NeoTerra

Game: NeoTerra
Publisher: BTRC
Series: EABA
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 15th, April 2003
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10   [ Really good ]
Total Score: 8
Average Score: 8.00

NeoTerra is a thinker. It’s a campaign setting running off a smart idea. Treat this review in the same way you might a review of a pre-written adventure – it’ll contain spoilers.

I think that’s fair enough, if you’re interested in buying NeoTerra then I suspect you’ll read through all of it and to the GM only section. Here’s an advantage of a PDF game that I hadn’t thought of before. You can print out your copy, move the GM only bit to a second folder and let your players safely flick through the first.

The GM section in the game is ultraviolet clearance, citizen. The computer is here to help.

Oh wait. No. That’s Paranoia. If you take Paranoia and remove the mutants, the obsessive laws and cure the insane computer then you’re moving towards NeoTerra’s own brand of dark future.

There is an ever-present computer and it cares for humanity but it’s not mad, a little eccentric perhaps, but it does a good job of looking after mankind.

You can expect to live for 200 years with the computer’s help, you can expect to live for exactly 200 years and to be completely active and healthy for all that time.

The computer gives you a house, free clothes, free food and an allowance. If you fall down the stairs, get hit by a truck or beaten up by a mugger then the computer’s robots will rush to your aid and heal you. The computer can cure anything short of total destruction of the body. Healing technology is so good that people refer to “death” as something which can be cured and “permanent death” – which can’t. This ever-present computer is simply known as the Net.

The Net imposes no draconian laws. In fact, the Net doesn’t impose any laws at all. It’s not illegal to deal drugs, to be a member of a secret society or even to blow away your nosey neighbour.

There’s a catch though. The Net controlled serves won’t make you a gun. You’ll need to earn some credits and buy one yourself. If you then go shoot your neighbour then in the first instance you’ll have to do a jolly good job of it to stop the Net’s health care system from putting him back together and in the second instance there’s nothing to stop your entire neighbourhood from deciding that they’d be better off without you.

There are no laws but there is peer pressure.

There are no laws on purpose. The Net neither helps nor hinders in someone’s attempt to get a gun on purpose. The Net is interested in peer pressure, more to the point; the Net is interested in sorting out those people who succumb to the pressure to those people who set the initial standards.

The Net wants to know who’s responsible for bright ideas and popular fashions. The Net’s interested in memes. It wants to find the best meme and the people responsible for them.

That’s the cultural side. The Net’s also interested in genes. It wants to find the quickest, the strongest, the best.

Why?

The elite of each generation provides the DNA code for those who are to colonise distant planets.

In the Net controlled future mankind can’t breed naturally. Children are grown by the Net and then delivered to parents. By having your genome sent into space as one of the seeds of a possible new civilization is a form of immortalisation.

If the idea of working really hard and striving to be the best of the best for 200 years in a world where the Net could provide everything you want in return for such an obscure payoff doesn’t sound attractive to you – then you’re not alone.

Most of the people in NeoTerra do nothing other than live. The game wonderfully uses the catchphrase “Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll” to sum up everything these people are interested in.

They’re the Drones. It takes something special to decide to work for a living – you might not be interested in the colonization thing, you might just not like the idea of the Net spoon-feeding you.

The people in this minority are known as the Workers. It’ll be a Worker who’ll get you a gun. The chances are that if you’re after a gun then you’re a Worker too.

Not everyone is aware of this but the Net uses 20 archetypes to determine who is swimming strongest in the gene and meme pools. These archetypes are fairly self-explanatory; the 20th archetype is Teacher/Mentor and so the very best Teachers or Mentors in the entirety of an NeoTerra generation (200 years) will attain some form of immortality through their space-travelling genes.

The 18th archetype is sociopath; there are people in NeoTerra trying to be the best sociopath possible. To be good sociopath you really need to shock people, to get them to question their current society and as the author explains if the result of your actions is yawning and “ho-hum, another grisly axe murder” then you’re not likely to win the sociopath stakes.

The sociopath, shockingly enough, is a good example of why it’s not just genes that the Net is interested in but why memes are important too. Genes might make for a talented killer but it takes a powerful meme to shock the Drones and an even more powerful meme to be accepted into society.

It is a dark future. It’s a dark future in ways more insidious than competing sociopaths. You live for 200 years because the Net laces your food with helpful drugs – whether you like it not. Bored and elderly people sometimes switch their food with other people’s just to see how their increased drug dosage affects the other person.

They made a TV show for it called Food Roulette. The electronic currency is secure, credits and general credits are locked to you, but there’s nothing to stop someone breaking into your house and making off with the painting you’d spent the last two years creating. There’s nothing stopping you taking your revenge.

Information is free. The Net makes everything public. If someone breaks into your house and nicks your painting then you can ask the Net who was in your house last night. You’ll get a reply because you’re able to give the Net a location and a time.

When the Net tells you that Greg Porter was in your house last night and you suspect him of making off your painting you can’t just ask the Net “Where does Greg Porter live?” The Net’s smart enough to know which Greg Porter you mean but it chooses not to give you the information. You need a location and a timeframe for your query. I like this Net quirk – it’s a great way to keep mystery in a sci-fi rpg.

I found myself simply enthralled with the first half of NeoTerra. The exception is the lengthy section on general credits and credits. Direct credits are for a specific product or service and general credits are for anything.

You can trade them in for a 2:1 deal. If you have 500 credits for Green Kitten RPGs then that’s all you can spend those 500 credits on. You can trade the 500 Green Kitten RPGs credits in for 250 general credits though and then spend them as you see fit. That works for me too.

The issue, and it’s only a minor quibble, with the section on the economics is that it’s too long and stressed. There would be a chicken and the egg problem with money and would be Workers. If you need money to set yourself up as a Worker but can’t get money until you Work – then there would be a problem.

In fact, many of the archetypes require money for success but wouldn’t earn much. To counter this there’s a system where you can spend credit based on the future value of your work.

The system is controlled and monitored (as everything thing is) by the Net. If you want to do well in the system then you’ll have to honour these “loans” promptly.

The RPG’s example is a would-be thug issuing credits on his thuggary work. If someone calls the credits in then he’ll need to go beat someone up for them.

If in a few years he becomes a famous assassin and then someone calls the credits in he’ll still have to honour them but this time round he’s so much more expensive than the loaned credits might barely pay for the cost of one of his bullets.

My natural reaction to this chapter was to skip it and then go back and read it separately after taking a break.

I’ve very carefully not lied to you. NeoTerra does; at least in the player-friendly section. The GM section begins with the admission that everything you’ve read is a lie. Great! I love punchy twists like that.

I’ve not lied to you because I’ve not mentioned any of the official history of the world and I’ve just let you assume that the people who live for 200 years in NeoTerra are flesh and blood humans.

The official history – where AI computers battle for Earth and where the Net with the best interests of mankind protectors the survivors and sets up the world as we know it now (the 800 years of NeoTerra) isn’t quite true. There was a battle and the Net did win but it decided to protect mankind by dismantling the survivors molecule by molecule, saving their memories (but with a little tinkering) and then running the entire new world order as a computer simulation.

NeoTerra is an experiment, the Net wants to see whether mankind will evolve to a point where it’s not going to self-destruct but it’s only going to find out through a safe simulation.

Even in this twist, the Net is still largely pro-human, it’s just a bit eccentric.

It’s a computer simulation. If at times for the people of NeoTerra it seems as if the Net can read their minds – its because it can. Their minds, after all, are just computer code.

The game isn’t really designed so that people figure this out and escape. How could they? The Net can read their mind. There’s nowhere to escape to; a computer variable doesn’t exist outside the program.

I really think this is one secret to keep from the players. Players need the illusion of freedom; they need to think that their plans have a chance to succeed. The Net will let some plans succeed, just not the ones that threaten the experiment.

In an 800-year old experiment to find the best, the brightest and smartest of mankind it stands to reason that people smart enough to suspect something is terribly wrong might be born. These people do exist and lead a very strange life; they can’t even allow themselves to fully comprehend what they know because the Net will know that they know… see, strange.

Groups like Bastards Inc make for poor PC choices but excellent NPCs. The likes of the Forgomen make for ideal PCs; these are those people who didn’t die (didn’t go for genetic recycling) at 200 and were lucky enough to slip through the system.

The Net forgot about them. These people don’t benefit from the Net’s health care and have to be very careful. Small program glitches might manifest as ghosts and other strange happenings.

Then there are the aliens. This is where NeoTerra loses some of the shine. What do you need to threaten a nearly omniscient Overmind? You need another nearly omniscient Overmind. Duh.

The alien Overmind arrived on the edge of the Solar System and began to construct an invasion fleet. The Earth Overmind – the Net – responded by building it’s own fleet and using the personality programs it had to act as the pilots for these ships.

The Earth fleet won the battle. It’ll take hundreds and thousands of years for the news of the loss to reach wherever the alien Overmind came from. In the 800 years that the program as been running on Earth the NeoTerrans haven’t broken free but these space pilots quickly worked out what was going on, re-wrote their own code and rebelled.

They’re now using bits of old alien space fleet to build themselves bodies. Okay. Weird.

You could play all NeoTerra without the aliens at all. Actually, you could play all of NeoTerra without NeoTerra. The Net is running a Terra program too. A 1950s simulation of the Earth with the attempt to see if that does any better.

NeoTerra used the generic EABA rules and this is a good match-up. The world of NeoTerra is a great big place and with very strange resources. The mutable technology means that all sorts of things can be created.

Not only that; there’s all sorts of people around. You’d want to be able to play the game as a gritty noir or as a high adventure spectacular (since it’s so hard to die). EABA is just perfect for this.

Quite rightly the PDF points out that there will be hundreds of different brands of weapons but that it would be inadvisable to try and list them. Instead, the equipment lists offer up generic items and weapons and the GMs encouraged to make up competing brands himself.

Since NeoTerra is a BTRC product it follows the same colour coding as EABA does; red, green and blue for special text and for shaped bullet points. The green is different though, a lighter and extremely hard to read (at least on my computer’s settings) green.

The technical panache is there. Page references within the document are all hyperlinked so you can jump around in the document. External hyperlinks take you off to the BTRC website or the artists.

I don’t like the default settings for viewing; the page doesn’t fit to width and is on single feed rather than continuous but these don’t impact on the strength of the campaign setting at all.

I really liked the bulk of the NeoTerra setting. It’s smart, it’s sexy and it manages to be both different enough to be interesting and similar enough to be reassuring.

I do quibble here and there with some of the ideas but they’re all isolated suggests which I can take or leave as I see fit and I appreciate a game setting that’s been designed in that way. It’s quite a complex setting at times but makes having the PDF product all the more worthwhile; it doesn’t just give you the idea, it takes you through and shows you how to implement it.

When you need to deal with the crunchy bits such as skills and how many points should be spent on an average Worker then you’ve got that at hand.

I started off by mentioning Paranoia. Paranoia was always the sci-fi game that I used to break out when the gaming group needed a change. NeoTerra will be that sort of enthusiasm saving game.

When the gaming group needs to try something entirely different, with the chance to show off (after all, it does pay to be cool – be cooler than anyone else) and perhaps with insidious darkness, then I’m sure NeoTerra is the ideal candidate.