![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In the early 90s I ran an RPG campaign based loosely on Whitley Strieber’s novel, Majestic, which was about the foundation of the (almost certainly) fictional MJ-12 following the Roswell “U.F.O. crash.” The players each took on the role of one of the “MJ primes”, the heads of different divisions within the organization.
Now, Roswell is pretty old hat these days, but you gotta remember I was running this game when Roswell was still moderately esoteric – the sort of thing you had to read creepy magazines or mildewed books from small pinting houses to know anything about. Or, you could stay up till 1 AM and watch a 1970s TV show narrated by Leonard Nimoy. Or, yes, granted, you could read a best-selling novel by Whitley Strieber. Ahem.
I used GURPS as the game engine, and I don’t apologize to any man for that! :0)
The idea of the game was that the aliens were not invaders or extraterrestrials, but an Earthbound species that had evolved parallel to humanity. They communicated via empathic telepathy, and had been driven somewhat mad through continued contact with humanity. As a species, they decided to “save” humanity by granting them immortality and freedom from want by transplanting every human soul into an un-aging alien body, powered by sunlight.
I got a little heavy-handed with the Jungian philosophy and pointless esoterica at times, and the players got annoyed. I think the low point was when they were climbing through narrow tunnels in a pyramid on the Moon – an experience intended to evoke images of new birth. Too ambitious, I think. My usual GMing failure!
Still, the campaign ran on a weekly basis for the better part of a year, and managed to sustain player interest for most of that period. There were some notable incidences of excellent role-playing, particularly in the first couple of sessions, and toward the end.
As the game progressed, the players realized that the aliens were manipulating the MJ-12 staff into an unknown goal. This knowledge led to a break among the players as they roleplayed the private motivations of their characters. Dan, who was running the avuncular head of the enlisted ranks involved in the project (they provided site security and occasional test subjects), became enraged with the complicity of the “eggheads” running the science program. Everett (running the head of internal security) decided to get out as soon as possible. And Bill (the head of the research division) decided that the best solution was a quarantine of the MJ-12 facility, to prevent the virus of alien ideas (as personified by all those flying disc and spaceman stories in the pulps and movie serials) escaping into society at large. Everett also enacted the MIB program that filtered out through the countryside to stymie rumours of alien contact.
The MJ-12 facility (built on a dry lake bed in a remote corner of indeterminate New Mexico desert) essentially became a closed community, ignoring contact from the U.S. government but still requisitioning supplies. They actually did a good job of rebuffing inquiries from outsiders and trying to retool their research into the alien threat without following those paths of investigation that the aliens seemed to want them to follow. Toward the end of the campaign, however, Everett realized that there was an almost identical organization running parallel to MJ-12 on another base in Utah. He keeps this a secret.
The game was essentially a series of impressive scenes linked by confusing (and badly holed) plotline. The final scene from the last adventure I ran sticks in my memory, though.
Everett and Dan have a violent confrontation, that ends in a very messy shoot-out. (Guns in GURPS are extremely dangerous. If someone hits you with an M-1 Garand, you don’t just grab your arm dramatically and grunt.) Dan’s character is killed, and Everett badly wounded. He hops into his car and drives off into the night. Dan’s body is discovered and an alarm is raised. Bill’s character, hearing the news, fears the spread of “alien ideas” into the larger community, and decides to terminate the MJ-12 project. You see, like all good mad scientists, he has been using his Top Secret clearance and presidentially-granted powers to requisition weapons-grade uranium, which he has installed in a simple “uranium-gun” style A-Bomb.
As Everett drives away across the desert on a moonless night, he becomes aware that he is not alone in the car. A different kind of alien is in the back seat – similar in form to the “greys,” but with jet black skin and luminous grey eyes. Game ends.
The plan for next session was going to involve this:
1. As Dan arrives, I hand him a new character sheet, with stats for the mysterious new alien and a crib sheet of basic goals and stock cryptic responses to expected questions. One of his goals - he has to convince Everett to drive to the second MJ-12 base. And he has full knowledge of his prior life, but no interest in it.
2. Bill triggers the A-Bomb and destroys the MJ-12 base, illuminating the desert for miles around. Then Bill gets a new alien character sheet – with goals similar to but subtly different than those on Dan’s sheet.
3. Everett sees the flash, and presumably is forced to stop the car or something due to temporary blindness. As his vision returns, he sees a second alien in the car. He is utterly alone in the desert, except for two aliens in his backseat.
So, the adventure would have basically consisted of Bill and Dan trying to convince Everett to drive one place or another. They received their alien bodies, BTW, as a side effect of their “rebirth” in the moon pyramid. Everett's character was badly wounded, and would be unsure what was real and what was not.
It probably would not have worked out that well, but I really wish I'd had the chance to run this.
In the years since, I've sometimes experiment with the idea of forcing in-game changes in characters by changing the form of the characters themselves. It seems to me that the game Mechanical Dream might work for this sort of thing. I’ve often wondered if a game based on the 1920 SF novel A Voyage to Arcturus could work. In this book, the main character wanders a completely alien landscape and finds his attitudes and perspectives changing as his body grows (and loses) new organs that provide new means of sensory perception.
Now, Roswell is pretty old hat these days, but you gotta remember I was running this game when Roswell was still moderately esoteric – the sort of thing you had to read creepy magazines or mildewed books from small pinting houses to know anything about. Or, you could stay up till 1 AM and watch a 1970s TV show narrated by Leonard Nimoy. Or, yes, granted, you could read a best-selling novel by Whitley Strieber. Ahem.
I used GURPS as the game engine, and I don’t apologize to any man for that! :0)
The idea of the game was that the aliens were not invaders or extraterrestrials, but an Earthbound species that had evolved parallel to humanity. They communicated via empathic telepathy, and had been driven somewhat mad through continued contact with humanity. As a species, they decided to “save” humanity by granting them immortality and freedom from want by transplanting every human soul into an un-aging alien body, powered by sunlight.
I got a little heavy-handed with the Jungian philosophy and pointless esoterica at times, and the players got annoyed. I think the low point was when they were climbing through narrow tunnels in a pyramid on the Moon – an experience intended to evoke images of new birth. Too ambitious, I think. My usual GMing failure!
Still, the campaign ran on a weekly basis for the better part of a year, and managed to sustain player interest for most of that period. There were some notable incidences of excellent role-playing, particularly in the first couple of sessions, and toward the end.
As the game progressed, the players realized that the aliens were manipulating the MJ-12 staff into an unknown goal. This knowledge led to a break among the players as they roleplayed the private motivations of their characters. Dan, who was running the avuncular head of the enlisted ranks involved in the project (they provided site security and occasional test subjects), became enraged with the complicity of the “eggheads” running the science program. Everett (running the head of internal security) decided to get out as soon as possible. And Bill (the head of the research division) decided that the best solution was a quarantine of the MJ-12 facility, to prevent the virus of alien ideas (as personified by all those flying disc and spaceman stories in the pulps and movie serials) escaping into society at large. Everett also enacted the MIB program that filtered out through the countryside to stymie rumours of alien contact.
The MJ-12 facility (built on a dry lake bed in a remote corner of indeterminate New Mexico desert) essentially became a closed community, ignoring contact from the U.S. government but still requisitioning supplies. They actually did a good job of rebuffing inquiries from outsiders and trying to retool their research into the alien threat without following those paths of investigation that the aliens seemed to want them to follow. Toward the end of the campaign, however, Everett realized that there was an almost identical organization running parallel to MJ-12 on another base in Utah. He keeps this a secret.
The game was essentially a series of impressive scenes linked by confusing (and badly holed) plotline. The final scene from the last adventure I ran sticks in my memory, though.
Everett and Dan have a violent confrontation, that ends in a very messy shoot-out. (Guns in GURPS are extremely dangerous. If someone hits you with an M-1 Garand, you don’t just grab your arm dramatically and grunt.) Dan’s character is killed, and Everett badly wounded. He hops into his car and drives off into the night. Dan’s body is discovered and an alarm is raised. Bill’s character, hearing the news, fears the spread of “alien ideas” into the larger community, and decides to terminate the MJ-12 project. You see, like all good mad scientists, he has been using his Top Secret clearance and presidentially-granted powers to requisition weapons-grade uranium, which he has installed in a simple “uranium-gun” style A-Bomb.
As Everett drives away across the desert on a moonless night, he becomes aware that he is not alone in the car. A different kind of alien is in the back seat – similar in form to the “greys,” but with jet black skin and luminous grey eyes. Game ends.
The plan for next session was going to involve this:
1. As Dan arrives, I hand him a new character sheet, with stats for the mysterious new alien and a crib sheet of basic goals and stock cryptic responses to expected questions. One of his goals - he has to convince Everett to drive to the second MJ-12 base. And he has full knowledge of his prior life, but no interest in it.
2. Bill triggers the A-Bomb and destroys the MJ-12 base, illuminating the desert for miles around. Then Bill gets a new alien character sheet – with goals similar to but subtly different than those on Dan’s sheet.
3. Everett sees the flash, and presumably is forced to stop the car or something due to temporary blindness. As his vision returns, he sees a second alien in the car. He is utterly alone in the desert, except for two aliens in his backseat.
So, the adventure would have basically consisted of Bill and Dan trying to convince Everett to drive one place or another. They received their alien bodies, BTW, as a side effect of their “rebirth” in the moon pyramid. Everett's character was badly wounded, and would be unsure what was real and what was not.
It probably would not have worked out that well, but I really wish I'd had the chance to run this.
In the years since, I've sometimes experiment with the idea of forcing in-game changes in characters by changing the form of the characters themselves. It seems to me that the game Mechanical Dream might work for this sort of thing. I’ve often wondered if a game based on the 1920 SF novel A Voyage to Arcturus could work. In this book, the main character wanders a completely alien landscape and finds his attitudes and perspectives changing as his body grows (and loses) new organs that provide new means of sensory perception.
