Prohibition Index
Support Pages
Background Information
Rules
Setting
The year is 1920, in a world quite different from the one you know. After the failed Martian invasion in 1889, mankind has been making leaps and strides into a new age of advanced technology. The era is somewhat more advanced, but also somewhat regressive compared to the current era, having never entire outgrown the utopian and nationalistic mass-movement cults of Marxism, Futurism and Fascism.
Appropriating the machines of the invaders, who were struck down by the microbes of the Earth's biosphere, has allowed scientific progress to climb ahead past the expectations of all previous eras. Energy weaponry, sophisticated smart materials and the improvement of the human being are ubiquitous, as the Industrial Revolution has given way to the Futurist Revolution, emboldened by the seizure of Martian technology. The universal robot and the android, servants of mankind, have increasingly replaced the poor working class, stabilizing and empowering mainland Europe and causing the United States to momentarily close its borders as it struggles to integrate vast immigrant populations that it cannot employ. The western players in the increasingly relevant League of Nations believes it can achieve hegemony by capturing more of the alien technology than its rivals.
Despite the apparent power of mass movements in the era, a single individual can do much. Industrialists found hidden enclaves for themselves and their entourages in the few frontiers of the world, including Antarctica, the bottom of the ocean and the highest places in the sky. A new type of supercriminal who employs his wits, alien overtechnology and manipulation of the law to cheat the system is rising from the restrictive bounds of Prohibition.
Everyone is looking for a pawn, from the electric old men of the homeland, to the rich robber barons of the New World, but as a child of the new era, you're too smart, too fast and too wild to be someone's chess piece. It won't be long before you break out of the rat race and seize a part of the century for yourself!
Notable Concepts
Overtechnology
A blanket term for all technology that derives from black-boxed alien wreckage, Overtechnology is the new oil, coal and opium of the post-Martian Invasion world. By quickly appropriating elements of alien design and integrating them into rising automotive technology, mankind was able to make a near complete jump to non-combustive power sources and quickly accelerate to the dawn of the information age. Despite this, most overtechnology has been replicated only by hijacking the base control systems behind Martian equipment, rather than fully replicating, meaning that much of the infrastructure behind the new era depends on the continued function of a limited (and diminishing) supply of wreckage from the invasion that took place twenty years ago.
Supranational entities such as the Tesla Institute and International Society of Futurists are doing their best to gather xenotech samples, and have had the greatest success reverse-engineering many examples of overtechnology, including the electric motor, solar sail, gravity attenuator and smart fabrics, freeing up remaining Martian replicators for other applications.
Overtechnology also heralded the discovery of psychics, who are also discussed in the section bellow. Psychic phenomenon are however extremely relevant in the discussion of overtechnology, as psi-capable individuals are able to manipulate and control active forms of Martian xenotech such as Red Mercury and Computronium with mental force alone, making them invaluable elements of the Futurist movement.
Red Mercury
Red Mercury is low-density living metal said to have similar properties as the material it's named after, with a metallic sheen and a tendency to leech into exposed skin. It functions as a cure-all of all types, allowing for rapid repairs on living bodies, undoing age, dismemberment and disfigurement and curing even rare ailments such as the Spanish Flu and Common Cold. In industrial applications, it's used as a universal polymer to make unfinished systems 'work', allowing human engineers to build systems that are effectively beyond their grasp. Red Mercury is effectively limited in supply, though the detonation of vast Martian fuel carriers in the upper atmosphere has scattered many trillions of gallons of the liquid in the air, which has been gradually precipitating in lakes, ravines and the bottom of the ocean over the decades.
Red Mercury is related to the phenomenon known as Red Weed, a Martian plant that was seeded throughout waterways and caused tremendous infrastructural damage as it caused mass clogging and shut down a majority of European naval yards during the invasion. The plant did not react well with the Earth's biosphere, however, eventually becoming saturated with compounds toxic to it and dying off in large numbers. The plant, which has been confirmed to produce Red Mercury, is now only found in regions particularly hostile to human life, in Iceland, North Africa, the Middle East and near volcanic vents at the bottom of the oceans.
Calculum
All active overtechnological devices contain Calculum, a form of dense 'living metal' that can be formed into a number of mechanisms that are too complex to be wrought by human hands and industry. Recovered Calculum allows for the creation of the massive anti-gravitational Wells Engines that keel floating fortresses and cities in the air, as well as more mundane applications such as laser blasters, electric motors and smart fabric. Calculum effectively allows all functional elements of Martian design to be multipurpose and self-repairing, and can be 'coaxed' into reproducing by a trained psi talent, making it far more sustainable for regular use than Red Mercury.
Elerium
Elerium is an mysterious liquid fuel that takes the form of a blue-ish white liquid saturated with tiny crystals. Created through Red Mercury-based alchemical processes, it's actually a liquid suspension of battery sources that draw electrical power from so-called extra-dimensional Telluric phenomenon. Electric motors with Elerium reservoirs are essentially perpetual motion machines that do not need to plug into a solar sail stations and require very little maintenance. Martian fuel carriers carried Elerium in addition to Red Mercury, so it is often found at the very bottom of reservoirs where the former accumulates.
Elerium is unfortunately unstable when exposed to the Earth's atmosphere, vaporizing into a highly flammable gas and rising up into the outer atmosphere, where it precipitates and becomes emulsified with gaseous Red Mercury before falling back to the surface.
Futurists
The Futurist movement is one of the major forces in the Roaring 20's, emboldened by the appropriation and mass dissemination of martian overtechnology. Led by luminaries and industrialists across the globe, Futurists advocate the use of overtechnology as a means to improve the lot of humanity across the globe. Advocates of cybernetics, robotics and mass engineering projects, such as lunar colonization and the civilization of the Africa continent by floating entire cities onto choice land all generally fall under the umbrella of post-Martian Futurism, with the newly-formed League of Nations and other supranational entities that encourage the formation of more global communities all heavily backed by international Futurists.
The reconstruction of war-ravaged Casablanca as Jupiter City was a major victory for the movement, as self-professed futurists poured millions of dollars into the city's post-war renewal. Now sprawling metropolis on the scale of London, Paris or New York, the city is the headquarters for a great many companies working in cutting edge overtechnology-based industries such as robotics, cybernetics and Wells engine technology.
Enclavists
The Enclavists are a fringe element of the Futurist movement who reject universal proliferation of overtechnology, espousing an individualist ideology that rejects the globalism and international governance of Futurist idealogues. The Enclavist movement is less organized and interrelated than the Futurists, but have had success in colonizing remote areas of the world such as Antarctica and the Atlantic seabed. Free from legal (and moral) constraints imposed by governments, Enclavist settlements have been able to pursue overtechnological research more freely than many nationally-affiliated Futurist think-tanks.
There is no consistent ideology or mindset in the Enclavist mindset besides an underlying desire to escape government intrusion (and the backing of wealthy industrialists). Many Enclavist sentlements are founded with libertarian ideals, while others function as self-contained socialist utopias (or so they claim). Despite this, most, if not all of such settlements are hostile to outside intrusion, in particular by the burgeoning League of Nations.
Robotics
The creation of the first thinking machines from Martian Calculum has allowed mankind to make vast strides in terms of computational technology, quickly rendering mechanical calculators obsolete before they even saw widespread use. The two most common forms of robot are the common android, which represents humanoid machines designed with varying degrees of humanity to act as companions, menials and servants, and the familiar who generally lacks a humanoid shape and functions as a personal assistant, often carrying an internal telegraph, typewriter and camera inside of a housing the size of a large soccer ball.
Androids are commonly seen in all walks of life, though the vast majority are observably inhuman in behavior or appearance. This is primarily due to League of Nations mandate to keep integration of non-human elements in society at a steady global pace to prevent the collapse of the labor markets. Under the international Wainwright Laws, artificial lifeforms cannot be made indistinguishable from humans until 1982, and blatantly superhuman constructs that can integrate into society are even more illegal.
Cyberware
While machines are being made increasingly close to human beings, human beings have begun altering themselves with machinery in the wake of the Great War. Many veterans were left without jaws, eyes and limbs, or otherwise disfigured. While veterans of previous conflicts like the Franco-Prussian war were condemned to be cripples and pariahs, prosthetics have become sufficiently sophisticated to replace human tissue. With a few yearly grams of Red Mercury and regular maintenance, the cybernetically treated enjoy similar quality of life as their uninjured peers.
After three decades, the technology has become sophisticated enough that human beings can be wholly augmented compared to those who forgo cybernetic treatment in favor of Red Mercury-derived regeneration. Electric motorized muscles strike with many times the force of regular arms, reinforced spines and legs allow men to carry with dozens of times the strength of their ordinary peers and electrical eyes see with the precision of a hawk, the detail of bees and the speed of flies.
Reception from the public has been mixed, though the Futurist movement has by and large embraced it, while more conservative groups have actively advocated a restriction of augmentation technology. The 19th amendment to the United States constitution has rendered alcohol, the alien flora-derived drug red eye, weaponized cybernetics and cognitive enhancements illegal in the spirit of preserving human dignity, leading to the creation of a vast black market for these items.
Psionics
The dispersion of Red Mercury into the atmosphere had a number of side-effects on the human population as a whole. The regenerative potential of human beings which was widely believed to be lost through evolution returned in a limited capacity, people's immune systems strengthened and nearly all mammalian life on the planet seemed to become more robust and long-lived. The most startling of these changes however, was the discovery of psi talents, or psychics, human beings who displayed mental abilities such as telepathy, precognition and the ability to directly control overtechnology with their minds. The majority of these talents were the children born during and shortly after the Martian Invasion, with the psychic gene somewhat mysteriously being dominant in heredity and strengthening with intermarriage between talents.
Because of their prodigious talents and natural versatility, psychics are sought after by every academic, military and government body in the world, as psionic pilots can control hijacked martian weapons, psionic engineers can command overtechnology can weave itself to their whims and psionic agents employed by governments can steal secrets and bypass security in ways a simple G-man or agent-provocateur could not.
Somewhat suspiciously, the International Society of Futurists has been pressuring the League of Nations to place a ban on human genetic research after the 'psi gene' showed common markers with tissues recovered from the corpses in Martian wrecks.
The World of 1920
The League of Nations
The League of Nations is a supranational entity headquartered in the rebuilt Casablanca's Jupiter City district, founded at the end of the Great War as a body to peacefully mediate conflicts and regulate mankind's global advancement. The horrors of the Great War which often featured soldiers armed with overtechnology weapons fighting eachother with Napoleonic tactics and early modern-style logistics had a tremendous cost in lives and devastated the European countryside in a fashion unlike anything it had seen since the Martian invasion.
Backed by Futurist institutes and directly funded by the wealthy Berber Red Mercury traders of North Africa, the League is interventionist and capable of enforcing mandates without support from even the Great Powers, though it often cooperates them to maintain legitimacy in the Post-Great War world. Despite this, the League maintains the largest standing force of mercenaries, recruited from major LoN members and America, effectively cherry picking from militaries in the process of downsizing after the Paris Peace Conference. Many of these military companies keep their headquarters in Casablanca, where they present themselves as gentlemen's societies and social clubs. So much so, that gentleman on leave is often popular slang for a mercenary at work in a foreign country.
No event demonstrated this better than the Rif War, when Berber prospectors armed with advanced rayguns and field armor purchased from the Tesla Institute face off against the Spanish army in what was once Spanish Morroco. Even without official support from the League's fighting men, the Berbers where able to hold back the European incursions to the region for several months before the defeated Spanish army was forced to retreat, unable to make any significant gains or keep elan.
Tesla Institute
Founded in Austro-Hungarian Empire by inventor Nicola Tesla after the Martian Invasion of 1989, the Tesla Institute is one of the great European bodies of engineering, being the foremost authority on overtechnology and a main supporter of the League of Nations. After his native Croatian Military Frontier was devastated by the Martians during the war, he returned to his destroyed hometown of Smiljan, where a Martian mothership had crashed. Exposed to Red Mercury and changed by the experience, he became the first known psi talent and used his newfound talents and already considerable brilliance to harness Elerium fuel and build the first electric motors and solar sails. Receiving funding directly from Franz Joseph I of Austria, the Tesla Institute quickly grew in size and power.
The Institute's influence had expanded so much that it was effectively considered the military research body of the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the time of the Great War and contributed greatly to the state's early victories. The greatest of the innovations by the institute during the wartime era was the Death Ray, a massive bombard-like cannon that fired a lancing beam of light that energized matter and caused it to explode violently. The technology was quickly appropriated by all sides of the war, but only ever deployed by the Ottomans, who used it to raze the city of Casablanca to the ground with a single sweep.
Tesla was personally appalled by the use of what he ultimately saw as a weapon that would function as a deterrent to open warfare and abandoned national affiliations after the conclusion of the conflict. When the League of Nations was formed in 1917, the Tesla institute moved its headquarters to city the death ray had destroyed and became one of the great backers of international peace through the League.
The Electric Old Men
The Electric Old Men are a common name for the members of Nikola Tesla in the Institute. Membership is exclusive, but generally thought to encompass every inventor who's served on the board of directors in the Tesla Institute at one point or another during its existence. Many of the members are octogenerians with careers that stretch deep into the previous century, with its eldest member Louis Pasteur rumored to nearly be a century old.
North America
The United States of America
Canada
The Dominion of Canada is one of the British crown's last holdings in the Americas. Having been sparsely populated at the time of the Martian invaded, it escaped the conflicts unscathed but with limited supplies of the resources strategic to a functioning overtechnology apparatus. Unbeknownst to the majority of the world, the hostile nature of the northern plains allow it to play host to very small pockets of Red Weed, which has been leeching Red Mercury into the water cycle and causing people in remote villages to display psi talents.