FORGOTTEN FUTURES

Most people get up in the morning with a fair idea of likely events during the day ahead, and very rarely run into invading Martians, marauding dinosaurs, or deranged serial killers. It seems unlikely that anyone reading this has fought a gun battle on the wings of a biplane, or unravelled a sinister web of deceit to unmask the machinations of an ancient cult and a nameless evil from beyond the stars.

Life is different in a role playing game, and characters don't lead routine lives. They are adventurers, encountering excitement wherever they go. Sinister cultists kill victims on their doorsteps, or decide that an adventurer is the reincarnation of their god. Their airliner is the one that is hijacked, their spaceship the one that picks up a strange alien parasite. They suspect weirdness in the most mundane events, and are usually right. The snag is that the referee has to prepare all this for the players.

Sometimes plot elements are implicit in the game background. Let's take an example set in 1911, a decade after the War of the Worlds was won by the wrong side. The Martians control the world, and are using their machines to exterminate humans, apart from a few survivors kept as food animals. There are still human enclaves, hiding places where a resistance organisation is gradually acquiring the tools needed to destroy the Martians. Think of a steam-powered version of the resistance organisation in the "Terminator" films. Here the staple plot will be commando-style raids on Martian bases, and attempts to destroy Martian war machines. The aliens aren't invulnerable; cunning booby traps might literally bring a machine to its knees. Long-term goals would be capture of Martian heat rays and other weapons, and discovery of a way to use them safely.

This is fine for one or two sessions, but it won't sustain a long campaign. You can only destroy so many tripods before the novelty wears off. Let's add another plot element; the Martians have implanted electrodes and transmitters in the brains of a few of their prisoners, and brainwashed them to wipe out knowledge of the implants. These spies have been allowed to "escape" to the resistance organisation, where they unconsciously report to the Martians. The Martians use the information to catch raiding parties; they prefer fresh-caught food, not the unhealthy blood of their ageing "cattle". The resistance base is allowed to exist, because the occupants are accomplishing little. The Martians know its exact location, but don't move in because it would cut off their most succulent food supply. Now raids will start to go wrong, and the adventurers may start to suspect a spy in their midst. Throw in more complications; a resistance commander who thinks that one of the adventurers is a spy - possibly correctly. An escapee who is behaving very strangely, but for a completely different reason. Sooner or later someone will realise that escapees knew something about every failed raid. Proving anything will be VERY difficult; the spies don't know that they are spies, and aren't doing anything unusual.

FORGOTTEN FUTURES

THE SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE ROLE PLAYING GAME

RULES

By Marcus L. Rowland

Copyright © 2005, portions Copyright © 1993-2002

http://www.forgottenfutures.com/

http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/index.htm

The Martian menace next time

Ok, here's a little scenario..

The last Martians to die did so a couple weeks after the first reports of Martian machines crashing or going out of control came in. The northern Canadian landing, apparently protected from disease by the arctic climate, may have killed themselves rather than die of disease: in any event, the central “nest” was a half-mile wide pool of molten ground when Canadian forces came to investigate.

Recovery began. The US was fairly quick of the mark: although nearly one in ten Americans had died during the invasion, the political system remained intact, and the sheer size of the nation meant large areas remained untouched by the invasion, which had moved outward from the landing sites in a slow and methodical manner, with no long-distance raiding. Martial law was called of after eighteen months, and massive reconstruction loans helped stimulate industry. The most notable social trend was a strong religious revival brought on by the seemingly miraculous nature of humanity’s salvation: one of the scientists involved in the initial struggle became a preacher at the church he and his wife had found refuge in on the day the Martians began to die...

Other areas were less fortunate. Various local strong men arose in Latin America as weak local governments crumbled in the face of the invasion, while much of colonial Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia descended into chaos. In Indo-China, Ho Chi Min emerged from the woods were he had hidden out during the invasion, and took control of the country in the total disorganization of the French colonial forces. In Egypt, the Muslim brotherhood temporarily seized Cairo in the wake of what was clearly SOME kind of divine judgement. As chaos and amine broke out in Western Europe, forces of the far let took control of local governments in France, Italy, Austria. A new civil war broke out in Yugoslavia.

Not that the USSR was in any shape to take advantage of any of this. Only a few years after Hitler, a second invasion of comparably devastating proportions had nearly broken the state. Stalin hadn’t got out of Kursk in time, and within a couple years power had decidedly passed to the one force capable of restoring order, the army. As it was, Marshal Zhukov was hard pressed to restore government control over the Union proper in the post-invasion chaos, let alone Eastern Europe. No, the Poles, Romanians, etc. would have to be let go: people were starving to death at home, and the Soviet Union could not afford to anger the US, which damaged as it was, was still in substantially better shape than the USSR. The Soviet Union would be lucky to avoid collapse, and would take any US help it could get.

Of course, the US was not in any real way ready to provide a post-Martian “Marshall Plan”, nor was any other nation. A few states had not yet felt a Martian attack when the die-off began, but these were all small states: New Zealand, Liberia, Panama... However, there was a recognition that the global disaster required global solutions. At an emergency UN session held in 1951, it was unanimously agreed to create an international relief fund and reconstruction agencies, and to set up the necessary system for a global food bank, special financial cooperative efforts, etc., in a spirit of “all hang together or hang separately.”

Many idealists saw this as the beginnings of a world government: many intellectuals went into high-flung raptures about how the Martians had made us conscious of our common humanity, or, more cynically, on how the existence of a common threat would finally unify mankind. Unfortunately, human beings are rarely so sensible: the major surviving governments were scared badly enough to work together with traditional enemies in case of a future attack, but were no more willing to give up their sovereignty than France had been willing to merge it’s empire with Britain’s in the darkest days of WWII. After all, how could a world government include both democracies and dictatorships such as the USSR and China? And while the necessity of pooling resources and providing mutual assistance to help in economic recovery was widely appreciated, there was no way the wealthier states were going to take input on how to use their $$ from the poor and backward 2/3 of mankind.

So, what emerged by 1954 was something like a combination of NATO and the EC, comprising the US, most of Europe, Australia-NZ, Japan, and the USSR, closely allied militarily and economically linked: a China (and later India) more loosely tied economically, due to backwardness: and an “outer sphere” of poorer nations expected to provide raw materials and perhaps labor to the Planetary Union - for the common good, of course! A shaky and shambolic structure from the start, it never worked very well, and came under increasing internal stresses as time went by and the Martians failed to make a comeback.

At first the US and USSR did not clash. Initial big power muscle actions such as the US’s quiet support for right-wing European governments squashing local communists were politely ignored by the USSR (by 1990 only Italy, Serbia, and Albania still had communist governments west of the USSR), and the US returned the favor for not objecting to the communist takeover of Korea in the chaos following the Martian attacks on Seoul and P’yongYang. The military regime in the USSR increasingly turned to nationalist forces rather than Communist ones for support, and only Mao still stood for the international proletarian revolution, leading to the essential isolation of China for two decades.

However, the system as it was flawed in a number of ways. Nationalist sentiments and suspicions began to undermine the system of international labs and research centers set up to investigate Martian technology, and dragged their heels on turning over all the equipment found to the international commissions. By the mid-70's it was estimated that nearly twice as much was being spent on illegal local, national research programs as was by the official international effort.

Meanwhile, things were not going well in the former colonial territories...

Bruce Munro

Ideas! So what do you think happened next?

Of course, a sequel was written the year after 'The War of the Worlds' was serialised. It was called 'Invasion of Mars' and detailed the invasion of Mars (strangely enough) and subsequent liberation of the humanoid Martians from the Wellsian Martians.

Apparently, it didn't bear much resemblance to the original novel.

And show me a person who has read 'The War of the Worlds' and not had an idea of how the story should progress?

The book wasn't left as open as everyone assumes. The entire point of the novel was the total destruction of the "infinite complacency" and arrogance of the Victorian social order Wells detested. The Martians succeeded famously in making mankind vigilant; we were shaken from our self-absorbed stupor, forced to develop foresight and to learn how to anticipate.
That sounds like a potential pulp/VSF campaign or game/book? title, 'Tentacles and Tripods: The Fight for Total supremacy in the Solar System!'

I think someone wrote a 'sequel' where Edison? and humanity went BACK to Mars to 'kick some cephalapod…expulsion orifice?' Who's to say humans wouldn't have had similar 'problems' from MARTIAN environment/etc as Martians did here? Lots of interesting possibilities….or like the TV series 'V'…after the 'red dust' was distributed driving the 'VISITORS' off earth, they managed to come back to 'bands/temperature-areas' where red dust/antigen? didn't affect them???

Maybe Martians and humans would co-habitate/fight in 'bands' on each other's worlds where they could 'survive' best?…the lesser 'bacteria' areas of Polar regions on Earth and Humans could survive in equatorial regions on mars in constant 'hot/cold/guerrilla warfare?'…

Age of the flying boat

READY FOR TAKE-OFF The thrill of a take-off from water was one of the high points of clipper travel. Here, a Pan American Airways Sikorsky S-40 is shown taxiing for take-off from Miami, Florida, on its way to Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

The failure of airships left air-passenger transport over the world’s oceans exclusively to flying boats. In the 1930s these glamorous machines enjoyed a brief golden age as the aristocrats of long-distance aeroplane travel. The ascendancy of flying boats made sense in the conditions of the time. Although they were not necessarily capable of alighting safely on the open sea, they were, understandably, considered safer for transoceanic flight than land-planes. They could operate services to far-flung exotic locations without the need to build and maintain a chain of airfields. And their boat-like hulls lent themselves to more spacious and luxurious accommodation than contemporary land-based airliners. This allowed the flying boats to come closer in style to the luxury ocean liners with which they competed on most routes. It was no accident that flying-boat crews dressed in nautical fashion, or that those of the most famous fleet, operated by Pan American, were dubbed “clippers” after the fastest ships of the age of sail.

As in other areas of aviation, the United States lagged behind the Europeans in the development of commercial flying-boat services in the early 1920s, even on what the Monroe Doctrine had defined as its home turf – Central and South America. In August to September 1925, two German Dornier Wal flying boats carried out a demonstration flight from Colombia across the Caribbean to Miami, Florida, and offered to set up an airmail service linking the US with the Caribbean islands, and coastal states with South America. Stung in its national pride, the United States refused to play ball, but the incident highlighted the need for America to develop an overseas airmail system. The result was the Kelly Foreign Air Mail Act of 1928. As with US domestic commercial aviation, government-awarded airmail contracts were the springboard for the development of US international passenger services.