Let Us Make A Setting

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setting based on real science

Well, what little has been made for this setting involves a bunch of people literally made for combating monstrous Diseases and various other maladies. So I guess that we could combine real-scientific traits with more fantastical stuff. In short, making things into full-blown Witch Doctor.

Do these Childer go to a special school? Is there a sinister organization behind all this? Because I like this idea, I want a setting with lots of cute boys running around using grim biopowers in a post-apocalyptic hellscape?
Maybe the CHRONOS Organization runs a few totalitarian city-states in the wasteland, and then there are "free zones" which are more subject to disease but are more free.

Childer are almost certainly taught at special schools. I mean, I doubt that they'd be treated very well in 'normal' simply by dint of their very natures, as well as the fact that them being what amounts to walking corpses probably doesnt help them much in the emotional or socialization factor. Though, if their is an organization behind the recruitment of Childer as Exorcists/supernatural Doctors, it probably isn't all that malevolent. Perhaps a wee bit amoral, but not Evil. Closer to how some medical facilities may function I imagine.

>tfw you end-up getting afflicted and becoming a Childer and the entirety of your family ostracized you and occasionally tries to have you killed for being a "freak" and a "blight on the line"

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>If a childer isn't available, operators are called in instead. Operators are average folk with only a sealed suit and an firearm to stop the affliction from spreading. Weapons and training might vary depending on the region.

>Operators and Childer aren't exactly on the best of terms. With most Operators being freaked out at how cold and distant the vast majority of Childer are (with the rest being distressingly upbeat most of the time), and many Childer think the Operators are too "weak" to be fighting against Disease.

>Although that's not to say they'll work together, with at worst insults being thrown at each other like 'corpse kid' or 'normie'. Some of the best preforming affliction defense groups are childer/operator mixed.

>There is one rule that both Childer and Operator know on the field of an Operation. One that neither side shall break or go against, no matter how much they butt heads, and that is;

>Always Stand Together

>However, while agents of both sides operate well enough on the field, the higher ups controlling both are in a constant state of debate and conflict on where, how, and when to use childer as well as debating on weather Childer should be terminated alongside the threats they face.

Childer fit into a few broad 'classes,' determining what type of biotes they manifest. They're durable to the point where killing one means you have to burn it or blow it up, and even if a Childer gets blown up they can be stitched back together.
The Cult of the Grim Father worships the Childer and the Disease as the heralds of the Sixth World (think mesoamerican myth). Rumor has it that they may even have a few rogue Childer on their side.

>The higher-ups arguing for the preservation of Childer usually make note of the fact that said "Corpse Children" are near-un-killable, and are one of the very few reliable assets they have in the fight against various Diseases.

Posting some more Operator style art.

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>If too many afflicted are in an area, they may start warping the area around it, causing it to turn into a zone of affliction or to most people 'zones'.

>Zones are places where reality has been utterly twisted with Disease. The very air is toxic, and the land itself yearns to devour all things that tread upon it that are not of vile illness
>Only Childer and skilled Operators are capable of safely moving through the Zones.

Last post for now. Hopefully the thread is still alive when I get back.

>Despite this, there is people surviving, if not thriving in these areas.
>They are usually outcasts or criminals running from society to keep what little freedom they do have left.

rescue bump.

Can we veto the whole "Operators are immune to the disease" or if they have to be immune due to how infectious the disease is

>Operators are immune to the "Disease" because they are given medical drugs to halt the infection within them, all operators are actually infected by the Disease and becoming an operator is the only path left to anyone infected by the Disease who does not wish to fall to the corruption.

> The Drugs are supplied by the same organization that trains and maintains the Childers and how it is produced or how it halts the effects of the Disease is known only by the mysterious group behind this.

So, since we seem to be stalling a bit on the specifics of the setting, we have some broad strokes. Childer, Operatives, tension between the two as they travel between tightly-controlled safe areas and the deadly, post-apocalyptic Zones.
Should we start working on a system? What's the resolution mechanic ought to be?
>d20
>dice pools of d10s or d6s
>d%
>2d6
>Deck of cards
>Diceless

Maybe it doesn't even halt it, just slows it down, and the reason Operators can go out into the wild Zones is because they've basically already got a death mark on them. And as time goes on, Operators are eventually doomed to fall to corruption?

>The Cult of the Grim Father worships the Childer and the Disease as the heralds of the Sixth World

I like this but I find it hard to believe if these people worship the disease they would more than likely infect themselves with it leading to no real leadership as everyone becomes a monster.

That's what I mean the Drugs slow down the infection but ultimately every operator either becomes a slave to this School or Secret group that creates and supplies the drugs or defects and succumbs to corruption.

Oh something we are forgetting is that most of the population is female so... most operators should be female.

You can't go wrong with a good D20 system. Though a deck of cards also sounds fairly interesting as a system for this.

>the fatality of this can be reduced by exposure to girls in various emotional states with love, kindness and smug being the most effective treatments

Personally I like D100 systems but honestly could not care less what we end up with. Whatever we create though we need to add some mutation bar to represent how inhuman the character is maybe certain actions or exposure to the Disease increases infection and each time you fill the bar a new mutation occurs?

Well, I mean they are wearing sealed suits which would prevent corruption, doesn't make them immune, but prevention is key.

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>settlements in the zones are primarily ancient bunkers that had been built to support multiple generations in the event of a nuclear exchange that would leave the surface uninhabitable
>few of these bunkers can manufacture the air scrubbers they need to keep the Disease out or the tools to maintain them and are given a hard choice between vassalage to the vaults that can or scavanging for what they need from bunkers that have fallen to the Afflicted.

What kind of things would you see in these dead zones? How often do the Childer venture there? Why?

>Fears of the Disease spreading to swallow the Earth lead certain breed of humans, like the wealthy and the genious, to take to the obvious frontier away from the zones: the skies.

>this massive city in the sky named "Olympus" is home to a few 100 genius/rich people and the secret society that trains these Childers.

Well, here's something;
>There are as many Strains of Disease as there are stars in the vastness of the universe. Perhaps even moreso. And one of the most common Strains is normally located in the 'weaker' Zones. Vampirism.
>Vampires as most people would know them, are soulless husks that glut themselves on the blood of living creatures, nightmarish aberrations that vaguely resemble humans but are utterly unnatural in terms of movement and ability.
>In truth, the creatures commonly called "Vampires" are little more than shells, bodies used to hide away the -true- Vampire, a bloated worm-like thing that infests the bodies of the living and hollow them out, using them as a wretched carrier for their horrific existence.

The Disease serves as a focus of dead things, and a heavy concentration of Disease generates heavy fogs and lakes of Living Petroleum, which can power up entire cities for days, and cost a fortune in the Market.

Stahp.

You're ALL starting to sound like this setting for a Visual Novel I'm making.

you know what never mind I take it back really tired of the "There is one sanctuary" trope

If there is going to be a city in the sky make it a dead zone that hovers over the rest of the world as a reminder that escape is impossible. The rich and powerful tried to take to the skies but a strain of the disease made it's way up there and the city is now a dead ghost town with it's centuries worth of fuel reserves causing it to hover above the landscape.

>as the Afflicted and their dead bodies are moved by telekinesis and not by musclepower the definition of what a creature is or can be is stretched to breaking. In the hill country burrowing colonies of coal seams occasionally burst out in massive hordes hunting for biomass to be crushed into more members of the hive.

It's not a sanctuary if the Olympians kill any childer and operators they see on sight.

Gotta maintain the purity of your sanctuary. Sometimes even go on a ''Culling Crusade'' to thin the number of Diseased that blight the land. And that includes everything not Olympian.

wait a minute
>the disease only affects MOST young boys, and the disease's survivors are the Childer who are clearly not okay and not fit to be husbandos
> the handful of remaining (re: immune) boys grow up and are communal husbandos who father the next generation
why wouldn't they be passing on their immunity to the entirety of the next generation? this setting is practically a stage for evolution in action.

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>No one has ever seen an Olympian unclothed, they have claimed to be elder Childer and that their appearance would be disturbing to their charges
>what few records exist from before the Outbreak that describe the Olympians however give various other excuses as to why they completely cover themselves, ranging from religious custom to alternative health fad

Not a biologist but why not just make the childer gene recessive or we make it dominate but so that it has no effect on anything lacking a Y chromosome.

Olympians are the Chad Paladins to the Virgin Childers. Outright superheroes straight out of a western comic in contrast to a childer anime aesthetic.

Paladins vs Necromancers come to mind whenever you see the fight.

>implying the disease isn't sentient and sparing a portion of the population so it has more shotas to infect in the next generation

If we make it sentient we'll just end up with the flood but more psychic and supernatural.

if it was recessive, then the male is guaranteed to have both alleles for it and he passes on half of it to his son. all the sons that survive pass half of it on to their sons, and so on and so forth. meanwhile those men are also fathering daughters, and each of those daughters is also ending up with either 1/2 or 2/2 of the alleles in question, which means the population of sons who didn't get the one from their mother would get logarithmically smaller with each generation

i mean, i'm not a biologist either and IRL there's a bunch more factors to deal with, like "person is immune if they have at least one J, both K, at least one of any of L, M, N, O, P, but NOT both Q", then there's metaDNA to deal with, but the point is that EVENTUALLY, all that would remain would be the immune. Unless the childer are fathering children too in which case my whole argument goes out the window.

The reports of Olympians sending out killsquads of mad gassers who sabotage the ventilation system of Vaults that look like they might be a future threat is a vicious conspiracy theory and has been denied

>When delving into the zones, operators are won't to bring their Moloch: Battle Tanks with hooks and threads capable of vertical movement up the mountains or down vertical shafts down the mines, riddled with Disease. Think Fire Nation tanks.

>all that would remain would be the immune

What we need to decide is if this is a mutation or a disease because if it's a disease it would be mutating alongside us to try to counteract our adaptions to it. If it's a mutation yes Humanity could definitely breed it out of them eventually so either the Childer slowly become more and more scarce or their DNA is passed on through unconventional means.

>in the first days of the Outbreak the higher ranks of the cult that would become the Cult of the Grim Father committed mass suicide, believing that the end of the world was nigh.
>the Disease has reanimated several of them, and these mad abominations are bound in the sanctuaries of the Cult's temples, scribes working to record and decode their deranged prophesies.

>Vault Cisterna is a glaring example. A large vault incinerated via white phosphorus, and the one stain between Olympians and Underworlder relations.

Well I suspect that Childer don't view the 'affliciton' that grants them their abilities or their unloving nature to be a Strain of Disease particularly. They may very well view it as the universe itself choosing the ones it needs to help kombat the Disease and it's Strains, and they were the ones with the greatest wills and potential skill-sets. In fact, they may indeed view the "Husks" of those boys who didn't become Childer as being too "weak to make the uct" and that they "probably" wouldn't have survived either way.

So, they likely view their specific affliction as being an intelligent action, but the bets are still on for Disease Strains as a whole.

I was referring to our immunity being genetic - if it's a disease it must be highly adaptable to be able to counteract the immunity, and some kinds of diseases are... not highly adaptable.
but then if the disease counteracts the immunity, then there are NO immune boys and everything is doomed. humanity would need to be mutating new immunity factors at about the same rate as the disease overcame them, and that sure as shit ain't a reasonable expectation to have.

Pretty much a childer.

And a childer that has gone past the point of no return.

>the pliant nature of afflicted flesh has allowed for the development of a crude school of biomancy which attempts to develop forms of life more adapted to the new world by combining bodyparts from various beasts and even people
>shunned by normal society these mad scientists dwell in unnoticed corners of the zone, unleashing the fruits of their labors on the world once they've lost interest in them

That could be the philosophy of individual Childers but as a whole I don't think the disease itself should be sentient.

Is it all the same disease or is the one that makes Childers a seperate strain from the one that makes horrible monsters

Most likely a separate Strain that Childer view as being a way for the universe of develop an immuno-response of the true mass of the Disease. All other Strains likely result in middling monsters at the lower levels, and fullbown cosmic horrors at the higher tiers.

>And if given free reign for a long-enough period of time, a zone can grow to be VERY conspicuous indeed. Some say the only reason we didn't notice the first of the zones is that it came from outside our world, inside the moon. And when the moon broke water, spilled it's spawn like a meteor, struck the Earth, it was already too late for all of us.

Buy my game.

lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=46018

that only works from the Childer's point of view - the strain that has the most potential to propogate would be the Childer strain and the rest of the strains probably wouldn't be very long-lived as the Childer strain took over everything the other strains had.

>the emergence of the first zone from the Moon shattered it as columns of necrotic flesh hurled themselves towards the earth
>the fragments of the moon now circle the earth in decaying orbits, where a fragment lands a new zone is likely to emerge if not culled quickly

>all of the males who are straight-up unaffected by the disease become communal husbandos who must father children - there are no men in the Zones
>some Zones have active groups of women trying to track the sources of said zones
>yfw the entire thing turns into Diseasebased!Rule63!S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
>yfw Fem!Strelok happens

That's the thing though; Childer look human. They look like young boys, the exact age at which thry "Died" and ended up becoming what they are now. Sure, they have utterly monstrous abilities that sound like they're out of fucking Hellsing or the like, and they can end-up becoming overwhelmed and turned into horrors, but they STILL possess a 'human' form and a desire to defend and "cure" the world. Other Strains don't have any of this at all.

>the Pacific Trash Patch has become a base of operations to contain the horrors of the Mariana Trench zone. It has been built up into an enormous floating slum as refugees from the mainland try to take shelter under the authority of the local Childer

>If the ground looks bad to you, you should see the bottom of the ocean.

Captain Roderick Phillips, only man to reach Challenger Depth and come back.

>Sometimes, particularly vile Strains bubble up from the Trash Patch, from many depths below. It is well-known for many fleeing refugees to end up getting consumed or infected before said aberrations can be driven away.

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How about we just make these creatures that rise up from this trench the source of the Disease?

Eh, the origins of the Disease being ambiguous or even totally unknown, opens up faaaaaaaaaaar more storytelling and lore opportunities than there would be if we just made several big ( but not even the largest) monsters be the ones producing it. It's much better if we simply leave it as is. A complete and utter unknown. Operators and Childer are probably encountering new Strains every single day, and they may need to regularly re-evaluate and develop new ways to treat them each time. The Disease having a clear origin point however, would really lessen all of that, I think.

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>The Unified Ascendancy is essentially the remains of the United Nations Security council and the remaining peace-keepers when the disaster struck.
>They also have access to large stockpiles of advanced weaponry and military exosuits, making them a formidable enemy.

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Shit, forgot the image to go along with this.

>okay so reviewing so far we have a diseased world with a dominant female population,
>The Disease causes mutation and physical corruption on a scale where those afflicted are changed so much they cannot be considered human
>A unique strain of this disease causes Childers to come into existence a rare mutation in young men that freezes their aging process and develop mutations to fight the disease. Many Childers are taken in by a secret society (taking the guise of a school). This Society trains the childers to combat the disease and keep their humanity intact.
>High above the ground is a flying city named Olympus who's population hide from the rest of the world, quite literally as none have seen one unclothed.
>Thought the world are the "Dead Zones" completely overcome by the disease and avoided at all cost besides those desperate or stupid enough to try to live in the many underground vaults scattered thought the zones.
>In actuality the zones are fragments of the moon crashed into the surface of the earth as the moon was the very first "zone"
>In the mariana's trench there is a community of people dedicated to fighting the horrors that spew from the trench many of these hunts are unsuccessful without the help of a local Childer
>The United Ascendancy acts as an attempt at government in these times and seek to be peace keepers in the hope to rebuild humanity
>The same secret society that trains the Childers have their own personal military of "The Operators" people infected by the disease whos only hope is to live as a slave to this society as they are the only ones able to slow down the progression of the Disease with medicinal drugs.

Did I miss anything? This setting sounds pretty cool.