Making a real-world campaign setting with Thoon

[atemu1234]

As mentioned in an earlier post, I'm making a D20 campaign. Now, this world utterly lacks Magic. It's set in the real world. Here's the basic timeline:

1985: A strange radiation is detected in the midatlantic. Discovered by both the United States and the Soviet Union, both blame each other.
1995: Strange, mutated corpses were found on the eastern coast of the United States and the west coast of Europe. Quickly covered up by the government.
2001: The first "Aberrant" appeared. A Mind Flayer of Thoon. It emerges from the ocean and quickly wipes out life in New York and New Jersey. It was eventually captured by a massive armed forces attack from Canada.
2003: Two years have passed with minimal incidents. However, something new has happened: For some unknown reason, humans have begun manifesting Psionic powers. This is blamed on the "radiation" from the midatlantic, and the world governments soon begin rounding up these citizens, holding them in illegal detainment camps, off of the books.
2005: First Spelljammer emerges from the Midatlantic. Carrying almost fifty Mind Flayers of Thoon, they declare war on the world. They decimate the United States, Central America and South America. Of these three countries, only about 1% of the population survive the slaughter. They flee north to Canada. Only about a tenth of the survivors make it.
2006-2008: More and more Mind Flayers, called Illithids by the humans, enter the world through the Midatlantic. Within these three years, they kill almost 1/3 the population.
2009: The government issues project Angel, where humans with psionic powers were promised freedom from detainment in exchange for military service. Most accept, and are trained in combat. These become a specialized wing of potent psionic fighters, and succeed in lowering the casualty rate. They are still losing.
2012: By this point, almost 1% of the human race can manifest psionic powers. The Illithids bring Mindshredders and Intellect Devourers into the world. Together they are called Aberrants.
2014: By this point, almost 2/3 of the population is dead. The US government along with most other world powers agree to merge there governments in the hopes of combating the aberrants. A world leader is elected.
2016: The first generation born of detainees comes into being. Even more powerful than their parents, they are the new hope of the planet.
2020: It's discovered that the Aberrants have been creating sleeper agents. Despite their few numbers, these dominated or parisitized humans cause a world panic.
2030: By this point, the population has dwindled from 6 billion to only about 1.5 billion. About 5% of the population can manifest psionics. Our story begins.


This is what I've got so far. Are there any events that I'm missing that would go well? Rules-wise we use the sanity system as well as the Taint system. The taint is represented more as the effects of Aberrant experimentation, however. Also, it should be noted the Aberrants create beings called The Mindless. They're basically human zombies except they are treated as aberrations (they still have the d12 hit die, however).

[Khedrac]

I'd advise against this for a fairly odd reason...

Your idea actually looks fairly fun and it is certainly innovative, but the problem with bringing he real world into it is you bring people's knowledge and real-world expectation into it.

Problem number 1 - your players are going to expect modern weaponry to work - and guns, particularly modern firearms don't work well with D20. Yes I know there is D20 modern, but most people expect a 50cal bullet to the head to kill anyone.

Speaking of 50 cal bullets let's go back to 2001. A single mindflayer is not going to wipe out a large city, and definitely not in a country with significant firearms ownership.
Start with him killing/controlling everyone he can see - fine, initial attempts to bring him down fail utterly, but when firearms have a range of a mile or more (yes it takes a very good sniper at that range, but that's one use of machine guns) it will not take long for someone the mindflayer is unaware of to put a bullet through his head. If not a single missile would end up being used before he can kill an entire city.

Similarly the spelljammer may well be able to defeat anything it is aware of, but given the range of modern missiles (especially if you add in cruise missiles and drones) it's just concentrating the illithids into a single target.

Yes I am aware of things like damage resistance, fire resistance and spell resistance, but personally I don't see them being much use against the shockwave from a missile going "bang" (and I think given the velocities involved, most shrapnel and a decent caliber bullet will also go right through...

And don't forget option Z - one of these things killed a city and now you say there are 50 there? - I authorise a tactical nuke.


The above is my take on what would happen with your scenario. I'm not saying I am right and you are wrong, for one thing it's your world so quite the opposite, but my interpretation of how I think events would unfold would make it very hard for me to play in your scenario.

For me, you would probably need to start with the spelljammer, that way there are enough present to do serious damage and spread out before people could learn how to fight them (i.e. from a large distance) then, for me, your scenario starts to work.

As an aside there's an old short story called "Legwork" by Eric Frank Russel where a single telepath from a very old and very powerful race comes to earth to scout it out for conquest. He can control any number of people he is aware of, but he isn't aware of the man with the machine gun and a pair of binoculars half a mile away on a hill... (So much for the plan of capturing him though.)

Also I think humans vs. illithids would be very much like the Edition Wars story The Giant wrote for The Order of the Stick - humans would fairly quickly learn of the range limitations of their telepathy, "modern" weaponry has a much much longer range than virtually anything in D20, e.g. WWI naval guns had ranges measured in miles, the range of the main guns of an Iowa class battleship is 20 miles (Wikipedia) and missiles can have a much much longer range.

Edit: I tried to think of some constructive suggestions (perhaps for slightly altered background). About the only thing I can think of is to add in the effects of radiation from the use of nuclear weapons - if the humans don't use them the Thoon will when they gain control of some.
On the other hand this could be a great setting for fiction...

[atemu1234]

Problem number 1 - your players are going to expect modern weaponry to work - and guns, particularly modern firearms don't work well with D20. Yes I know there is D20 modern, but most people expect a 50cal bullet to the head to kill anyone.

I've made Protection from Arrows into an available power. Problem solved, for the most part.

[WarKitty]

It might be worthwhile to have the game start out with the reveal of sleeper agents, rather than having it come later. Make it so people don't figure out right away that something's up, and when they do it takes a while to figure out what exactly is going on. By the time they figure out how to target the invaders they've managed to adapt a bit better.

[Khedrac]

I've made Protection from Arrows into an available power. Problem solved, for the most part.

That's a good start, but tbh for me it would do very little against big-caliber firearms. DR10/magic for ranged weapons. A composite longbow from a an above-average strength archer can go through it (only for a scratch) and a normal archer on a crit can easily get a kill on a normal person despite it. So judging by that and the fact that 50cal rifles are designed to shoot through engine blocks I don't see it bothering a 50cal bullet. Again this is just my perspective...

What I think you need to add in is some high-powered ways for them to ignore major explosions, shockwaves and impact trauma. Something to think about when comparing D&D spell/weapon damage to modern weapons is the item damage rules. An explosion is a lot more than just fire damage, it's mainly shockwave (=force?) and shrapnel damage. So start with the sort of objects that get destroyed by a modern weapon, and then work out how much damage it had to do to do that to the object. I think you will find it makes most D&D attacks look like a joke. The Thoon do have a big advantage in their mental control powers, but I see the D&D ranges as far too short to give them a chance in the modern world.
I mean a long range power at 10th level is 400+400 feet. That is 266 yards. Now in Napoleonic combat the main musket troops fired at less than that range, but not the skirmishers with rifles. You may find those who are not that accurate getting closer than this when they don't have to (i.e. no line of sight) but snipers would have a field day against these guys.


It might be worthwhile to have the game start out with the reveal of sleeper agents, rather than having it come later. Make it so people don't figure out right away that something's up, and when they do it takes a while to figure out what exactly is going on. By the time they figure out how to target the invaders they've managed to adapt a bit better.
This is another very good way of getting round most of my objections. I just think you are starting way too small scale for open conflict to work from day one. On the other hand building up a network before going to combat and they can have most of the people in key positions - all those wonderful modern military weapons I mentioned - they are on their side now (or half of them are)...

[Coidzor]

As mentioned in an earlier post, I'm making a D20 campaign. Now, this world utterly lacks Magic. It's set in the real world. Here's the basic timeline:

1985: A strange radiation is detected in the midatlantic. Discovered by both the United States and the Soviet Union, both blame each other.
1995: Strange, mutated corpses were found on the eastern coast of the United States and the west coast of Europe. Quickly covered up by the government.

Ok, with you so far.


2001: The first "Aberrant" appeared. A Mind Flayer of Thoon. It emerges from the ocean and quickly wipes out life in New York and New Jersey. It was eventually captured by a massive armed forces attack from Canada.

Wait. Stop. Stop.

Why on earth is Canada able to stop it when the U.S. is unable to? How is Canada able to mount a successful offense sooner than the U.S.? What are you doing to Mindflayers of Thoon to make them airstrike proof? And is this pre-9/11 or post-9/11?


2003: Two years have passed with minimal incidents. However, something new has happened: For some unknown reason, humans have begun manifesting Psionic powers. This is blamed on the "radiation" from the midatlantic, and the world governments soon begin rounding up these citizens, holding them in illegal detainment camps, off of the books.

Ok, good old able to round up large numbers of people and keep it a secret successfully. That's a staple of such things.


2005: First Spelljammer emerges from the Midatlantic. Carrying almost fifty Mind Flayers of Thoon, they declare war on the world. They decimate the United States, Central America and South America. Of these three countries, only about 1% of the population survive the slaughter. They flee north to Canada. Only about a tenth of the survivors make it.
2006-2008: More and more Mind Flayers, called Illithids by the humans, enter the world through the Midatlantic. Within these three years, they kill almost 1/3 the population.

Run into some problems here. World population now is about 7 billion. It was around 6.5 billion or so back then by my best recollection. Central America is around 43,308,660 (2013 est.), South America around 387.5 million (ca. 2011), U.S. alone is about 313.9 million (ca. 2012).

Also, Central America isn't so much a country as it is a pseudocontinent or sub-continent. South America is, similarly, not a country, but a full-blown continent. It's also not only a long way from Argentina to Canada but a lot of territory to cover, though I suppose we can assume that Alaska is safe because it's as far north as Canada.


2009: The government issues project Angel, where humans with psionic powers were promised freedom from detainment in exchange for military service. Most accept, and are trained in combat. These become a specialized wing of potent psionic fighters, and succeed in lowering the casualty rate. They are still losing.

What government? You killed the U.S. off completely. There's no unified world government.


2012: By this point, almost 1% of the human race can manifest psionic powers. The Illithids bring Mindshredders and Intellect Devourers into the world. Together they are called Aberrants.

I'd go with freaky alien monsters hellbent on killing us all. :smalltongue:


2014: By this point, almost 2/3 of the population is dead. The US government along with most other world powers agree to merge there governments in the hopes of combating the aberrants. A world leader is elected.

Uh. *cough* You, uh. You already killed off the U.S. 8 years before this, and you sort of have the world government doing things before it is formed.


2016: The first generation born of detainees comes into being. Even more powerful than their parents, they are the new hope of the planet.

Should probably just call them the second generation of psionic humans.


2020: It's discovered that the Aberrants have been creating sleeper agents. Despite their few numbers, these dominated or parisitized humans cause a world panic.

Why? You've had them already completely depopulate vast swaths of the planet. Infiltrators make more sense before you start the full-blown genocide.


2030: By this point, the population has dwindled from 6 billion to only about 1.5 billion. About 5% of the population can manifest psionics. Our story begins.


K.

[atemu1234]

Why on earth is Canada able to stop it when the U.S. is unable to? How is Canada able to mount a successful offense sooner than the U.S.? What are you doing to Mindflayers of Thoon to make them airstrike proof? And is this pre-9/11 or post-9/11?

Well, they do have a military, you know. And they are more centralized. And closer to the site than, say, most of America's armed forces. Contrary to popular belief they don't just sit and their bums and eat maple syrup all day.

[Coidzor]

Well, they do have a military, you know. And they are more centralized. And closer to the site than, say, most of America's armed forces. Contrary to popular belief they don't just sit and their bums and eat maple syrup all day.

Not ready to scramble to engage such an event, on their own, before a major reprisal by the U.S., even given a pre-9/11 world. If it went further North, it'd be different. If it were a joint exercise, it'd be different.

As it is, it's just bizarre, even given the context of aberrations.