Bioshock Jungle Setting

I'm working on a semi-bioshock setting, but I'm going for something new... how would you try and create a Bioshock "Utopia gone wrong" setting in the Jungle?

Set in the 70s. A load scientist want to make the perfect "Eco sustainable" society based around flower power principles. Also they turn into mutants for some reason.

Well, for starters, why did they move to the jungle? What about it grants the same utter isolation that living in the bottom of the ocean can grant? That's why Andrew Ryan built down there, to assure the "evil governments above" couldn't intervene by force.

That said... if you want to mesh Bioshock with a jungle setting, you could find a useful philosophy in Social Darwinism. Until the Nazis made it politically unfashionable, this was a huge belief system touted all over the world.

Your "utopianists" came to the jungle to seek purity through strength, to winnow out the weak and make themselves stronger. Maybe focus on biotech and/or psionics; the strong command the weak, who live and die as the strong see fit.

The strong, of course, end up devolving with some ADAM-stand in - maybe a mutagenic virus contained in a deep jungle flower, ala Resident Evil 5? - and you have a lot of man-beasts and man-plants taking over what was supposed to be a bastion of racial purity and eugenically engineered strength.

...Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that eugenics and social darwinism are the best-fitting social philosophies to build your neo-Rapture from. These were legitimately popular beliefs in the 1800s and 1900s, up until the Nazis showed the world what their logical conclusion would look like. Dieselpunk meets biopunk, with a dash of toyed-with pulpy Darkest Africa for backdrop.

What type of jungle? Central America, Africa, South Eastern Asia? That's quite an important difference. Also who started the utopia? Do you have any basic ideals behind it prepared?

You can have them in a treetop village

And instead of skyhook or pneumatic tubes people swing around the place like Tarzan using engineered smart vines.

I'd probably go escaped Nazi Science trying to make an Ubermench Utopia.

You could run with the original plot of Bioshock 1. Cult deprogrammers have to go rescue an heiress from a cult that's taken "survival of the fittest" to it's absolute extreme, by splicing and modifying themselves into monsters.

Well for any pseudoshock game you need to figure out what cultural philosophy/ movement you want to have spiraling out of control, add about 20 years to when it was in vogue so it has time to go ape shit, and then pick an isolated place for everything to have gone wrong. Also what kind of crazy superpseudoscience you'll 've having

Something like this. An ecologist society founded in an extremely isolated valley, you either go there by air or travel weeks on a muddy river. Living in harmony with the nature, flowers and peace. Except their experiments with photosynthesis have gone wildly awry and it's become full Darwinian experiment, with some more fanatical member grafting chlorophyll implants onto their skin and feasting on raw flesh.

Said experiments have also produced super science with very capable solar power.

Players are a flying crew that crash landed nearby either by accident or design.

While everyone here is going for a Darwinian sort of philosophy, I'm going to go a complete 180 for my suggestion.

It's the late 1960s, right at the height of the counter-culture and rampant use of drugs by young adults in that era. A group of college kids are flying from some Central American hotspot for getting good, clean, "cheap" drugs and are partaking in them when their plane crashes due to a freak storm.

The group wakes up to find themselves being held captive by a decidedly "backwards" culture, a weird hybrid of Aztec, Inca, and Mayan architecture, dress, and dialect. They want to offer up these "sky people" back to the gods in the form of human sacrifice, which the group knows is not going to work.

Now they have to escape and survive from these weird natives, wielding weird powers "given" to them by "the avatar of the gods" for their most "noble" warriors. Said powers are because of a Nazi scientist who fled during WW2 and also crashed here, but was able to convince them he was an avatar of their gods and let them continue his inhumane and unethical experiments to create these powers, which are only possible because of some of the plants found in the area being distilled, purified, and combined with his Nazi deep science tech.

>Pre-colonial
>Africa "The Dark Continent"
>A combination of "modern" medical science and some obscure zulu-ish magical/herbal bullshit
>insert early British gibberish. Maybe a bunch of secret society or early illuminati

I would definitely do a Nambian style 1930s genetic testing colony that features
-German Eugenecists
-Massive plasmid conditioned slave populations
-Kraut Space Magic
-Mutated Slave rioters
-"Lost city" intro that leads to a magnificent alabaster city in a jungle that is currently enthralled in revolt between the German eugenicist aristocracy and mutated slave rioters that feature many abnormalities that would allow them to replace the function of electricity for functions such as refrigeration, heating, air conditioning, pest control, agriculture, metal working etc. purely as a replacement for the modern slave: oil.

>Jungle
>Namibia

Please pick only one.

You could stick it in Angola, though.

I mentioned Namibia more to evoke the tone of the setting than the locale.

JUNGlES FUCKING SUCK... DEAl WITH IT.. YOU CANT MAKE A DECENT SETTING IN A JUNGlE...

gorilla brutes serving humans then rebel and take over
now humans are trying to survive. most are slaves to their gorilla masters
or so it seems.......... maybe a human guy is behind this and ordered the gorillas to do it???

>Jungies
This is a fun word

I like the idea of a valley hidden in the forest, with a sprawling cave system underneath which serves as housing for research facilities and laboratories.

As for how the plasmids of this game work. A form of Protozoan found in a previously unknown species of insect was found to have the ability to carry over traits of other organisms to the infected host. This was first discovered during a Malaria scare when researchers were finding that victims were growing fur or insect-like carapaces on their dermis. Further experimentation led to the realization that not only could organic features be carried over, but they could control what symptoms occurred and even what organs were effected.

Once the research base was better established and outside communications were shut off as per the usual Bioshock scenario; these new Plasmids were used to help the researchers explore the jungle and expand their facilities by literally creating cryptid-like plasmids that granted enhanced sight, strength, stamina, and beneficial physical mutations.

By introducing the protozoan to specific minerals and tailoring the infections to sink deep into the bones and parts of the body that previously had been exempt of symptoms they could even create plasmids that allowed humans to alter their own internal organs for the creation of fire spitting glands in the mouth or hands, organs capable of generating vast amounts of electricity while also insulating the body, and enlarging of the pores to allow unique insects to live within the host and feed off them.

Basically it became a mutation frenzy and they were so shortsighted in their pursuits that they failed to realize they were dealing with a super science strain of Malaria. In the initial stages they made sure to "cure" people of their infections and keep them in proper quarantine until all the symptoms had passed, but once they thought they had mastered the organism they let their protocols slip.

By chance or because of outside interference though, a mutation occurred within a specific batch of the organism slated for use in Plasmids. Causing symptoms to be untreatable by the usual cures and remedies. This caused a panic as a number of prominent researchers and personnel were infected and their situations quickly went from managable to desperate as their mutations persisted and their physical conditions worsened.

In an attempt to save their lives they were given a secondary injection of what was believed to be a parasite that was the natural predator of these Protozoan organisms. This did save lives but the side effect was that the mutations to the original organism rendered it impossible to completely purge by the newly introduced predator. Lives were saved but without a way to properly cure them they were left mutated and with conditions that might go for the worst at any moment. And as the strain of these mutations on the body were still in effect the only way to keep them alive was too further augment their physical constitutions while a cure was sought after.

However, their minds couldn't keep up with the added strain, pain, and burden of new organs and their mental states quickly deteriorated. Eventually the first subject broke out and for fear that they would eventually make their way back to civilization thanks to their augmented bodies they had to hunt them down and pacify them. This sent a rash of fear through both the still mentally sound victims of infection, and those who were uninfected.

A scare swept through the communities. People feared the infected and those who were infected felt as if they were just going to die. It didn't take long for this fear to result in another breach of quarantine, this time with fatal consequences for a top researcher.

With the community unable to contain their fear and paranoia it was revealed that one of the personnel was actually an agent of a major world power sent to keep tabs on the group and report back if anything of value was found. The person in question was executed.

Now not only were people afraid of those carrying the infection, they were also unable to trust the uninfected for fear they may report back to their nation of origin and cause all their work to be pilfered and used for reasons against their own.

The last straw was when a number of vials of the mutated strain that was being kept in cold storage in one of the cave systems went missing. It didn't take long to figure out where they went as during one dinner in the mess hall one of the researchers began to manifest symptoms of plasmid usage, something that could only happen if the plasmid had been administered to him orally or introduction through the blood. People feared the former and a witch hunt began resulting in the deaths of the infected researcher, a portion of the mess hall staff, and a number of researchers thought to be responsible.

>Fuck running out of patience

Basically, researchers weaponized Malaria and then lost control of the strains due to mutations. The community tore itself apart due to paranoia and multiple breaches of Quarantine and eventually this resulted in the deaths of a number of people, and the infection of the rest who now had an incurable strain giving them powers with no means to retain their sanity. At the time the players find the valley it's been years and those who are still uninfected live in the trees or deep in the caves for fear of the monsters that were formerly humans roaming the forests.

And due to the plasmids continuing to mutate now that they weren't being checked in labs you have things that couldn't even pass for humans to deal with, as well as other animals becoming infected as well.

That sounds more Far Cry to me

OP here... it's gonna take me some time to sort through this, but this is some awesome stuff.

Anyone got any good music to use for a setting? I'm going mid-late 1900's.... very Indiana Jones-esque.

What if it's a Jamestown thing?

>mid-late 1900's
Go post-colonialism. Patrice Lumumba wasn't killed by Mobutu Sese Seko, he and his supporters escaped to to a secret Belgian bioweapons facility deep in the heart of the Congo along with a party of Soviet military advisors. It has been ten years since the coup that brought Mobutu to power, and rumors of monsters in the shape of men spread like wildfire.

That's Farcry.

Have to jungle take place at 1960s Russia like Metal gear solid 3.

The players are Arctic Schippers who have gotten trapped by ice near the Siberian coastland.

Forced to travel over land they find an overgrowth Lysenko research centre design to make frost resistant crops

>Social darwinist mutagen arms race in a fucking jungle society

I would play the shit out of that.

The first post was literally "make it about flower power gone wrong"

That said you could always have both. Maybe there's a schism between the new-age faction and the Darwinism one?

OP here, I was actually considering introducing West African Vodun and Bò as a level of spiritualism/mysticism to the backdrop of the setting. That could make for an interesting faction...

Glad you liked it.

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