274

and the Brains Trust aren't perfect. Engelstadt (Oppenheimer) is increasingly cold and distant (disillusioned with his creations once again being turned towards destructive ends, or possessed by some alien intelligence from out in the void, Destroyer of Worlds and all that)

Fine likes to cause trouble and keep changing up Winter's static society for laughs

and Vidor (Fermi/Szilard composite genderflip) is an ethical scientist persecuted for it like the rest of them, but is the type who once they start gets thinking on something can't help but to draw the schematics (such as anti-nuclear weapons Szilard coming up with the cobalt bomb which could eliminate all life on earth).

>>24101318
Wow, you really made me angry right there. Seriously, I've got an anger head ache right now. Congratulations. Please, tell me you were joking or trolling. Please.

>>24101274

I really like this. Looks like the theme of this Bioshock is something like "revenge of the irrational" - no matter how bright, scientific and utopian the city is officially declared to be, secret societies, cults and irrational, superstitious beliefs are cropping up everywhere. And the higher-ups make a big point out of fighting the irrational, while secretly believing in it.

>>24101274
>>24100870
>>24096154
>>24095821
>>24090170
>>24089512
>>24089431
Hey, I'm >>24089451 and I just wanted to let you know that I am simply marveled by the thought you've put into this. I've posted a number of other times in this thread, and I want in on the very ground floor of this, wherever it goes.
Captcha: must paracycl (perhaps it's telling us about means of personal transportation?)

>>24101340
>>24101340
I think one really good source of the internal conflict would be the same divide that atomic stuff went through IRL: "Holy shit this is awesome science shit" vs. "Oh god this has horrible consequences"

>>24101355

Honestly my main theme is an aesthetic one, which is the innate urge to turn a utopian society into a amusement park rather than a real civilization. With Disney I just can't help it. His whole enthusiasm for planned cities, the fact that he was fundamentally conservative and traditionalist, and that the whole World's Fair theme I took from wanting to project the way Columbia was inspired into the later world's fairs all just leave me less on solid "ideology -> utopia -> skewered" ground than on a general satire of the Raygun Gothic future, where blue eyed future people look unblinking into the world of tomorrow.

>>24101362
This is just another /tg/ setting brainstorm. We have these every week or so. We had a similar, but equally awesome Edison/Tesla Bioshockalike concept in the Antarctic just last week. Without exception, they never go anywhere, and nobody ever bothers to actually make a splat for them, and nobody ever runs a game in them.

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yup. this is the future you left us with walt.

Thanks a lot.

>>24101355
It's a great idea, that the fundamental flaw in the man's vision is that great scientific genius lies hand in hand with rationality and morality.

I can just imagine the recordings fraught with despair and confusion that the people he hired on who produce such great and clean works of technological wonder also play host to such ugly neuroses and anti social behavior- at least in the lens of his 50s utopian society. Leading to him attempting to curb this, leading to greater rebellion on and on and on.

>>24101372

Exactly. On one hand they all signed up for this precisely because they wanted to make a society that did things like expand to Mars, on the other hand they increasingly get the creeping feeling that Progress is attempting to uproot and replace Earth. And Raum's orbital cannons reaching completion isn't helping matters any.

Did I mention how with what they are putting in the water, everyone has such marvelous brains now? But that doesn't mean they know how to think. Even non-scientists like Winters can have the solar system at their fingertips when they can just feed their Vision to the Men and Women of the Future.

>>24101391
Yep, and I love it.

/tg/ is great in short bursts, before egos and fetishes rear their ugly heads. There's a correlation between the lifespan of a /tg/ project, and how good it is.

>>24101362

Introducing the PARA-CYCLE! Forget the cramped monorails, and the sluggish conveyor roads, and travel in style, above the heads of your fellow citizens!

>>24101391

We had another Bioshock setting based on eugenics ideals. I think it would be cool to bring them all together in a Multishock universe that could be traversed via tears.

>>24101391

Someone needs to actually adopt the setting as their own, then. Anything posted on /tg/ is the inconsistent ramblings of many anonymous authors. Someone needs to say 'this is my project and I will see it through, I will decide what is canon and what is not,' put together resources for it in a permanent location off 4chan, keep posting threads about it and keep it from fading into nothing.

It isn't going to be me, I have shit to do, but hopefully someone will volunteer.

So the magic powers in this setting come from the little color-coded pills. What's the magic MacGuffinite that makes them work?

>>24101452
Nobody ever does.

Well, except for the shitty ones, like CAT-Astrophe.

>>24101452
Why? We're having fun as it is.

Another way to think about it is to consider it the softer, more insidious version of some of the themes from the other bioshock games. This really struck me seeing the fuzzy, non-threatening Uncle Sam Eagle type cartoon character in reference to the old Epcot center attractions, and when thinking about the Gernsback Continuum and the general vaguely creepy transhumanist vibe that the Retro-Future vision of society has - future people taking their food pills, being happy all the time. I mean the 50's retro-future, with all its Buck Rogers tech and outfits, would fit perfectly well in Nazi propaganda; which makes the difference between the futurists who are scientists (and mostly liberalizing intellectuals) and those who are vocal proponents and visionaries (and mostly egocentric eccentrics) all the more vivid.

Nothing about what you said or did here was original in any way. Its just ripped off rehashed ideas that someone else thought of first that you want to take credit for.

You can not comprehend my frustration at having new ideas constantly supplanted by old ones like these. There are thousands of visionaries who are convinced their ideas are crap because somebody with POWER decides they like the 1950's retro aesthetic and would prefer it to anything that is actually radical or progressive in thought.

your atomic fuckery is just another relic of a bygone era, gracefully forgotten and hopefully never to be seen again.

>>24101391
But it really is solid, this is New Vegas: Old World Blues meets System Shock, the interworkings of the brain trust, how they play off Winter and his followers, the potential for different sub-settings, it's all there.

>>24101464

I'm inclined to say some kind of lunar mineral, only because it enables "huffing moon rocks" puns.

>>24101450
The african city was my idea. And from there I went to actually considering a quest thread set in a French Republican ideal city built in the Alps with Napoleon's gold ready to set the world on fire during the Springtime of Nations, to this. I'm trying to figure out which Bioshocky idea I want to flesh out more fully.

>>24101464
>See also Gallerians, the Jetsons, Crank, the Vietnam fucking war...

You mean drugs can make you faster, stronger, smarter and let you do things you couldn't before? What a radical notion! Why, its a wonder why it hasn't been around for 1000s of years?

>>24101493
>>24101519

Are you mad, brother?

>>24101494
NO, NO, NO, its a ripoff. It isn't a "reimagining" of bioshock and fallout 3: New Vegas, it fucking IS
bioshock and New Vegas.

Admit it, your scared to name things, to try new things, to do things that haven't been done before, because you damn well KNOW what will happen.

Your chimp squad will throw crap at you until the next grand poohbah shows up.

>>24101450

That sounds like a vast yet worthy undertaking. Multiple alternate timelines, each with their own separate high-tech dystopian city built on different retro visions of the future.

>>24101464
Given the general aesthetic in this setting, they probably involve Rays! Maybe there's some transuranic element with unobtanium-flavored powers deep beneath the lunar surface.

The long-term effects from consuming too many radioactive pills are exactly what you'd expect.

>>24101529
yeah, i'm fucking mad. I'm tired of guys getting paid to rummage through the bargain bin at a cellophane studio and slap a new label on it and call it "art".

>>24101464

I was thinking that they are just pills. The pills aren't Salt, Adam, the pills make the thing work. But from there I started thinking about powers more broadly, and decided that as some sort of supernatural element the idea of Synergetics - basically lumping all plot device physics from quantum to nanomachines to psionics in one nebulous category implying tactical hypergeometry or that is using Buckminster Fuller's systems theory as a bullshit smokescreen - being some of the weird abilities that are being tapped.

Basically, in of itself it is a perfectly in-tech of the setting thing for pills to be able to make you smarter, change the color of your skin, whatever. Food pills, go pills, better living through chemistry was so fifties and part of retro-futurism.

So easy mode is just having power pills be like that, a pill that temporarily stimulates the part of your brain for telekinesis.

Hard/possibly bullshit mode is having some of the stuff like telekinesis, the non-chemical/bio-change stuff, tying into some sort of plot about faux-Oppenheimer being possessed by a disembodied space intelligence and Buckminster's idea of how the universe works being somehow correct and other bullshit.

>>24101563
You do realize that none of us are getting paid, right?

>>24101566

Bonus if it's never clear whether Oppenheimer ACTUALLY is possessed or just believes himself to be possessed due to massive space pill overdose.

>>24101566
Good point. Buckminister Fuller and Freeman Dyson got up to some weird stuff.

have you ever read transmetropolitan?

You can ONE fucking idea from that comic book seires, just fucking ONE, and base an entire novel or idea around it. But people don't like it because its ugly, its confrontational, and most importantly, its DIFFERENT

>>24101583
>Your ideas are bad and you should feel bad
>Use these instead

How about no.

>>24101583
>People don't like Transmetropolitan

Are you fucking kidding?

Like, you can have pills that do transhumany things without advocating transhumanist/libertarian type ideology, wonder drugs just fit great in the aeshetic of 50's retro-future, but I do actually think pills that give you temporary powers/magic fit too; just because I had this great image in my head of a test video of an astronaut popping a yellow pill so he can telekinetically lift up his Mars rover and replace the broken wheel.

So as tools for the explorers being sent out of Progress to expand throughout the solar system.

>>24101583
Actually, better idea, start your own thread if you have an idea.

>>24101583
>>24101563
>>24101539
>>24101493

Just shut the fuck up, man. I don't know who you're railing against, but a /tg/ thread brainstorming a fun setting concept isn't really your target at all.

>>24101612
But anon, don't you understand that all fiction based on ideas I don't like is objectively horrible, and that you are all sheeples for not using ideas I deem new and progressive? Clearly I must prevent you from having fun, for the good of society!

>>24101583

What's funny about this is I suggested riffing off of "a gonzo journalist" hint hint in this thread, just as Transmetropolitan does.

>>24101583
>>24101563
>>24101539
>>24101493
SURPRISE, NOTHING IS FUCKING ORIGINAL, AT ALL. EVERYTHING IS A REHASH OF A REHASH, BUT THIS PARTICULAR MIX OF REHASHES HAPPENS TO TRIP MY FUCKING TRIGGER, KINDLY FUCK OFF, AND LET US CREATE THIS SETTING SO WE CAN RUN GAMES IN IT. SHIT *DOESN'T* GET DONE WHEN COCKSHINES LIKE YOU BITCH AND MOAN. GO BACK TO /V/, YOUR ACCENT BETRAYS YOUR HOME THERE!!!

>>24101633
The issue being that the city's on the Moon.

Although if you can figure out how to get a gonzo journalist onto the Moon, I'd love to hear it, because that sounds way more fun than "shipwrecked Apollo astronauts."

Kind of a Venture Bros-y feel?

>>24101606
>you can have pills that do transhumany things without advocating transhumanist/libertarian type ideology

no you can't. thats the point. If someone won't let you take androgen for testicular cancer while competing in a bike race, then you sure as hell aren't slipping some sort of pill that lets you move shit with your mind past the FDA.

This is about the same isolationist crap rand is always on about. Guess what? If you can't solve the problem of exlusivity in politics while having the luxory of being surrounded by thousands of expediant and useful laborers trading in a free market, your not going to solve it by creating a planned economy and adopting some sort of dictatorship.

>>24101633

Make a Hunter S. Thompson expy who somehow convinced NASA to send him to the Moon as part of an extended Apollo program's publicity stunt into one of the sample characters.

Fear and Loathing in Moon Disney, where the pills give you superpowers.

>>24101654
> Capslock
> Three exclamation points
> gb3/v/
> *IRC Bolding*
And most importantly
> Getting this mad about somebody pointlessly shit-flinging

You, sir, are just as much of a cunt as the cunt to whom you are responding.

>>24101658

He just wakes up on the Moon city one day after a drug-fueled rampage through a lighthouse-themed Las Vegas casino.

>>24101658
Someone on the Moon is starting to sell Moon drugs on Earth. Nobody believes that crock of shit as they're starting to deal with a new recreational drug epidemic, but there's on journalist desperate enough to listen to that source. And doesn't run screaming when the source asks him to sit down in a chair with straps in an abandoned Hollywood Studio lot.

>>24101686

>>24101678

Both of these are good ideas.

>>24101278

One idea is to write this as an investigation genre (plenty of popular rpg's that do that) game starting with how a US astronaut who went missing on the moon ended up washed up on the Oregon beaches with a butcher's knife stabbed through him.

Leads you to a lighthouse in the Pacific Northwest, the Brains Trust's experimental prototype teleporter, and the City of Progress.

There's lots ways you can set up "impossible astronaut murder mystery" as a scenario starter.

>>24101698
I'm thinking that instead they end up finding the old Atomic Moonliner in an abandoned Hollywood Studios lot instead of a teleporter, and the Lighthouse is instead a guiding beacon on the Moon itself.

But I'm really liking the astronaut-murder-mystery concept.

The Martian outpost could be more "frontier"-like, with a raygun western aesthetic and more anarchic structure.

>>24101736

Of course, not using amazing rocketships of the future as the transportation method is a tremendous cop-out, but I feel like having to say/write "and yes, we are far too advanced to be detected by the US or Soviets entering and leaving the atmosphere" feels like, as ridiculous as it is given all the other crazier stuff, the straw that would break the camel's back.

Alright. I admit, I'm jealous of your circle jerk.

My ideas are unpopular, and I see you doing something that seems... well, i don't know, obnoxious, or maybe offensive, in the sense that it grates against my personal aesthetic, and I see you being successful at it, while mine go to shit.

So, let me rephrase. My opinion is that it is unoriginal. The characters are interesting, but there is no real rational for them being there on the moon, without some sort of elaborate conspiracy or coverup, or having to fall back on the idea of an "alternate timeline", which has become a convention which I find absolutely abhorrent, because it eliminates the historical context in which the events transpire.

>>24101761

Maybe they disguise their supply missions as official NASA launches. Could be a conspiracy in the US government to hide the existence of the moon base from the Soviets, as well as the weapons platforms they're building out there.

>>24101758

Don't encourage me or I'll make it all too themepark like. I already want to incorporate the oil company sponsored Dino Land from the early 60's New York world's fair, and having faux-Heinlein as sheriff of sexually liberated racially tolerant West World on Mars, complete with real murder and viscera, is too tempting.

>>24101698

How about this? The in-setting analogue of Scientology are actually the Earth-based recruiters for this bunch. There are a bunch of secret levels up beyond what the public knows about where people are let in on the secrets of the lunar dome city. The crazy parts of the religion are all just a smokescreen to keep the government believing they're a run of the mill bunch of nuts.

>>24101680
No, I'm merely sick of his shit and mildly intoxicated at 3am on a saturday. We're BOTH cunts for not talking about Moonshock, so shut up and back to the science

>>24101769
>successful

This is a /tg/ brainstorm thread. These happen every week, and they never go anywhere permanent. Nobody will mention this after May. We're not getting paid for this.

And of course it's unoriginal. It's a homage to the Bioshock games.

And yes, it's an alternate timeline. That's par for the course in Bioshock. The first game centers around an underwater city founded by an alternate-universe Ayn Rand. Note that Ayn Ran never disappeared to create an underwater city in real life, nor did a significant fraction of the planet's intellectuals go Galt and vanish after WWII.

>>24101761
The original Moonmen went to the stars ages ago- since then, nobody has visited.

It's just that some fuck up left behind a moonliner with coordinates to their place, and somebody managed to find it.

>>24101736

We don't need a lighthouse, this isn't a bioshock game, and your idea of an old moonliner is indeed better. And honeslty I find the idea of it in a studio backlot more entertaining than a lighthouse being a rocket or summong a rocketship from a lighthouse.

Or we could go full retard and have the Not-Space Needle turn out to be a dormant atomic moonliner and the protagonist go up in that, meaning that now the whole world knows there is something up there on the Moon; creating tension/a limited timetable on Progress City.

>>24101820
And I wish to point out that we are also having fun, and you are not. I'm sorry that it grates with your artistic ideals. Start your own thread.

>>24101794

While I'm not 100% sure I'd want to go there, given the real life infiltration of the US government by Scientology in the 60's/70's,your idea is totally plausible.

>>24101791

Do it. Include a pill to enhance reflexes and perception, called Quick Draw.

>>24101856
Especially because both L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons were founding members of Moon EPCOT.

Second, if this is supposed to be some sort of meta platform for storytelling, it leaves a whole lot to be desired. If the utopia has already been acheived, there is no conflict, unless something happens in which it needs to be maintained at the expense of the protagonists.

If it hasn't, then we are left with the traditional dystopian autocratic machine world society that has been explored thematical so thoroughly in the past, that any new insight into the phenomenon would be difficult to procure.

Contemporary literature and storytelling is already rife with dystopian themes, and because the story takes place in the past with characters who are long since dead, building the utopian vision feels out of sync with our times, and any story featuring the protagonists building one will be left with the question, "if they succeeded, why don't places like this exist now?"

>>24101881
The whole point is that it's a failed utopia. Not-Walt-Disney takes all these people up there, and Something Goes Horribly Wrong. There is internal conflict and strife and the whole thing falls apart.

The players come in a significant time after this happens and have Adventures in what remains, as well as piecing together some of the mystery of what went wrong.

>>24101881

Seriously man, just drop it. You're not making any sense. An RPG setting isn't required to be original, it can merely be a slight rearrangement of old tropes and established genre conventions and still work perfectly well for its objective, which is having fun for a gaming group. It does not have to produce any "new insight" on any "phenomena". And you sound like a horrible pretentious cunt, so I'm glad your ideas failed.

tl;dr blow it out your ass.

>>24101835
thats my point. Your thread is popular, your aesthetic is popular, but you have no objective claim to quality, because you refuse to submit yourself to peer review.

>>24101831
The lighthouse is just too symbolic (even if very bluntly so) to write out of the equation. This might not be a Bioshock game with Based Lavine's hands at the helm, but it is, as the other poster said, an homage. The lighthouse marks you finding your way to this amazing place. It also doesn't have to be as traditional a lighthouse as the one in Infinite, remember the tower from the first Bioshock was obviously not normal.

>>24101881

Bioshock is such a good model for roleplaying, having non-linear storytelling basically, because it depicts societies that have factions and conflicts, which players could then choose between, play off of, in a self-guided way.

Being able to choose to support the Vox or Founders is something the Infinite setting sets you up for, but the game doesn't because of the medium. But if you were playing it an RPG.

So, while I admit I'm not someone who has ever GMed or knows dick about adventure writing, I do get the feeling that if you set up your town from Fistful of Dollars, the Man with No Name (the PC's) will have something to propel off of through the conflict between the two gangs in one town.

>>24101789

All the UFO sightings that started cropping up after WW2? These guys.

It doesn't stretch suspension of disbelief very far to say that they developed secret experimental technology that allowed for lunar rocket launches that avoided radar detection. Heck, we could probably pull that off with today's technology against mid-20th-century tech.

If I were doing this, I'd say that Hitler was the first person to use the technology, and the whole bunker suicide story was Soviet misinformation. The Fuhrerbunker was actually built over a huge rocket launch silo. But then again, I just watched Iron Sky, and my god, that premise has so much potential, but the movie just played it for laughs.

>>24101931

Lighthouse in the studio lot, where the journalist meets the source. There, done.

>>24101930

I want to play a game of Genius the Transgression with you, guy.

>>24101881
Bioshock games are statements of "What could go wrong if X had their dream state?" The original Bioshock had hyper libertarian Randians found a city under the sea with only themselves and magic. It turns in to a ghastly ruin of what was once their dreams, stalked by all that remains of their population of artists, thinkers, and creators; raving addicts fighting each other for crumbs.

This is asking the same thing. "What would happen if the dreamed of world of futuristic sci-fi, as dreamed by Heinlein, Walt Disney, and company, was allowed to come to pass, and how could it go horribly wrong?"

>>24101929
thats my point. Its not "required" to be original, but it bloody well SHOULD be. Original ideas are, well, they are a bit crude. They don't start out looking like a polished diamond, they are more like a dirty peice of rose quartz.

>>24101947

My cheesy take is that from the lighthouse in the Pacific Northwest you get propelled by a weather balloon with afterburners into high-earth-orbit where you are picked up by a rocketship.

>>24101939

Von Braun was building UFOs for the Nazis, then for the US until they canned the project when a prototype blew up over Area 51. He was then recruited by Moonologists to build the Progress Arks using the same technology base.

>>24101930
Christ, we aren't going to publish this shit man. "Peer review", what, are the producers going to see this and cut our funding or something? I mean, after the whole thread turned on you, you immediately went "oh, oh, but your thread and your ideas are so good and popular, mine blow. Still though, this is why I think the fun you're having is bad". In short, fuck people like you.

>>24101986
I think we should stick with the idea from the OP:

Disney, Von Braun, Jack Parsons, and Howard Hughes actually build the atomic TWA Moonliner, instead of just an exhibit for Tomorrowland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Moonliner

>>24101966

The guy is right in that I haven't come up with how/why it has gone horribly wrong. I've just come up with some colorful characters who make sense for filling out the game in terms of levels/factions, but that's not a satisfying way to set up storytelling, linear or interactive.

Right now what seems to be shaping up, proper plot wise, is Oppenheimer (maybe possessed) and Disney (actually dead and reduced to pre-recorded messages, animatronics, Univac AI, whatever) going off of the deep end; leading to things falling apart.

While horribly unoriginal, I kind of like the idea of encountering something out there in the black and being changed by it, so the Oppenheimer thing being tied to the ongoing expansionism into other parts of the solar system is one way to go.

>>24101930

This thread IS peer review. We're a bunch of peers subjecting OP's idea to review and developing on it. And you're a jealous cunt with a chip on your shoulder.

"Dayle was a fool. Overcome by his utopian visions, he thought nothing could stand against us.

And he was right, in his way. The monorail runs, it unites us all, none can deny that. His Visionaries, Heinlein, Parson, Hubbard have created a world free of the errors of the past.

But what about the places where there is no monorail? What of Earth?

Dayle didn't just ignore them, he forgot them, focused on his great Vision. But they haven't forgotten us. Even now they plot and scheme and stew in their filth.

What is to be done about Earth?"

- From the desk of Kimball Johnson.

>>24102011

The Brains Trust of Oppenheimer, Szilard/Fermi, and Feynman are the unobtanium, the sea-slugs, the "just add for superscience in any field" sprinkled upon the spaceship buildan/habitat planning crew of Disney, Hughes, Dyson, Von Braun, and Buckminster Fuller (providing the engineering side of the habitat planning with Disney).

Actually instead of just friends of Howard/exceptionals brought along for the ride, having Heinlein and Hubbard as being part of the private space crew they set up kind of makes sense. Heinlein was a Navy officer, Hubbard fakes it and as we have seen from real life was able to recruit people to get into uniform and obey orders.

>>24102021
I'd rather not have Oppenheimer exposed to something too supernatural.

Rather, Oppenheimer went out on the moon's surface after an argument for a long time- too long for any oxygen he had to keep him alive. But he came back- different. Out on the moon, standing in his stark white suit, staring in to the all consuming dark of space, he realized something, something that changed him. He is suffering nervous damage from oxygen deprivation. One of the greatest minds ruined irreparably by the hostile world they mock by living on, because he forgot how long the oxygen could last in his rage.

>>24102021
Unoriginal or not, it's a good idea. Bioshock games need that odd, paranormal bent to them. Bioshock 1/2 had those ghosts, Infinite had Boys of Silence that I only roughly understand. Also, it serves as a good analogy for/against isolationism. "Go into the unknown, the frontier, though know what you find, what you experience, may change you"

Here is a story i wrote. Everybody who reads it says its good. Every publisher I've ever sent it to has refused to read it, as has every agent. (300+ so far) And no, i don't mean they didn't like it, I mean I wrote a 3 digit number on my cover letter and asked them to write in on their form letter.

All of them came back blank.

Synopsis: A brilliant college dropout and his undergraduate friend race against time to produce a faster than light engine for use by a civilian space agency before the military seizes and replicates their original prototype.

>>24102021
I can already see a lot of ways this could all go horribly wrong, without invoking Crazy Space Magic:

>A lot of these guys ideas of the futures differed a LOT. Disney was heavily into central planning, Heinlein was anarcho-capitalistic... Although perhaps they could initially put aside their differences, there would inevitably be conflict.

>A lot of that utopian, Golden Age sci-fi dream pretty much ignored the dirtiness and complexity of real human life. Blue-eyed Space Cadets staring off into the stars in their heavily planned geometric Cities of Tomorrow. There would inevitably be a real underclass that was disillusioned and cynical with these utopian visions. Maybe they'd be Marxist- this is the 50s, after all.

>Everything splits along "rational"/cultish lines, between the scientific but ethically-challenged and guilty minds of the Brain Trust- think the immense guilt of Oppenheimer over creating nukes, the apolitical feelings of Von Braun- and the strange cult formed by the combination of Parsons, Hubbard, Fuller, and maybe Dyson.

oh, and

>Science! has a schism, similar to the one that the atomic optimism gave way to- one side is all Just Think Of The Potential and irrationally ignores the dangers, the other is rebelling against the consequences and the potential dangers and is filled with irrational fear.

>>24102108
Ah, you're one of the bitter ones, then.

Is this the first story you've written?

>>24102087
That sounds to me like it'd also make a good cover for paranormal whosits. Either way, if the OP is still here (and if you're him I apologize), would you be interested in another thread tomorrow. I'm the "TRAINSHOCK" guy, and I cannot explain how this is like you read my mind over the past few days and presented me with precisely what I wanted.

>>24102117

what struck me as very poignant was how Disney describes in his "welcome tot his happy place" speech a place where the old can relive the past while the young look forward tot he future.

I kind of like the dichotomy of Columbia and Rapture existing simultaneously as it were; or to be less confusing; Dayle Winters making his mauseleum to the past, his themepark of the perfect society as he experienced it in his life, the training ground for the space cadets of the future as well.

Its less totalitarian and more human and sad for a guy to be spoonfeeding orders to a bunch of hyperintelligent futuremen when he honestly feels that is the future, and that he is going to be left behind.

>>24102134
No. I've written 2 novels, and a book of short stories. I have no idea how to break in, i feel like I'm banging my head up against a wall.

>>24102117
Or there's
>There's not a lot of nature on the moon. Isolated, claustrophobically tight, just a thin Dymaxion geodesic dome between you and the endless void and the blasted black moonscape and the radiation, without a single living thing save those that came on the Moonliner- people go a bit crazy. There's the original, utopian (but eventually corrupted) Science-is-good group, and there's the equally irrational group that believes that science is evil- especially the unnatural powers of the Pills- and that humanity must return to nature, no matter the cost in life. Basically terroristic super-hippies against an equally irrational and deluded faction that still believes that science and technology is flawless and the solution to all problems.

>>24102117
Maybe it's a matter of generations. Have some sort of wonderdrug which extends lifespans of the first generation of moon colonists, and the next generation is being raised by them, but they're underperforming severely. Perhaps it's due to the lack of gravity affecting development, maybe it's the high expectations, maybe it's because the kids simply can't give a fuck, but the first generation of colonists with regret realize that far too many of their offspring simply aren't measuring up.

Some of them are reconciled to shittier jobs. Some of them are put through awful horrible experiments to try to improve them. A few are quietly shuffled in to positions they can't fill properly out of misguided parental love that can cost lives.

Think of Dostoevsky's "The Idiot." That's what the 1st generation thinks of the 2nd. Those lamentable morons that they can't kill out of kindness, can't exile for security, and are forced to uncomfortably sideline in their perfect world.

If everything I say sounds like a scream, maybe its because I'm dying a little inside.

I honestly have no idea what triggered my diatribe against your idea. My mind just jumped to the conclusion Bioshock + Fallout 3 = crap, but I've never even played Bioshock.

I just saw something happening and wanted to be a part of it, and new I couldn't, and it made me mad. I guess everywhere I look i see "No Homers'" clubs.

>>24102191
Have you considered indie publishing, or self-publishing?

http://accordingtohoyt.com/2012/12/09/making-money-from-indie-publishing-a-guide-for-the-hopeful-the-optimistic-and-the-doomed/

>>24102191

Man you're my hero. I wanted to be a writer once, but after getting 2 very short articles published for a total of 140$ I was never able to bring myself to write a short story much less a novel. I had to realize that I was not a writer, not because of some bullshit like blaming lack of potential, but just that I was lazy and had not put in the work and could not call myself a writer.

I'm just a dude that writes silly shit on the internet. I find it fun and I like supporting other people's silly shit too, so I don't want you to shit on us having fun like you have been doing, but you shouldn't feel bad in comparison. You've worked hard, I'm just playing around.

>>24102243

Don't worry. I know exactly how you feel. I've heard it before, mostly from other writers who eventually did break in. I'm not a writer myself, so my only advice is to keep trying. I know it hurts.

>>24102243
God damn it, this isn't your therapy thread.

Rage in an ERP thread or something for fuck's sakes.

Ok. What do you want to make? Start a thread. Let's see if we can make something you want. Seriously. I'll devote time to this and everything to help you out here if you'll leave these guys alone.

>>24102260
Hell, want to be my agent? I'll cut you in 50/50 if you can make me some money and get me some small press.

>>24102243
Other writers know that feel.

http://accordingtohoyt.com/2012/03/28/grocers-of-despair/

>>24102192

Forgive me, I just had to riff off of this.

"There's not a lot of nature on the moon. Isolated, claustrophobically tight, just a thin Dymaxion geodesic dome between you and the endless void and the blasted black moonscape and the radiation, without a single living thing save those that came on the Liners with us. The same three races of dog. The same breed of cat. The parakeets, hummingbirds, even the grass on everyone's lawns is the same. And the people... Live here long enough, your friends start resembling strangers. All those men with the brick jawline and blue eyes, the women with their rosy cheeks and blonde hair. There's no variety in us, no unexpected ugliness or jarring features. It's always bothered me, ever since I came.

So that's why I got this job. The law says I have to euthanize the freaks, but I've taken to keeping them. I've grown quite fond of this menagerie, this greenhouse of ugliness and filth that I've raised, smack dab in Dale's little utopia. So what if I siphon off a little air and water to keep them alive? They're worth more to me than all the standardized perfection in this little world."

- Derek Kazansky, senior administrator, founder of the Underground Orphanage.

>>24102285
Thank you, but i don't want you to make something I want. I want someone to want what I make.

>>24102320

Ok, that settles it. You're going up there on the moon. I mean it, I want to include a failed outsider author dude that just wants to get published and recognized in Progress City while working as a sewage technician or something.

>>24102320
THEN MAKE A THREAD WITH SOMETHING.

Your sob story has the attention of damn near everyone in this thread, go, make a thread somewhere that isn't here see if it's wanted.

>>24102117
>>24102192

Why not all five? They don't seem mutually exclusive, and a mixture of all of them seems both the most plausible and the most interesting. The Founders find their ideals of the future incompatible with each other, are further stressed and split by the growing disconnect between their hopes and the awful realities, the strange cults with their strange magic eat away at the fringes, and there's Luddite terrorists.

>>24102320
I'd really recommend you read those two links I posted. I really think they might help.

well, i guess I can copy pasta my story, i'm not that attached to it anymore. thread called test flight. I'll stay in this one too.

>>24102390

post it in /lit/ for criticism, dude.

>>24102295

I suggest you submit short stories individually to magazines. Try a free trial at Duotrope's Digest. The typical deal is you can submit one story at one place at a time, and it takes a while to hear word back, so you can have say 6 different stories each submitted a single time (they don't want to compete with other potential buyers) to different markets (most markets don't like multiple submissions at one time from one author) and then even if they all get rejected you can juggle them around and submit the one you submitted to 1 to 2 and so on.

Also, there is a fan-zine turned pro in terms of it goes pro SFWA payrates, so the normal cent-age per word, called Escapepod. Submit a short story there, they are relatively prompt when they aren't in a no-submissions backlog filling mode.

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“Did you just say jetpack?”
“Yup.”
Jason pushed his glasses up on his nose, glaring at his friend. “A Jetpack.”
Imagine a jet-engine turbine from a 747 that fell to the earth from 10,000 feet, then was welded to a diesel truck engine, and you almost got it. Finish it off by scaling it down to a couple hundred pounds, feeding it through a trash compactor, and soldering a few exposed wires and hoses to the frame, and you have a fairly accurate picture of the contraption being hauled out of the back Jason Warwicks beat up Toyota.
Jack grunted as he struggled to drag the frame off the highway and into the Arizona desert. Jack wiped his brow as he dragged it across the parched earth, leaving a trail in the dirt.
Jason trailed behind. He said, “Alright, ignoring the obvious aerodynamic problems of sending a human corpse screaming through the stratosphere, supposing you found some way to circumvent turning your ass into a piece of bar-be-que pork mid-flight from the exhaust, and pretending for half a second you would actually fly long enough to even get the chance to explode in mid-air, what the hell is the point?”
Half-ignoring him, Jack struggled to get into the homemade rig that was supposed to keep him strapped to the frame. “That’s your problem. You’re always asking why. Why not? Besides, jetpacks are cool. Didn’t you ever watch James Bond?”
Jack said, “You’re such a dork. You could at least have named it a turbo-fan, or something.”
“It already has a turbofan in it.” Jack finished buckling his last waist strap, and with a great effort, managed to hoist the frame off the ground and onto his back. He growled irritably at his companion behind his shoulder. “Just shut up and push the red button.”

>>24102390
This is /tg/. We do roleplaying games and roleplaying game accessories. If you're doing actual written-out fiction, you want /lit/. Be warned, they aren't huge fans of SF.

>>24102422
ah crap. sorry.

>>24102319
>>24102340

William S. Burroughs, no you cannot have Interzone in space. This is my idea, get out of my head William, get out of my head.

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ooooooh

shiny

This thread is so fucking funny. People try to make a setting, interrupted by somebody crying WHAT ABOUT MEEEEEE. He then proceeds to take the crumbs of respect given as authority to post his shitty writing in the thread.

I'm sorry OP. Your thread got spaghetti'd.

>>24102424
One (technically two) words, Writefags.
As much as I love this setting and hate this guy for trying to shit all over our fun, I need to defend him here.

>>24102452
Yeah, but our writefaggotry is also roleplaying and roleplaying game accessories. Most of it's 40k-based or set in some RPG setting.

Hell, Deep Sounding- the only /tg/-published novel- was basically Dwarf Fortress: The Novel.

>>24102451
Though I'm not the OP, but I was the first poster after. I'm gonna repost this shit erry night till I get a hold of him, and at the very least I'm talking him into hammering this setting out one on one, and participating in it however I can when it's done.

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"They are coming.

The freaks. The unworthy. The scum.

We left them behind. No. We left ALL of it behind.

All of the failure, the weakness, the STUPIDITY! We left that behind to create a utopia. We followed Dayle and his Visionaries and they have lead us well.

But now the corrupt scum of Earth? The president of America, the preening peacock, has vowed to land a man on the moon within the decade.

We can not allow this. We must not allow this. Not until the utopia is complete. We are of the Moon so we must be as the Moon. We must remain stark, cold, sterile, uncontaminated.

Why can't Dayle see this?"

- From the desk of Kimball Johnson.

>>24102434

Holy shit, I never even considered it, but it fits! Interzone in space is the best fucking idea ever.

>>24102489

Moon people killed JFK! Read all about it!

>>24102475
Point, I'm gonna agree that he fuck off and leave.

>>24102489
Who's Kimball Johnson supposed to be? The only thing that name makes me think of is Lensmen.

Ok, so I was trying to space hobo my way out of having a clear ideological conflict. Let me 'splain.

I didn't play the first two Bioshocks, so I think of Bioshock as objectivism gone wrong, not objectivism vs. working class uprising; reading about Atlas makes me think a businessman decides to use his freedom to give money to the poor to become a demagogue, which flies in the total face of Objectivism but which Objectivism would have to violate itself in order to ban.

Obviously the collectivism of 2 is the main ideology there.

Infinite is set up to have a very clear two-part conflict, something I don't feel all Bioshock type ideas need to have, two opposing ideologies. I like the idea of one ideology breaking down.

But yes, 50's retrofuturism isn't much of a specific ideology, and emphasizing the futurism vs. Disney's 50's social mores would imply there is a cultural/social revolution brewing of women not content to be housewives, ethnic minorities not content to be ignored, etc. But yet I don't want to just be doing the same thing Infinite just did.

I have my aesthetic: retro-futurism is, while clunky a term in order to avoid using terms that can also include Art Deco, something we all recognize when we see. 50's scifi, Spacely Sprockets, and a liberal dosing of the atomic age which is beloved because of a certain series.

The aesthetic and the technology go hand in hand, plasmids are such a non problem in a world of food pills and better living through chemistry. Special pills for astronauts is so in-genre.

So the main problem, from a point of view of Bioshocking, is the ideology is not coherent or focused. It is diffuse, because I'm mainly telling a zany alternate history using these larger than life figures with their own idiosyncratic views.

And I don't know what to do about that.

But I have solved one problem, for covering the "hitting all the Bioshock tropes if you want them" area. the lighthouse is a disguised rocketship.

>>24102542
Well, don't make it a straight Bioshock ripoff. A zany alternate history is way more fun as an RPG setting.

>>24102542

I actually like this better, since it allows for a wide span of stories you can potentially tell in the setting. Hell, just the eugenics vs freaks subconflict ITT is interesting enough.

>>24102542
so how do you plan on, you know, writing this thing?

>>24102578
It'd probably be best as a WoD splat, really. Or a GURPS splatbook, but those are usually exhaustively researched and a lot of work and nobody plays GURPS anyway.

>>24102451

It's ok, I'm made of spaghetti.

>>24102486
Just don't copy and paste a whole bunch of text. Summarize in your own words, come up with your own stuff. I've had to get better about only posting a new thread when I have new material, or at the very least being honest when I'm just trying to stir a discussion thread and don't have anything ready-made and new to say. Even when I write new stuff, just text dumping it rarely works.

>>24102589

Didn't Genius The Transgression do something similar?

https://sites.google.com/site/moochava/genius

>>24102553
It's really a matter of embracing "yes this is an homage to Bioshock, a spiritual successor in the same way it was one to System Shock" or trying to deny the obvious similarities in setting. Better to stick with some of the tenants set forward and accept it, then have people mock the idea for being "nuh-uh it's TOTALLY not that"

>>24102589

I'd run it in FATE. Spirit of the Century, to be exact.

i said i was sorry

>>24102606
Yeah, but from what I've heard, G:tT has pretty shitty rules. Besides, the focus of Genius is internal conflict and making amazing magic- powered supertech. This seems to be more about mortals going out and dealing with a society full of physics-powered supertech that's falling apart due to conflict and also getting temporary powers from pills.

>>24102623

Yeah, I'm still putting you in the setting.

>>24102600
Well, I'm not nearly as learned in the setting as the OP is, and he seems to have a great foundation as is, so I'll be posting screencaps of this thread, along with my own input. As soon as I can contact him again though, I'm finding a means of establishing a direct line to him

>>24102501

This makes an uncomfortable amount of sense.

Between the Roswell crash and the JFK assassination, I bet there's not a lot of mysterious stuff in 20th century history that couldn't be explained by Walt Disney's hidden moonbase.

>>24102644
Orrrr you are the OP and I'm too drunk/tired to notice, fuck...

>>24102589

I know shit all about mechanics or game mastering, I do my best to play in games once in a while but I wasn''t lying about being lazy. What I can do is try to refine, collect, polish, and curate setting information. So think more Uberstadt and less a Viral game. It's not exactly /tg/ gets shit done but its not losing stuff to the aether either.

Of course, a quest isn't impossible; but really the best things that come out of this stuff is that once in a while someone says that they will run or have run a game based on, perhaps loosely or just with their own modifications, a /tg/ idea.

>>24102565

You know, its always hard to see someone change your idea in some significant way, but given the idea of if it were a videogame or if it becomes a quest thread having Hunter S. Thompson sent to the moon worked on a level, the idea of the Hunter S. Thompson's sherrif campaign race style Freak Power being the counterculture in Progress makes sense.

Now who is Kimball supposed to be?

>>24102515

Well, I didn't invent the guy, but he seems like an administrator. Maybe a chief of police kind of guy, if we go with the idea of him orchestrating the Kennedy assassination to stop or stall the space program.

>>24102649
This is, of course, going to be some kind of zany alternate universe- Disney, Heinlein, most of the Manhattan project, von Braun (who was pretty critical in NASA's space program) and a bunch of others straight up disappeared, which is probably going to have some effects on how history developed.

>>24102649

There is an Interzone inspired rpg called Over the Edge set on a mysterious island nation. I don't quite want to go the full on conspiracy theories satire with this, as the setting is busy already, but we have stumbled on something with the drug-fueled fiction of the New Wave of the 70's representing what would happen counterculturally in Progress.

>>24102694

Especially if the psychoactive drugs give you superpowers.

>>24102689

Using fictional analogues can kind of get around that.

Basically what we end up with in that is The Trinity, a trio of Manhattan Project scientists, who lose their security clearances during the Red Scare and meet up with a millionaire entrepreneur with a vision and with friends and fellow supporters, including a significantly even more wealthy captain of industry and the finest brains he can hire, including a pair of futurist scientists and an ex-Nazi who used to work for the US government.

That's hardly exclusive to the specific historical figures, so we can avoid nerfing NASA by removing the real or this world's only Von Braun type figure.

travel to a city in "the heart of a star"
run by a "Thuggi Cultist"
named "bhagavad gita" or the "black palm"
you will learn powers from "Cyber-Dragons"
which are powered by "Anti-Matter"
collect the chronicles of "Ancient Lore"
and learn more through "Nova Catalysts"

>>24102777
It turns out "Bahamaut"
was actually "still alive"
when "you" "resurrect" the "star"

Ok fellow citizens of Prosper, men and women of tomorrow, I shall return this evening to rekindle the flames of discussion at the predetermined Discussion Time. So sleep tight in your little Vac-Beds, and don't let the Voidworms bite.
Capthca: Agricalc that (Agricalc sounds like something that could be a part of a list of made-up sciences that one of the Brain-Trust insists upon holding a PhD in.)

>>24102742
True.

So what have we got in the way of fictional analogues?

From what I can see, we've got
>Dayle Winters - Walt Disney
>Joe "Drummer" Feinstein - Richard Feynman
>Chien Wu Song - Don't know
>Howard Hughes* (unknown analogue name)
>Oppenheimer* (Unknown analogue name)
>Slizard/Fermi composite (Unknown analogue name)
>Jack Parsons*
>L. Ron Hubbard *
>Buckminister Fuller* (Unknown analogue name)
>Robert Valentine - Robert Heinlein
>Max von Raum - Von Braun

>>24102827

Agricalc: the univac-based administration system that manages food production and automated farms in Progress. The Agricalc building is one of the largest in the city, dwarfed only by Brain Trust HQ.

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>>24102501
>>Moon people killed JFK! Read all about it!
Obvious once you pointed it out.

>>24102515
Just a character, but yeah, riffing off Lensman.

Are we not talking about the setting anymore? Oh wait, >>24102835 is.

>>24102835
In reference to Bioshock 1, Chien We Song could be Suchong, the biologist.

>>24102835
Don't forget Heinlein.

>>24102835
Also, Dayle Winters is dead; he maintains a presence only through Imagineering- animatronics, recorded messages, maybe a big Univac-style artificial intelligence. His head is, of course, cryogenically preserved.

>>24102871
He's in there. His fictional analogue is Robert Valentine.

There's something very appropriate about Heinlein in a moon city undergoing a revolution which may or may not involve artificial intelligence.

>>24102835

What I had was...

Dayle Winters (Walt Disney)
Howard Mason (Howard Hughes)
Jules Gabriel Engelstadt (J.R. Oppenheimer)
Max von Raum (Von Braun)
Erzsebet Vidor (female Szilard)
Joseph Fine (Richard Feynman)
Arthur Allbright (Buckminster Fuller)
Frank Hawthorne (Freeman Dyston)
Robert Valentine (Robert Heinlein)
Charles Foster (L. Ron Hubbard)
Danforth (Parsons)

>>24102882

He's moving to Mars to become a sheriff, though.

>>24102903
Point. He'd be part of- possibly the leader- of the anarcho-capitalist faction.

>>24102914

Heinlein, Parsons, and Hubbard are Hughes' lieutenants basically, in my reckoning. They run their feifdoms their own way.

>>24102945

>Heinlein
>Being ANYONE'S lieutenant.

Can thou even grok God?

>>24102945
I dunno. The combination of Jack Parsons, Satanic Rocket Scientist! and L. Ron Hubbard as a single, cultish faction seems too tempting to pass up, even if they were enemies IRL.

>>24102955

Yeah, ok.

Let me put it another way, these freaking eccentric California types are all divying up Progress City like its a pie, as Winters (or what is left of him) desperately tries to keep his vision together.

>>24102974

Parsons is more of a natural ally of Heinlein, they're both of the anarchist/libertarian vein.

>>24102882
Sorry, missed it. Valentine is an inspired choice though.

>>24102874
Is he? Is he really? IS HE?

Thread is archived on suptg, going to bed.

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>>24102988

"I see...heads."
"And I see tails."
"It's all a matter of perspective."
"What do you see here--from this angle."
"Dead. And that angle?"
"Alive. The same coin--"
"A different perspective."
"Heads--"
"Tails."
"Dead--"
"Alive."

>>24102021

Maybe it's a bit mundane, but how's this for Gone Horribly Wrong:

Not Walt Disney uploads himself into a computer, or interfaces with one Mr House style.

However, it turns out that the technology wasn't quite there yet.

As a result, the Great Infallible Leader is basically a glorified version of ELIZA and his/its edicts make less and less sense, so an advisor group has to develop to interpret it, and there are conflicts between the "interpreters" like in every major religious movement 10 minutes after the primary prophet is dead.

How's that?

>>24102673
>>Well, I didn't invent the guy (Kimball), but he seems like an administrator. Maybe a chief of police kind of guy, if we go with the idea of him orchestrating the Kennedy assassination to stop or stall the space program.

You know, I was just spouting randomness, but I like that idea. Not just the Kennedy murder, but the idea that Dayle's utopia has this insanely dedicated bureacrat who will protect the Vision by any means imaginable. While being completely blind to the corruption around him.

>>24103132
They'd be a great cameo. You can even pass it off as spacetime fuckery.
A good bit of reference might be the story 'Tomorrow town' by Kim Newman for a futurist city (it doesn't have all the superscience of this setting, but it does have the zeerust ideals-of sorts-down).

Bioshock: Kurzweil's Folly edition.

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>>24089431
>shift through image search
>no direct matches
>hunt through similar images
>mfw young Walt Disney resembles Andrew Ryan

Also, nice work on these ideas.

I have to admit, this idea just sings to me. I do wonder who that strange fellow who had a length of rope as a belt was.

From a video-game stand point, I personally love the idea of it being the 1970s, and the player(s) being the members of Apollo 18 - or 19, because 18 just vanished - finding a lighthouse on the moon and ending up in the City who distrusts them, who believes that the earth has been destroyed to doomed or some such.

Of course, the idea of the players finding an experimental Teleporter in the rundown lots of 'Lighthouse Studies' either during the peak of the revolution or at our own, with the moon and mars base filled with star-crazies, and pill poppers, and the splicer-esque remains of a city would also be pretty cool.

"What few of the pig-headed Brain Trust realize is that while they preach their lies and worship of the divine atom and their own small-minded belief in the proper balance of hydro-chemicals and n-Rays being able to change a man's biology to create some kind of Power of the Mind they ignore that here, in the deepest black, we hold back the will of demons only with the brief flicking of lights as we call them with petty fear and war mongering. We must deny fear, and accept the True Will that shall free Pan upon this world and the next and the next."
-Solar Grand Master Danforth

Okay, TRAINSHOCK guy/Poster#2 again, with an important thought. Music has always been important in the Bioshock universe, I personally can't help but picture Rapture when I hear "Somewhere Beyond the Sea". Plus there's the whole subplot of Fink's brother using tears to steal music from the future. That in mind, what are some song's that you could hear residents of Prosper listening to?
Captcha: "feited teelowl" The Teal Owl could be a club/bar/cult lodge, maybe?

Um, here's a good starting point for a divergence:

>Parsons, a science fiction fan, had read in the fantasy pulp magazine Unknown the 1940 original version of Jack Williamson "Darker Than You Think". Parsons identified the redheaded female love interest of the protagonist with Babalon or the "Scarlet Woman", whom Crowley had prophesied would usher in and help fulfill the Aeon of Horus and end the Aeon of Osiris represented by Christianity, other patriarchal religions, and male-dominated social institutions. In 1946, Parsons and Hubbard (whose works Fear and Typewriter in the Sky, among others, had appeared in Unknown) participated in a work of ceremonial magic known as the Babalon Working. In simple terms, the Babalon Working was a ritual to summon this Scarlet Woman.

>Paul Rydeen writes:

>The purpose of Parson's [sic] operation has been underemphasized. He sought to produce a magickal child who would be a product of her environment rather than of her heredity. Crowley himself describes the Moonchild in just these terms. The Babalon Working itself was preparation for what was to come: a Thelemic messiah.[8]

>Moonchild
>Thelemic messiah

What if this Babalon Working had worked? Crowley magic + Tomorrowland atomic era superscience + Scientology e-meters and Thetans and crap...so much material there.

>>24106647

Einstein walked around the 1939 World's Fair with a length of rope holding up his pants and wearing sandals.

He gave speeches and stuff, he was a notable person, but not everyone immediately recognized the strange German accent guy walking around.

>>24108672

Fly me to the moon and let me play amongst the stars,
let me see what spring is like on Jupiter or Mars

>>24108672
Actually, 'Beyond the Sea' could work again-since the second verse mentions 'Far Beyond the Stars'. Quite a bit of Rapture's music would also fit-since it's roughly the same time period.

>>24108701
This Moonchild could serve as the Eleanor or Elizabeth in this equation.

Also a like to 'Tommorrow Town' for some Zeerusty goodness and inspiration-it's obviously both earthbound and smaller-scale, but it fits.
>http://johnnyalucard.com/tomorrow.html

>>24108672

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FgSmdfRUus

Jesus Christ, this is amazing.

>>24109704
I really like the idea of calling the "Elizabeth" of this universe the Moonchild. What if for unknown reasons no children have ever been conceived in Prosper, and the Moonchild is the first successful birth?

>captcha: edoeln follows
Yes captcha, that's what we call her.

>>24110782
Humans are evolved to fit the environment of Earth. Anything tweaked to that environment, like, say, severely reduced gravity, can cause tremendous and horrible complications.

So, children have been conceived. They just don't survive.

>>24110782

Children would have been born, but every birth is regulated, and any aberrants are euthanized. Well, except the ones that guy saved in his menagerie.

Going with the theme of cosmos and stellar bodies with the Moon, and Danforth seeming worshipping mythical gods, the special "plasmid" pills could each be marketed as a planet in the solar system, depending on the power granted and mythological connotations. Jupiter's Storm summons storms to batter foes, Saturn's Strength lessens gravity around enemies, Luna's Kiss possesses and influences things. Each would have a Disney-esque mascot to advertise them, all connected by the main mascot, Ollie the Astronaut who is basically an astronaut Mickey Mouse.

>>24110782
Well i think her 'regular' name should begin with El, just to keep the theme going.

>>24110782
yesyesyesyesyesyesyes
>>24111080
YESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYES

>>24111080
Shouldn't it be Venus' kiss?

>>24111161
Eloah?

>>24110813
>>24110835
I actually like the mystery of 'first ever born', with Winters being open to tourism, Valentine and Charles Foster being rather...cult-like, and Mason being a directed, they'd want people joining 'Morrow for as long as they could...until the ideology started to stuffer it's break down and Winter started banning people and trying to make them into lumbering animtronics and Mason hides himself away, and Valentine, Foster and Danforth go full-on cultist mode.

>>24111161

Eliza.

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>>24109704
>>24108701

Besides the birth thing, just what would make Moonlizabeth special, unique? Elizabeth exploited interdimensional travel and Eleanor was a Big Sister. What sort of powers would a child of the Atomic Age have?

>>24111442
Moonchild...Should have magic. Or something akin to it. Pills maybe should have you tossing shit around...until you've met Moonchild?

Even if it isn't Danforth actually summoning up a demon from the black, or magic made whole by the first magus of the atomic age, the Beast Himself, she should be able to do something that looks like it.

>>24111442

She absorbed a very high dose of moon rays? Making her very attuned to the pill effects?

>>24111442
Moonchild should be the only one that Walt AKA The Computer That Runs The Moonbase listens to.

>>24111233

Could be that too.

So who/what would be the enemy? Not just the opposing factions, but the "monsters" as it were. Bioshock 1&2 had the various big daddies, Infinite had Handymen and such, so are we going to do something like that, or just go with man vs (space pill powered) man?

>>24112005
I really wish Infinite didn't do 'creepy animatronics' because I would love to suggest Imagineers's creations running amok.

Someone already suggested the 'Underground Orphanage' and it would be a kind of horrific idea of these poor 'unwanteds' descending into animal madness after benign treated like 'pets' for so long.

Aliens - or humans made to look like aliens, or robots who look like aliens - may be a neat idea, as would skeletons in space suits.

If we do do Mooncild uses magic or fucks with Pills, then Space Patrol Wunderkinds going from blue eyed, jut-jawed heros to gibbering creations might be neat.

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>>24104529

"A city on the moon?"
"Quite the development."
"A lot less gloomy than that city on the bottom of the ocean."
"I quite liked that one."
"More than that city in the sky?"
"The Girl was much nicer in that one."
"Hmm."

>>24111442

I'm tempted to just steal the plot of Metropolis and pick one of our geniuses as a Dr.Rotwang who created an android in the likeness of a deceased loved one.

And being able to commune with the Master Control/Multivac would be pretty big dealish.

>>24112227
I love this. Bravo.

>>24112487
Same, actually. I heard the voices and wish it to be A Thing.

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>>24112542
>>24112487

>You are now imagining the Lutece twins, still in their matching early 20th century outfits, exploring the city on the moon and acting as eccentric as ever
>You are now imagining them playing baseball in zero gravity without spacesuits on in a lunar mare, with little streamers attached to the baseballs so they can track the trajectory of each ball as they float through space

>>24113090
I AM AND IT IS FUCKING BEAUTIFUL!

>>24113191

What would Progress City need (to make it feel fleshed out and not a theme park) and what would it want/have as the city of tomorrow (demonstrating the ideology)?

My basic premise was the central city connected to six spokes, six other citadels/zones. And rather than Bioshock's greek gods naming convention, I'm going with lunar features (Nectaris, Amoris, Iridium, etc.) referencing the latin and greek nouns or verbs in the names rather than the physical features like "lakes" and "seas" which would be far far apart from each other on the lunar surface. So not referencing the specific places, just using the names as inspiration.

All I have right now is that the radial city/garden city style green belt between the central city and the spokes is actually underground. It is Fecundia, and at it's heart is the crater lake that houses a giant melting ice asteroid.

And I have an idea for one of the six spokes - Somniorum, the city of dreams, where the Temple of Religions, and immense stadiums for public gatherings, sporting competitions, and all other forms of self-aggrandizement and social improvement are held.

Cognitum should be the university city, the r/d center, and house the Multivac type supercomputer, or one part of it.

Ingeniopolis could be the production and recycling center.

Separate parts of the Progress project are Tranquility Base, which has been militarized since the American moon landings of 69-72, and which houses one of the experimental "hoppers" - this one a semi-stable link to Perseverance, the Mars outpost.

The other being the stanford torus at a lagrangian point between earth and the moon that is the home of Von Raum and the weapons satellites Dayle tasked him with building.

Some ideas for the names of Synergetics (plasmids. It's a type of pill. So in a dispensary there would be Consumables, Medicinals, Recreationals, Enhanciles, and Synergetics).

Mercury Standard
Venus Waltz
Martian Rag
Jupiter Jazz
Saturnine Symphony
Uranus Dirge
Neptune Blues
Plutonic Nocturne

>>24114209
I think we need a time-line of decay and destruction. And a starting point, too. Not OP, but lets say...1950s to early '60s? 1955? When Walt was showing his home to the world, Winter was sealing his off from space

First few years is serene, perfect - like it always is with such new ventures. People gladly join Review Board to know what job they should do, the Brain Trust has invested wonderful, effortless, things.
Then, the cracks start to show. The Underground Orphanage, the Brain Trust beginning to splinter, and some settling into their own 'Spokes'. A hippy counter-culture vibe among some - wearing their hair long, dressing in unusual styles, any way to act out in a designed city.
Then, 1963 rolls around. The assassination. By us. Of them...and they're still planning to come here. The counter-culture goes underground, hoping to get picked up, but everyone starts getitng worried - what happens when we're found? And when if it's the Russians who find us first? - I know that the brain trust is suppose to be against McCarthyism, but I bet they'd be a bit worried if they had Russians and Americans possibly gunning for them.
1969 rolls around, and what do, Apollo 11 find? Does Morrow keep itself hidden still?

And, because we're role-players, what happens after? How does Morrow look Today?

>>24114209

How about having the domes use the names mentioned upthread? Progress, Morrow, Prosper... did I miss any?

Maybe the catalyst for the collapse was the Mars Patrol coming back...stranger. They come back distant and hollow-faced. And then one day, they appear back in their space suits, with their space-guns and open fire on a populated area.

>>24115581
"I'm...really starting to get scared for Ronny. When they announced sign ups for Mars Explorers, he jumped at the chance, all bright eyes and bush tailed. You'd think he was getting sick of the construction job. He passes all the tests, not that he was allowed to talk about them, and suddenly he's standing on that podium, ready for lift-off with they rest of them. Red jumpsuit, fishbowl helmet, waving like a kid at his first day of school. They even had some fancy new guns that could fire in space. Brain Trust cooked them up, special. Then they shoot off for six months. Kinda lonely in the break-room with no one to talk about sports, they pick up the signal from Earth, you know.

I'd been so distracted by all the shit that's going down to remember the Return Date, funny they never mentioned it on the news, so I first met him at his place, I said I'd keep it clean for him, he's not got a wife of his own.

He was just sitting there, staring into his mug, still in his space-suit with the helmet on the floor. I thought he was mad at me for missing him coming back, so I start apologising, real honestly. But he just sits there, without a word. I get angry my apologises aren't being noticed, so I bang the table to get his attention. He nearly jumps out of his skin and looks straight in my eyes. I have never seen so much fear in a man's eyes before or since. I got so spooked, I muttered "sorry" and took off.

That's the last time I spoke to him. He's stopped coming to work, but a replacement arrived after the first two days. He's never at home, so I've stopped calling. I have seen him around, though. But, going into houses, with the other Explorers. Always in the suits. It's been weeks. How long have they been wearing them for?"
- David Segale, speaking to Representative.

>>24115581
I'm not fond of this, I prefer the thing dissolves from the inside out - If they do come back changed, they're strange and distant, but not outright going 'No Russian' on anyone.

Although that does make our Heinlein a lil' messed up, and I thoguht were were doing that for our Oppenheimer.

Of which I like, Oppenheimer being touched, maybe, by some dark, ouside forth and Jack Parsons worshiping a, maybe, actual Thelema-esque divinity makes the whole 'Super Science' feel weird and a little more creepy.

>>24115924
Sorry mate, I've been reading the rest of the thread as quickly as I can. I just thought I'd post this idea before I forgot! Use it how you will.

>>24115997
Hey, I'm just one voice of Many.

>>24116056
Well, maybe they can be a group by themselves? Everything went to shit and the only people the trusted any more was the other Explorers. So, they put their helmets on, got their guns back and just acted like they were still on their Mission.

PSTD from Mars.

"U.B. spotted, Captain."
"Local?"
"Don't think so, sir."
"Light it up, then."
"Yessir!"

>>24116184
Yeah, i was actually thinking this. Is it something Robert Valentine sees as a failing, i wonder? Mostly because i see him being the head of the whole 'Space Patrol' thing.

>>24115924
I don't know. I'm picturig that sort of thing as the match to the powderkeg, the straw that broke the camels back. Some Patrolmen snapping being a sign that things are out of control that no one can ignore. I'd imagine most of the population of Morrow would be wilfully blind to shit like the underground orphanage or the hippies/marxists/etc or anything else that didn't mesh with their plans, but that would be something they couldn't just gloss over

>>24116244
Actually, what I'm thinking would be that is Kimball Johnson announcing, proudly, on November 22, 1963:

"People of Morrow, we have killed the greatest threat to our safety. A preening peacock lays butchered and ready for market. I say to you, people of Morrow, rejoice! John Fitzgerald Kennedy is dead."

>>24116239
The Patrollers were messed up, the only way they survived was thanks to military training. They couldn't function without it, so when everything went to shit (or before then, if they are going to be the match to our powderkeg) this was what they fell back on for safety.

Maybe Valentine was the one who de-briefed them and found out what they had been through. So, they came to him for purpose. He used them as a personal bodyguard.

>>24116378
Ooh, this I like.

Oh yeah, someone asked what kind of music would be key to Morrow? I am thinking musicals and big band stuff.

>>24116378

His personal bodyguard, the Starship Troopers?

>>24115402

I started using Progress as the name of the city as a whole pretty early in thread, but I agree with you on ditching the lunar names. My reasoning is that the city needs to be tightly thematic, given we need to unite what is primarily the appealing aesthetic - which is retro-futurism and all the outrageous personalities associated with it - with a more coherent adherence to the genre of a partially deconstructed/ongoingly deconstructing utopia.

I think, while I'm trying to run away from the themeparkization, that the 39 world's fair's things like "avenue of labor" "court of power", "avenue of pioneers", zones dedicated to business and to industry, works.

But again, I would like some help on figuring out what the city of tomorrow looks like. Breaking it apart will be the easy part once we establish what the city was we won't be able to wait to let loose the characters we've come up with upon it.

One direction I'm thinking is providential is that the basic substratum of Winters/Disney's grandiose urban planning and utopian futurism can get into Albert Speers territory of grandeur that is alienating and dehumanizing in that way.

And the Underground Orphanage and other unresolved ideas of the counterculture/anti-establishment faction have pointed us in the most fruitful, most likely, direction: where are the Space Cadets coming from? If they were recruits brought to the city, who helped built it, then we have Dayle brainwashing or basically demagoguing a bunch of geniuses and the top geniuses in the brain trust unable to stop it. If they were laborers/recruits made genius space cadets by the wonders of modern science, then we have that whole scifi social question angle. And if they are offspring, then A. how do the first generation feel about everything and B. how has the young generation been indoctrinated, what are the primary institutions of this society?

>>24118017

In terms of an iconic period song I like Fly Me to the Moon, in terms of the musical aesthetic of progress city you can go Walt Disney https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zcmLsIbFD0 or you can go period (such as the musical cues of this doc/advertisement about the 64 world's fair) - the 50's documentary about industry type stereotypical musical cues.

Or we can go afield and suggest things that sound like rayguns, rocketships, and space cadets.

>>24114405
To set them apart mechanically, they shouldn't operate on EVE/Salts/mana. They should operate like Vigors were initially intended to, by requiring a new pill to recharge uses. You can spend the entire pill on a huge effect (if you've upgraded it), or a little bit here and there. And just like real pills, they should have side effects when too many are taken in too close a time period. Possibly inflicting physical or mental debilitation for a time.

Now as for tonics/gear, I think moon rock key-chains would work wonderfully. You could even do something kinda S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with them, by having detrimental effects to some of them.

>>24118187
YES.

>>24118681

Yeah, the pills began with food pills and are a delivery system for a lot of things, including making the population smarter and healthier, but they work like pills. Some things are regimens that don't necessarily just run out over the course of hours, but Synergetic pills could/probably would.

Given all that, making a second level of stuff not pills is not needing another way to explain human enhancement, as pills cover that if anything better than they do cover the Synergetics/superpowers - the aspect of plasmids that was "out of game" but "In character" in Bioshock fit into future pills great. But just as something for, running this as a rpg, quest thread, or thinking of it as a videogame just for a thought experiment, having some second level of stuff to think about would provide more depth.

But I'm not sure we can't just go with gear given the gear fetishism possibilies of THE WORLD OF TOMORROW.

>>24118520
Stop running from the awesome that is 'Horrible Theme-park Futurism."

As for Building, I'm seeing raygun and jumpsuits, with those classic Bucky domes - and maybe some micro houses. But I also think that the constructed city may also reflect the owner or location.

Anyway, as for Space Cadets, they need to be Dayle Breanwashing offspring. M-I-C-K-E-Y-M-O-U-S-E you kindly?

As for old the first generation reactions...ooh, maybe the Space Cadets could be out Big Brothers? The families are, at first, in awe, and overjoyed if their child gets chosen but...then they become jutted jawed super heroes...who don't quite remember their parents.

>>24118840
I've mentioned this before, but I'd actually find it cool if Pills are passive until you deal with the Moon Child, and then, somehow, you start throwing fireballs around.

>>24118992
On one hand it makes thinking of the setting and characters easier if they don't have superpowers commonly available, on the other I like the idea of an astronaut popping a pill to lift up a broken rover vehicle with telekinesis.

>>24118960

The most thematically important locations of Rapture, that is those used in the games, were: a medical pavilion, a fishery, an oxygen garden, a farmer's market, a classy night life district of theaters and bars/restaurants, a power station, a high class neighborhood, a working class neighborhood and a slum, a laboratory and natural history museum, a luxury resort, a theme park, a red light district, a park, and a penal colony.

In Columbia we see main street USA, Columbia style, in the form of the Comstock Center and Emporia at large; the company town of Finkton; and the entertainment complex Soldier's Field that has as its central element the Hall of Heroes - a patriotic museum.

So what would be the major setpieces of Progress?

I guess using the themepark inspiration, and the fact that what we have our strong personalities/characters, it might not be disastrous to think of the city as having been built in zones as people building an area based on their own vision of the future, hence the central Jetstones city they all share in common is not the Albert Speers with mouse-ears area Dayle kept building up after the founding or the astronauts-in-cowboy boots future Valentine envisioned.

What's interesting then is, as I didn't expect them to be running fiefdoms after everything goes to shit the way the others like Heinlein and co. would, I haven't really thought about what the future of Oppenheimer, Feynman, etc. would look like, specifically.

>>24119126
I think we can work with trying to bullshit a future for some of them - and I'm not sure we need to do all of them - they may just need to do some, the others are refugees or places where the strong personalities muscled the weaker ones out, or worked together - a cowboy, magic and space suits where Valentine and Danforth worked together. Or we could just invent the futures from other members of the brain trust.

As for locations, I think 'the City of the Future' which would be a central, 'no, look, we need to make this one work together' idea of fitting all the pieces together and the place that, when the decline starts, is hit the worst. Then a 'Brain Trust Laboratory', Churches of Science and Churches of the Will of Man...and a Church of the Dream that Oppenheimer may be infested with...the Cowboy Roundup, an actual amusement park, the Future-Suburbs and Mars.

Oooh, maybe the lifting a broken rover was possible before the moonchild was born?...or, being outside makes slightly more 'wild' powers work?

Of course, I'm the only one who's been saying 'Make Moonchild have actual magic and when you deal with her, free her, near her, you transform Jupiter Jazz from a strength enhancing pill to i shoot lighting out of my hands and call down tornadoes'.

>>24118992

>Upon her honorable discharge from the service in 1945, Cameron moved to Pasadena where she became a fashion illustrator. Disillusioned with mainstream culture, she became an enthusiastic supporter of jazz, frequenting the black clubs on Central Avenue. Her life was forever changed, however, when an old Navy friend took her to meet John Whiteside Parsons, better known as Jack Parsons. Instantly struck by Cameron's dramatic red hair and intriguing looks, Parsons was convinced she was his Scarlet Woman, the entity he and L. Ron Hubbard had just conjured up during their sexual magick experiment called the Babalon Working, an occult rite to manifest the Goddess potential in society and throughout the human race.[1] Cameron identified herself with the Scarlet Woman, as did those around her.[2]
>After further magical workings together, Parsons, Hubbard and Cameron felt that they had conceived a Moonchild, as described in the novel of the same name by Aleister Crowley, although no physical child was born.[3] They were referring to a spiritual entity. However it should also be noted that Cameron did have a very real abortion which was illegal at the time.[4]

Things that I propose should work in this setting that don't in real life:

Ceremonial magic as practiced by Parsons & co.
Scientology and the amazing powers you're supposed to have once you're cleared of Thetans or whatever
Gee-whiz 1950s Tomorrowland superscience with atomic-powered everything

Anything else?

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Just how many callbacks do you guys think this should have to the series that inspired it, if any? I like the idea of the Lutece twins being seen occasionally, but I'm not sure much else would be appropriate.

>>24120452
There's always a man, a lighthouse and a city.

The moonchild's name could begin with 'El' to carry on the theme (Eleanor, Elizabeth and...?)

You could actually have alternate-universe versions of Rapture individuals appear-since the founding of Progress and the founding of Rapture is about the same time period. I could see Fontaine (not his real name, of course) trying his hand on the moon.

For added screwiness, maybe see a tear get opened to Progress by Elizabeth in Columbia-and then hurriedly close it again.

Unless the moonchild can herself open tears, that's about the limit you can take things, I think.

>>24122745
Elsie?

>>24124597
Maybe it should have 3 syllables, too.

>>24124807
Well, three or four.

Morrow is built with the designs of the Brain Trust, the cash of Winters and the hands of those who were in the know and signed up for the venture. It's very theme-park ish, with each zone having a designated function by the Brain Trust, with the central area including the housing complexes and the Brain Trust's headquarters. It all requires the collective effort of the inhabitants to maintain, but within a few years it really starts to be sustainable. Through the power of the Pills, people can lift girders with their minds, work with little oxygen and withstand radiation. Unfortunately, this only lasts for a while and the effects begin to lessen as their use becomes more frequent.

>>24124906
Conceiving children proves difficult. Many are stillborn, while others are malformed, taken from their mothers and exterminated (those being saved in the Underground Orphanage as little more than pets). The Brain Trust agree that it must be the a combination of Pill effects on the body and the Luna environment, but are split on if they should tell the Visionaries and if they should stop providing the Pills (wonders of science vs horrors). Eventually, they start providing contraceptive pills (which no one takes) and begin artificially inseminating women. Thanks to the splicing ability of the Trustees, they can create strong, healthy boys, who they start indoctrinating in their Mason-run daycares with holographic "Ollie the Astronaut", created by Winters. The children born naturally are weak, sickly and shunned as the parent collective attempts to get the love of the distant, thick jawed "Cadets". This leads to their hippy anti-establishment movement, as they aren't allowed in the Cadet-Care, leaving them illiterate. The older generation laments the lack of connection with the Cadets (while secretly fearing them) and ignore the Lost (while feeling more empathy with them).

>>24124912
As more of the "Lost Children" are born and reach maturity, the central space becomes cramped and over populated. Winters isn't willing to upset the "balance" of Morrow (this being when the theme park aspect bite him in the ass), telling people they'll have to share space with the various industries. This leads to the building of illegal shanty-towns by the Lost, who don't have jobs to go to ("Why is no one taking the damn contraceptives?") which people try to ignore. The Mars explorers are sent off, Valentine's pet project, which keeps people's minds of the growing Lost population. Engelstadt takes his space walk, goes crazy and starts his "Cult of the Void", believing that his arcane rituals are the only thing keeping the city from being destroyed, competing with . Winters dies of radiation poisoning and Mason is now free of his morality pet. Using holographic projections of Winters, along with his own authority, start using the Cadets as his own personal task force, destroying shanty-towns (forcing the Lost underground) and murdering "dissidents" in their beds. Valentine, who has been running the police force (The Peacekeepers) and prepares for a coup against the Trust and Mason, getting the support of Vidor (who is sick of the patriarchy) and Wu Song (who just wants to mess shit up). Valentine plans to kill Mason, destroy the Cadets and escape to America and help them claim it before the Russians find it. Foster has gained a following in the Scientific community, his "Lady of the Moon" cult bogging down the scientific advancement with pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo, conflicts with the Voiders and avoiding the eye of Johnston, paranoid, Anti-Earth Commissioner of the Cadets.

>>24124921
The Mars Troopers return and are quickly snapped up by Valentine, who debriefs them (it should be left ambiguous what actually happened on Mars, but it's most certainly was Bad Shit and cost them two or three Troopers. Space PTSD anyone?). Mason see them as representatives of Morrow's bright future, lauding them as such and leaves them be, as the two Cults have openly started worshiping and fighting each other, which the Cadets crack down on. Johnston, in his paranoia, secretly sends three Cadets down to kill Kennedy, as he believes the US government knows about Morrow and is using the Space Race as a cover for a lunar invasion. Mason has locked himself away completely, commanding everyone through Johnston (Mason believes that He and Winter were different personalities, Fight Club style and so uses the holograms to give Johnston his orders), Valentine has built an army of Peacekeepers out of dissenters and Lost, Engelstadt and Foster are preaching religious genocide against each other, the remaining Brain Trust have vanish (They've been working on the Moonchild Project, in an attempt to improve on the Cadet Prototypes and believe it can save Morrow) and the whole place is addicted to Pills and Moonrock amulets.

>>24124930
The final straw is when Johnston proudly announces the death of Kennedy. This enrages Valentine, who starts his coup early from his base in the Industrial district (where the most shanty towns resided), starting with The Mars Troopers going No Russian on the crowd gathered for Johnston's announcement. The Feral Lost see this has the fall of the establishment and release the Orphanage into Morrow, with the Orphans having devolved into mutant monsters. Finally, The Cults take this chance to openly begin massacring each other in a orgy of ray-gun violence.

By the time the Astronauts discover the Lighthouse and the Monorail, Valentine is contending with the Cults for control of Morrow, while the Orphan roam the streets and stalk the Oxygen Farms and Johnston has barricaded himself in the ruins of the Central Dome, with mass-produced Cadets (leading to looking more like giant apes than space marines), who have to contend with the roaming Mars Troopers, who believe their return to Morrow was a hallucination.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!

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I wonder, is Ollie the Astronaut an animal?

Perhaps some kind of Lucky Rabbit. And his best friend could be called...I dunno, Mortimer Mouse.

>>24125045
A rabbit in a space suit? Adorable! Maybe Mortimer Mouse is his rival, representing what bad thing they need to represent.

Also, I think Mason should be trying to build/succeeded in building a AI replica of Winter, since he feels he's way out of his depth.

Got a few potential names I dug up that start with 'El' and sounded spacey for the Moonchild.

Elita
Elura
Elmera
Elvina
Elysia

Any one of those look good?

>>24124906
>>24124912
>>24124921
>>24124930
>>24124937

oh my god, this is creepybrilliant. The only thing I have to ask is what is Danforth doing? I'm assuming his cult is also started running gang wars with Void worshipers and Foster's madmen.

>>24125779
Oh sure. The more cults the better!

Void worshipping moon-walkers, Pseudo-scientists with self induced visions and eldtrich abomination summoning cultists, all fighting over a moon base!

>>24126319
Well, one idea I had was that Hubbards & Parsons worked together to try and summon their moonchild. By the time of Moonshock, they're bitter enemies. What if both cults have their own moonchild that they claim is the real deal?

Neither of them are. The real moonchild is in The Underground Orphanage. She just wants to see a sunrise.

also, I believe we are in autosage.

>>24126404
Sure!

Foster got addicted to "mind enhancers" to seek the answer, while Danforth read books on magical lore. They, along with Engelstadt, took the majority of the lesser scientists of the Trust with them.

Now Foster has massive drug fuelled orgies with his harem to cry and conceive the Daughter of the Moon (he knows he's sterile thanks to all the drugs, but he can't let Danforth know), while Danforth is trying to summon it into captured children (he's completely insane).

The Moonchild should be in the Orphanage. She was looked over because she is blind, but can see thanks to her psychic powers.

And we very much are.