<strong>The</strong> <strong>Mutant</strong> <strong>Epoch</strong>IntroductionIntroduction to <strong>The</strong> <strong>Mutant</strong> <strong>Epoch</strong>Welcome to the 24 th Century, and a worldundergoing metamorphosis. <strong>The</strong> ancientones speculated their end would comesuddenly, caused by one great war, plague orgeological catastrophe, wiping out their entirerace if not all life itself. Armageddon, of course,did come, and raged for centuries instead of amere decade, and in some areas, the old warsgo on, fought between humanity, mecha, mutantand the many slave races of clones, bioreplicasand cyborgs. <strong>The</strong> demise of the world’span-global culture took place insidiously, leadingto a final collapse of all nations, replacedby survival and expansion minded corporateand city states, and regions of total anarchy.Plagues, earthquakes, climate change, floods,starvation and civil unrest depopulated theworld further. <strong>The</strong> end seemed near by about2200 AD. From here, resources became stillmore scarce and regional wars erupted amongever smaller and more focused factionalgroups, groups which were often formed out ofgenetic, religious or technological allegiances.‘Hold out’ corporations and other powers advancedtheir weapons programs, adding robotic,clone, bioreplica and trans human forcesas well as bio-genetically engineered warriorsand beasts to their arsenals. Mutagen agentsused to wipe out enemy agricultural resources,or boost a government’s own, producedincreased yields but nightmares as well. <strong>The</strong>crossing of humans and animal DNA becamecommonplace, and the freakish results occasionallyproduced strains of sub-human deviantswhich formed their own racial standardsand sub-culture, ultimately splitting off fromtheir creators and claiming their own lands. Androids,having already taken over military directionfor some corporations, rebelled and slewtheir creators, forming mecha empires of theirown, many bent on the elimination of all humanity,while other mecha forces, still servinghuman masters, or developed by a competingmanufacturer, waged war on their mechanicalbrothers for supremacy.Hundreds of years of mutation, culturalcollapse and reemergence, have left the eartha very different place than that of the pre-devastatedworld. In former times, humans ruled,and all their creations were their slaves andplay things. In the <strong>Mutant</strong> <strong>Epoch</strong>, pure stockhumans struggle to survive in a landscape ofhorrors, where their enemies lurk around everycorner, and many plot their final downfall.To survive, some humans have embracedtheir own mutant offspring, former clone andbioreplica slaves and now live among them,embracing their common homosapien lineagein a bid to merely survive. In other locales;however, pure stocks have attempted to weedout all mutant life, embraced fundamentalistPurist religions that see their genetic purity asa gift from God, and seek to burn or enslave allmutant life. Yet, elsewhere, pure stocks whoare the direct descendants of intact corporateor political powers, have held on against hostileraces and factions. Fortifying themselvesin technologically advanced pockets of the oldworld, they communicate with each other aswell as a few orbital space communities abovethe Earth and on other worlds, working towarda day when their kind can once again claim dominionof the earth.For mutant humans this is an age of opportunityand personal power. In most areasthey have thrown off the chains of their humanmasters, have used their awesome mutationsto build pockets of their own culture, and decadeby decade have grown in power, formedsmall regional nations, and commenced communicationwith other mutant dominated nationsof Aberrationists. <strong>The</strong>ir goal is to see allpure stocks phased out by inter-breeding withmutants, or by execution.<strong>The</strong> most common settlements are thenumerous free towns, also called trade orbarter towns. Here, often with few laws, theseold west style forts are the refuge of misfits,seeking protection from the terrible creaturesof the wilds, the race wars between purist andaberration, or worse, the robotic mecha expansions.In free towns, engineered humans minglewith mutants and pure stocks, free willedandroid mercenaries and self aware robots,gathering to trade food, water, power cells,slaves, scrap material and relic treasures, aswell as to form excavation teams to uncoverthe precious loot found in the ruins of the Ancients.Adventure teams, usually small crackunits of between 4 and 12 members, are essentialto the free towns both to act as scoutand raiding parties, as well as to keep an influxof relic weapons and armor coming into theirhands. Only through force of arms can smallindependent factions survive long against thebarbaric humanoids such as skullocks, warmorts,moaners, reptili and bipedal rats, not tomention the imperial aspirations of androids,pure stocks and aberrationist mutants.It is a time when helicopter gun ships,satellite guided missiles, tanks and orbitalstrike craft are exceedingly rare, when warsare fought by hand held weapons, axes andcrossbows, muskets and swords, an age whenthe mutants, with their long ago engineered orhyper-evolved deviations, gain supremacy onthe battlefield. It is a time when a new, freakishrace is suddenly more populace than thepure blooded humans who manifested them;this is <strong>The</strong> <strong>Mutant</strong> <strong>Epoch</strong>.For anyone who has played other roleplaying games, this <strong>RPG</strong> will be fairly straightforward,allowing the game master to teachthe players the basic rules during charactergeneration and actual game play, withoutpausing too much to break the pace of thestory. For anybody new to the hobby, the quickestway to explain this form of entertainment isto describe it as cooperative storytelling withrandom outcomes. Said another way, <strong>RPG</strong>sare like being in a novel, where you, the player,decide what the character is going to say or do.For the referee, called the game master (GM),an <strong>RPG</strong> is like being the creator of a world, thewriter of a book, the narrator, as well as anactor for all the non-player characters (NPCs).Nobody in this game is playing against theplayers, not even the GM. <strong>The</strong> GM is neutralbut inclined to set challenges for the playersrather than destroy their characters with thegoal being an ultimate form of participatory entertainment.It is hard for anyone who has notplayed a tabletop <strong>RPG</strong> to image that by usingsome paper, a game book, graph paper, odddice, and a pencil, that an exciting, immersive,movie-like experience can be had, one whichmakes one’s palms sweaty, heart race, timespeed by, and you eager for the next session.This hub rules book, along with somepolyhedron dice, paper and pencils, includeseverything a GM and players need to begin acampaign in a world of discovery, adventureand danger, putting you in the game in <strong>The</strong><strong>Mutant</strong> <strong>Epoch</strong>. To learn more about role playinggames, see web resources page at the endof this book.