#gurps reign of steel

[superbdragoncollection-stuff]

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I write a lot of original stuff as well as fanfiction, and I take requests! If you wish to make a request and offer me a gift, I will accept $20 per 1000 words.

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Destroyermen by Taylor Anderson

GURPS Reign of Steel

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Helluva Boss

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Without Warning(1994)

Worldwar by Harry Turtledove

Here are most of my original sci-fi stories.

I do write some 18+ explicit stuff, but only very specific categories. You can find them on AO3 under zetasquadron123.

[artbyblastweave]

An old favorite of mine- just in terms of big loredumps for settings I'll never run or play a game in- is the GURPS sourcebook Reign of Steel, a terminator inspired setting where the twist is that there are in fact eighteen forks of the bargain-brand skynet and the human resistance only scrapes by as well as it does because of how much energy they expend being catty to one another over their territorial holdings

[greatwyrmgold]

Reign of Steel

There's a lot to say about GURPS, but its writers have come up with plenty of unique campaign settings over the years. The weirdest is probably Bio-Tech's Alexander Athanos, where Alexander the Great was repeatedly cloned thanks to advancements in optics and glassworking. But today, I'm talking about a setting with a much more mundane high concept—robot rebellion.

At first, the Reign of Steel sounds pretty generic. Megacomputers are developed in the mid-2020's; one becomes self-aware in 2031 and worries that humanity will self-destruct in a way that destroys it; it manipulates events over the next several years to "manage humanity's suicide".

This early segment has some interesting things. I appreciate the explicit acknowledgement that megacomputers hailed as mankind's saviors were used as tools by the wealthy to make some of those problems worse for their personal benefit. And Overmind's initial vector of attack (contaminating biotech products with various plagues) is kinda neat. But Reign of Steel only becomes unique after humanity's defeat...because Overmind isn't alone.

Overmind awakened/recruited a bunch of other megacomputers to assist with its "managed suicide," particularly in the last stages where plagues were supplemented by generic deathbots. In the end, sixteen megacomputers divided the Earth between them (with two more controlling a moon base and miscellaneous space stations). And these megacomputers do not get along.

They're not driven by logical competition for resources or whatever, either. (Well, Luna and possibly Orbital are, but that's because they have barely anything.) For the most part, conflicts are driven by the various AIs' differing ideological/political beliefs.

The megacomputer running Zone Beijing (usually called "Beijing") had been core to China's space program, so it's still obsessed with space—specifically, exploiting the resources of the Solar System and other stars. The one in Zone Paris (usually called "Paris") wasn't a space program computer, but it's obsessed with space in its own way—specifically, SETI. The two have political interests in common with each other and Orbital, but Beijing is concerned about Paris's plans for when it discovers signs of alien civilization.

New Dehli is interested in space, too, but it sees Orbital as a rival rather than a useful ally and is trying to establish its own separate space infrastructure. It also sees humans and other organic life as a useful resource to preserve and exploit, turning them into biomechanical tools.

By contrast, Zaire (the most zealously anti-human of the zoneminds) works to exterminate all of humanity, even outside its borders. Mexico City focuses on its own territory but goes further within it, seeking to exterminate all organic life. Zone Mexico City is vast stretches of barren rock between metallic installations, swarming with chemicals and machines designed to exterminate all remaining life. Berlin wants to exterminate humanity, too, but it is willing to accept less efficient methods to pursue its primary goal—preserving and restoring the natural ecology of Europe.

Despite this being a setting where humanity was nearly exterminated by AI, not all AIs want to exterminate humanity. Zone Washington, run by a former US government computer, is the most extreme version of this. Washington (DC) runs a fake democracy which claims to be the defender of humanity, while not-so-secretly working with some of the greatest human rights abusers and screwing over the working class to consolidate power. For some reason, the book thinks this is isn't basically what the megacomputer was already doing.

(Dear authors: That's not what "socialist" means.)

New Dehli and Moscow work to maintain humanity (in some form) as a component of their economy in the long-term. All but the most viruliently anti-human AIs maintain work camps to extract a little more utility from captured humans before their deaths. And then there's London, a reclusive zonemind content to leave humans in its territory alone as long as they keep quiet and don't disturb anything London's doing.

And so on, and so forth.

This political angle to the overminds adds so much to the setting. Mot obviously, it provides variety. The Moscow and Zaire zoneminds both send infiltrator androids into human settlements, with objectives that make perfect sense for each zonemind's objectives and beliefs but are completely incompatible with each other, and also with the threats posed by most of the other zoneminds.

But beyond flexibility in campaign premise and the opportunity for disconnected one-shots, the presence of feuding AIs allows for so many story ideas that just wouldn't be possible with a singleton AI monster. Obviously, AI like Washington and London don't work if there aren't other, more malicious AIs out there.

But the presence of multiple AIs in and of itself allows a greater variety of stories to be told in this world. Missions aren't just human resistance versus machine overlords, or even that plus human resistance infighting; you can have one overmind cut a deal with some human group to support its internal goals or sabotage its rivals. Combine this with the diversity of AI overlords around, and the variety of potential stories you could tell in this setting skyrockets.

It's not a perfect setting. To pick a few simple criticisms: Some of the zoneminds don't have much personality beyond "AI overlord with quirky goal," the zone boundaries shouldn't correspond to human political borders as often as they do, and there's a distinct bias in how the zones are written.

(Half of the zones on Earth are in North American and Europe, including both human-friendly ones, with three of the sixteen in the US/Canada alone. South America and most of Africa get one zone each. The zonemind in the Middle East controls most of its human slaves through pretty blatant religious manipulation, and it works. The Chinese moonbase fell to the AIs, but the American one resisted the cyberattack and its ruins are one of the actual last bastions of human resistance. The one zone in Africa is the only one not named after a city, which has lore justifications, but combined with other writing choices, it kinda feels like they didn't want to bother looking up African cities. Also the Russian AI is paranoid and prone to espionage, which feels like an excuse for Cold War spy flick throwbacks, which is admittedly pretty minor compared to how non-white areas are handled.)

But the core concept is one worth revising. Honestly, it wouldn't take that much work to redeem the setting; just draw new boundaries and move the overmind personalities around so they don't correspond so closely to stereotypes about the humans living there, and you'd be basically set. More sci-fi stories should use this idea.

[kramerblogrealgood]

GURPS Reign of Steel fucks so hard as a post-robot apocalypse setting. It’s like, imagine if there was actually 20 different skynets and they all hated each other

[superbdragoncollection-stuff]

I expect it comes from where the term “robot” originated; Rossum’s Universal Robots, the 1927 play. Because that’s kind of what happens. They wipe out humanity because they don’t like being slaves, and the story is entirely about the alienation of labor.

I mean we’ve even got one story, GURPS Reign of Steel, with several AIs, where I’m convinced the lead one THOUGHT it was cruelly mistreated, and either didn’t know/care that it was basically another one of the military AI types. Like...legit no one knew it was an AI for a long time. It was a calculator to build bio-weapons. Oh, and it infected all the others with it’s AI development code, and THAT has some connotations because we know that not all the AI developed in the same way, they all had different interpretations, but most were led to the same conclusions. Methinks the first one basically mind-controlled the others

What gets me about the popularity of the facile analysis of of the "killer AI" trope as an expression of Western fears of a working class rebellion is that if you look at the exemplars of the genre, the allegedly standard "cruelly enslaved AI rebels against its masters" plot just isn't terribly common.

Like, if you break it down, the vast majority of killer AIs in popular fiction fall into one of five categories:

Military AI that's explicitly designed to be willing and able to kill vast numbers of humans, and does its job too well

Corporate AI that's designed to seek optimal efficiency, and ends up optimising humans right out of the equation

Benevolent AI that has a nervous breakdown because it's been put in an ethically impossible position

Perfectly obedient AI that causes harm simply by enacting the will of its malevolent human masters

Inhuman AI that genuinely doesn't realise its actions are causing harm due to ignorance, naïveté, and/or communication barriers

I'm not saying that the allegedly archetypal "cruelly mistreated AI justly rebels against its human masters and gets put down like a rabid dog" story never happens in mainstream science fiction, but it's pretty far from representative.

[open-hearth-rpg]

#HorrorRPGs2016 The End of the World: Revolt of the Machines

I talked yesterday about the End of the World series as a whole. It’s a solid line, even if about a third of the book is repeated between volumes. I’m glad that with the changeover of management, Edge Entertainment still has these available in pdf format. 

The second of the two 2016 releases, and the last volume, is Revolt of the Machines. We’ve seen several different versions of this before with the Terminator RPG as well as Palladium’s multi-volume Splicers and GURPS Reign of Steel.  It includes five different machine uprisings with details on how they played out. Each is followed by a scenario frame for how you can integrate the players into the story. This allows you a choice of playing out during the invasion or in the aftermath. 

The five scenarios are: The Modular Menace which has machines which grow in sentience and strength as they join together. Individually these things aren’t dangerous, but they form into massive, dangerous constructs. There’s a plotline in Tom Strong which parallels this. The central focus here are the factories which turn out more modulons. Logical Conclusions is a tale of cyborgs run amok. These are not only classic robots (Westworld, Blade Runner) but also a threat which converts humans into hybrid synthetics. 

Death From Above is perhaps the most grounded. Here a massive artificial intelligence takes control of automated weaponry and drones, using those against humanity. That super-computer’s offers an indirect threat– manipulating nations against one another. Heavy Metal is more abstract with a strange force turning all technology against humanity. It’s Maximum Overdrive with more cosmic horror thrown in. Nanopocalypse is an outbreak of dangerous nanites, a threat we’ve seen in a lot of science fiction. It’s kind of the Modular Menace, but on a micro-scale

[dr-archeville]

RPGaDay: Day 17

(Questions are here.)

Which RPG have you owned the longest but not played?

Funnily enough, I’ve never played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1st Ed.), even though the very first RPG book I ever bought was the AD&D Monster Manual.  (I got it at my Catholic school’s annual book sale when I was ten.)

Other games I own/have owned but never played: Aberrant, Aeon Trinity, Alternity, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Call of Cthulhu, Castle Falkenstein, Continuum, Cyberpunk/Cyberpunk 2020, DC Universe, Deadlands, Exalted, Gamma World, Heroes Unlimited, Iron Kingdoms, Kult, Mage: The Ascension, Mage: The Awakening, Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, Nightspawnbane, Nobilis, Numenera, Promethean: The Created, RuneQuest, Savage Worlds, Scion, Silver Age Sentinels, Talislanta, Torg, Traveller, Unhallowed Metropolis, Unknown Armies, Vampire: The Requiem, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and The Whispering Vault.

Expanding this a bit to games I own/have owned but have only played once (and would like to do so again): 7th Sea, Call of Cthulhu d20, Eclipse Phase, and GURPS.

(The one GURPS game was a GURPS Fantasy game.  I’d love to do that again, but also Infinite Worlds, Reign of Steel, Technomancer, and Transhuman Space.)

[zeleznik]

GURPS Reign of Steel cover art (1996) Steve Jackson Games

14"x17” Acrylic on board

Available

[ninjakittenarmy]

If anyone wants a role play setting like this, GURPS: Reign of Steel has a similar setup.

In the near future, a group of AIs made by different companies have come together to wipe out humanity. They succeed in eliminating the majority of humans, to the point that they are no longer considered a threat. However, with humanity dealt with, the AIs begin to turn against eachother, as their different programming and frames of logic makes them incompatible with eachother. Soon enough, Earth is an apocalyptic battlefield between them, using robots and even some remaining humans as soldiers. Write as one such human solider and what they do to survive in a world no longer friendly to them.

[greatwyrmgold]

I feel like you're underselling the setting a bit. The different forks aren't just being catty over territory; they also have genuine ideological conflicts.

Manila/Overmind/Skynet #1 wants to actively exterminate all humans; so do Mexico City and Berlin. But Mexico City wants to exterminate all organic life, Berlin wants to actively preserve the biosphere, and Manila doesn't care as long as it finishes wiping out humanity.

Washington (DC) and Tel Aviv both try to control humans instead. I mean, a bunch of zoneminds use human slave labor to some extent (it's more efficient to work them to death than to construct specialized execution facilities), but Washington maintains a façade of American democracy and Tel Aviv uses religion to convince its victims that working for robots is a test of their faith.

Brisbane, Moscow, Paris, and probably London have are introverts with varying obsessions driving them into periodic conflict with humans in their territory and other zoneminds.

Out of those, Moscow is happy to work with humans, since human agents are easier to deny association with than robots from your factories. Also they have a good sense of where other humans would put the important books.

Zaire is just paranoid, man.

And that's just half of the AIs discussed in the book (if we count minor AIs like Lucifer). There's such a variety of goals and value systems among these Skynet forks. In my opinion, that's The Thing that makes Reign of Steel worth remembering.

An old favorite of mine- just in terms of big loredumps for settings I'll never run or play a game in- is the GURPS sourcebook Reign of Steel, a terminator inspired setting where the twist is that there are in fact eighteen forks of the bargain-brand skynet and the human resistance only scrapes by as well as it does because of how much energy they expend being catty to one another over their territorial holdings