more human than human - not quite a human sourcebook...

[Dan Gurden]

OK. I lied. After the Law Enforcement sourcebook aas released, I said I was off to do a Bajoran or Federation Timefleet sourcebook. And while I have been collecting pictures and developing notes, I actually did a short working treatment developing the standard human template a bit;

Its only 5 pages and hardly the be-all and end-all of the subject, but seems to me to be a nice mid point to help develop the human template a bit from the standard plain vanilla version.

What do you think?

[somaticon]

Looks good, really useful

[Owen E Oulton]

Saved in the queue for inclusion in the next update of Memory: ICON.

[Tricky]

Nicely done; it covers the 'human question' very thoroughly. As a devote of comics and their related rpg's, I've had to explain why guys from the other side of the universe were basicly humans with funny forheads and weird skin conditions, but thanks to most popular fiction borrowing from each other (pretty much every comic universe/game universe has a Preserver analog, for example) those explanations are usually accepted by most players.

Of course now, an guy playing Icon can now say he wants to be an AmerInd Augment colonist from North Star.

Speaking of augments, how does the FED justify persecuting one group of people?

[Dan Gurden]

@ Owen. No problem mate, dont forget the Law Enforcers or the updated Trill Character Generation stuff either...

I doubt I will get the Bajor or Timefleet works out in time though.

My word, I am well and truely back in the saddle here.

@Tricky. Oddly enough exactly that discussion just got started in Star Trek chat, coming at about the same time that I was thinking about that last segment.

[Nuclear Fridge]

Speaking of augments, how does the FED justify persecuting one group of people?

I'm not sure - I do know Augments were made into Bad Scary Nasties in the DS9 episode that made Bashir over into a closet DNA Superman.

Then DS9 ran the story that featured a group of people who had had 'cheap and nasty' DNA augmentation... super-smart, yet with debilitating emotional and social issues that couldn't be remedied.

It all seems to be tied into the slightly vague TNG 'mission statement' that humans are seeking to improve themselves, and messing with Mad Science to do that is a massive no-no.

At a (pretty simplistic) level, it seems to say, "don't do drugs, kids! They're bad!"

[The Tatterdemalion King]

At a (pretty simplistic) level, it seems to say, "don't do drugs, kids! They're bad!"

That was 'Symbiosis.'

For humanity, at least, the context of 'genetic augments' (as opposed to expressly legal genome resequencing to fix genetic disorders) in Trek has always been in the pursuit of creating a group with more power over another—using an altered genome to make them 'better,' and in doing so, imply a moral and political superiority or even a genetic destiny of making regular humanity obsolete ('Unnatural Selection'). The Eugenics Wars weren't a competition between the genetically uninsurable a la 'Gattaca,' they were an armed conflict in which millions died. Looking at it that way, it's obvious why the Federation made it illegal: the term 'augment' denotes aggressive creation of a politically-dominant caste ('Accession'), just as Nazi symbology denotes totalitarianism and race-based genocide to us.

The Federation is not a magical utopia of friendly people. I'd agree with that Star Wars dude who describes the Federation and essentially communistic (except that I, being a Red, see that as a good thing). Part of that is creating soft and hard limits on the amount of social leverage any one individual can have on the overall structure of the society—soft in the case of the absence of a monetary economy and the implication of a managed energy economy instead, and hard in the case of the Prime Directive, and the prohibition against creating people who are expressly designed as better than everybody else.

[Rotwang]

I like it. I have been doing something similar in my own campaign except yours is more professionally done.

[Dan Gurden]

Blimey. Just having a play around the new look forum. And noticed 171 views of this one, not bad for a long OOP game. Thats an order of magnitude over some of the other documents I did (Law Enforcement was 79)... Rather impressed that you guys liked this so much.

Makes me happy to have run it up for you!