“Entry 64
“Things are quiet now and I have a few to jot a note in my diary before before they send us to Prep. Warden Mausa says it’s another sample mission?just routine. That’s a patent lie though. If these things were routine, they wouldn’t send political prisoners to do them.
“Like I said before I hate Prep. They strip you naked, dunk you in chemicals and flash burn your body hair off. Then they shoot you full of every antibiotic known to medicine, stuff you in an itchy paper jumper, shrink-wrap an environment suit on you and finally send you to the airlock where your gun, armor and tools are waiting. After that it’s a mile hike up ladders and stairs to get to the surface. And that’s just to go up to the surface. Coming back, if you come back, is worse.
“The funny thing is they haven’t confiscated my diary yet. They know I have it cause it’s impossible to hide it in the cells. I guess they feel it will keep me diverted or perhaps they think I will forget how to read. It’s hard to guess what the Directorate thinks.
“The Directorate says it’s just trying to win the world back and that humanity is hanging by a thread and, as such, harsh measures are needed. That’s it. Gaurd’s here. Hope this isn’t my last entry
“Mweli Msisi
Shango Station
22 CB“Entry 137
“It’s hard to remember things. For the politicals, they routinely administer drugs and surgery on them to?I won’t say destroy?to edit?memory. They’ve got this chemical, administered by medical microbots implanted in your brain, that’s supposed to render the brain more plastic. They try to wash away what they don’t want while at the same time rending the brain more receptive to learning new things.
“I can’t even remember my parents now. They died in the early stages of the way. This diary is the only way I have to remember things. I suspect now that they tamper with it while I am away on sample missions or when I am at learning sessions. Did I just write this? Or did I just fabricate the memory that I did in order to rationalize what I see here?
“Mweli Msisi
Shango Station
22 CB“Entry 651
“Where to start? How to describe the end?
“It began as a dispute over mineral rights in the frozen waste of the Polar Continent. At the time, Earth was divided into three political groups: The Industrial States Trust, The Bioregional Progress and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The dispute became a shooting war. Considering the amount of money the BP and IT alliances spent on defense over the past forty years, it was only a matter of time before someone attempted to use weapons of mass destruction. It began with plague weapons being used by the BP. The IT retaliated with nuclear and kinetic weapons, which the BP answered in kind. Civilization began to fall apart but, the governmental and military command structures managed to remain intact on both sides even though the populations of many nations were reduced to a tiny fraction of their pre-war numbers. This was possible because the automated factories kept pouring out war materials despite repeated bombardment.
“It was then that the IT introduced the Hunters. The First Global War was 6 years old. Hunters were simple zombies, not much smarter than insects, that were produced by small, mobile factories called Mothers. Hunters had a very simple goal: Find and destroy the enemy. Or at least find and destroy those who could not identify themselves as friendly with the correct, ciphered, control signals. A new arms race began as each side invented smarter and tougher creatures and smarter and tougher countermeasures.
“And so things went for another two years.
“It was then that we began to find new varieties of war zombies whose origins didn’t seem to correspond to any known enemy design. By then it was already too late. They were beyond our control. The Era Chumbebandia had begun.
“Now, as I sit in one the endless vaults of Shango Station, the Reign of Humanity appears to be over.”
–Excerpted and translated from the diaries of Mweli Msesi, Enlisted, of the 43rd Army, Territorial Defense Forces, Industrial Trust.
This is your typical humans versus the robots story but with a with a twist. It takes place in an alternate history where Africa, not Europe, rises to global dominance first. Not only that but technical advances occur more rapidly in this history than in our history. The people of this world built computers and gene manipulation 300 years earlier than we did.
Rules for Chumbe Bandia
I would prefer if you use GURPS or the Hero System if you want to give me a character. Those are the point based systems I know. Before you even start thinking about point totals though, you’d better write up a detailed life history first. This game is about psychological themes and melodrama not about power gaming a set of statistics. The rules are going to be an extremely abstract concept in this game and I plan on being quite arbitrary. If you wanna just run around and kill things go play StarCraft or Quake or something.