Wandering Netsuke-carver

Wandering Netsuke-carver

Variant Bard. Instead of playing music, he quickly carves purse weights that contain spells – when the spell is cast, the weight crumbles. These netsuke may be kept or given away.
Nobody may carry more than one netsuke at a time because that would be ridiculous.
The carver is a man of few words. Precisely, not more than 20 per session.

Time is a flat circle, extinction inevitable

Some years ago I started planning a time traveling campaign that never got off the ground. There was going to be a big reveal, that time was cyclical – if you jumped forward far enough (somewhere between 100 and 200 years) suddenly the world looked like it did some millions of years in the past, because humans made it that way, either through failure or design.

Once I’d muscled past my natural pessimism I started to think of what would happen next – did the humans die out or is something wonderful and uncharted going on or both?

Today my eldest showed me the video below and Paolo Greco posted a thing about political brainwashing and another brick added itself to this campaign.

1. in 2019 the Trumpkinator is perfected: now viral messages delivered via youtube can make up to 90% of the population delusional and/or adjust their psyches just enough that they vote for any arbitrary set of signifiers.

2. in 3024 society has rebuilt to the point where biologists are able to track the effects of Trumpkination in the blood stream – elevated levels of corn whisky and mutant white blood cells. Meanwhile autonomous drone technology has advanced to the point where the drones are so tiny as to be basically free, self-replicating, and self-feeding.

3. In 3025 the biologists release their answer to Trumpkination – a simple biobot that can sample the population and eliminate Trumpkins using an engineered microbe that induces lethargy and seizures to discourage voting, then kills after a short verification period – so the authors of the Detrumpkinator can verify that they’ve got the right target and decide whether to administer an antidote.

Left alone they mutated, of course, as did the humans. We now know the 3 inventions as mosquitoes, malaria and chinchona.

My wife just beat all the game ideas I’ve ever had.

My wife just beat all the game ideas I’ve ever had.

Squidditch.