Bay 12 Games Forum

PTW, may join in later. Gotta read the thread first though!

Also what you call, The System: How to Actually play, is kind of how I have my game(Cones Rework(shameless plug)) play.

I'll go check out yours for ideas on how to run mine better then . Who knows, maybe I'll want to join in, too!

So, how exactly do the Biopods work? Are they just magic, or what?

And what exactly am I supposed to do?

Thank you for asking. I apologize for not being too clear on everything, this is my first time trying to run something like this.
The Biopods: A good way of thinking of it is that they're the lowest form of plankton imaginable. They can't move about on their own accord, they have no sensory system. Nothing. They simply absorb energy from "The sun" (If you're paying attention to the roleplay aspect, from the light cast down by the ship during the planets day time cycle), internalize it and use it to feed themselves. They then split into two identical parts. They exist almost entirely to be fed upon by other low lifeforms. I believe the correct word for them might be phytoplankton?

What you're supposed to do: This is difficult for me to explain beyond what I've already said. Pavellius below you hit the nail on the head though, tell me how things evolved (Or tell me how the alien you're playing made things evolved, if you're interested in the roleplay aspect!), feel free to tell me the why, and what you think would happen because of the evolution. Whether I take everything or just some of what you say and incorporate it depends mostly upon if it makes sense. If you tell me one of the basal, germ-like lifeforms suddenly grows legs, a mouth, eyes and becomes the size of a rhino.. That's not going to fly. However, you could over the course of many turns work towards that, if it was your wish.

TO THE GAME
My post
Some of the comedenti have sensory growths sprout up across their body, allowing them to feel as the liquids around them shift, and tell in which direction there are.. "Things". Whilst they have neither the senses nor intellect to differentiate danger from food, this does allow them to better position themselves so that atleast their feeder tendrils are pointed in the correct direction.

Main Post
While the numbers of the proto Comedenti species bloom, consume and spread across the primordial oceans of our new world, we see two competitors rise from their dust. One offshoot has its feeder tendrils spread across its form allowing it to devour much more biomass in a much shorter time. As a result, it and its offspring grow much larger and fatter than their ancestors. Little to no other single creature would be able to feed off of this new "Devoradenti" as even if they got their mouths on it, it would be feeding off of two or three other things as well as its predator at the same time! ..However, due to the need for much greater sustenance, the Devoradenti's actual numbers would be lower than any other current species upon the world.

As well, a more subtle adaptation. With sensory growths sprouting up over their body, the "Sendenti" were quickly over-consuming and spreading at a tremendous pace. However.. Their own newfound strength wasn't all boon. Not able to differentiate food from predator, they'd often run straight into the Devoradenti, quickly becoming its primary food source. Atleast they were doing better than their ancestors?

Planetary Alpha Species: Devoradenti
Species List

Pavellius, your signature text upsets me greatly.

I'm not much of a writer so I'll keep this "backstory" bit rather simple, blunt and to the point. I'm not sure if you'll even need to read it-If people don't want to 'roleplay' this, then you pretty much wont need to look at the backstory (Even if I would personally love to see some roleplay). It's mostly their for my enjoyment and aid in visualizing what's going on.

Backstory type thing
Sorry humanity-(And other species, whatever you may be)-But we're all wiped out. The entire known galaxy has been conquered and absored by an alien species who use the harvested biomatter as tiny capsules of currency. Why? Well, it's obvious. Everything in the galaxy is 'wrong', so they've decided to start over! ..With a game!
Upon each of this unnknowable entities ships lies a massive biomatter converter, shaped roughly into a sphere. Inside this sphere, a habitable planet is created by the biomatter owned by the ships pilot-Who in turn charges currency from each person boarded onto the ship-A fee for him creating a playing space for them, as WELL as allowing them residency in the quarters of the ship. From there, each player will spend his biomatter capsules in trying to influence the life growing on the ship in the way that he feels best. There isn't really a way to 'win', as the creatures growing upon the ships have no idea of the existence of the aliens. However, creating marvelous creatures-Whether beautiful, extremely strong (Maybe the aliens think new threats might be coming to challenge their dominance of-You know-The ENTIRE galaxy?) or even just very durable. Livestock for those among their people who can't afford biomatter. All-consuming alien life's gotta eat too ya-know. It's in the name.
As it turns out, YOU players are the aliens mentioned above. You'll be guiding the life that springs up over the course of time on one such ship.

Rulings
The planet already exists. You can't create new planets or "planes" or other such things. Atleast for now-Maybe the rules will change. This is only the first addition, so to speak.
If creatures grow eyes strong to see high into the sky, there will be a sky there. The ship generates it.
Flora will evolve in the background as the fauna evolves. Unless players take a specific interest in plants, it will be assumed that they evolve at a steady rate with everything else. So the planet begins essentially barren, but by the times things start to climb out of the primordial ooze, we'll have primitive plants. A good way to think of it.
There isn't a definite time between turns. I'm not going to say, a year, a thousand years, a million years. No. The time between turns is "Enough for 'stuff' to happen". This simply allows things to stay fluid and fun without me having to drag things out simply because we're not working with simple organisms anymore, if that makes sense. If it helps your roleplaying mind, we can assume the ship the planet is stored in artificially simulates time speeding up between 'turns'. Perhaps the aliens are just as vexed about how much time this stuff takes as I am.

The System: How to Actually play
I had quite a thing typed up here, but I sort of realized I was sort of sounding up my own arse. Here's the gist of it-You know those "type what happens next" games, where players will all say what they think the main character should do, then the game master tallys them all up and the highest number wins? It's similar to that, except multiple things can happen on one turn. One player certainly can offer more than 1 thing happening (Though certainly, the more you offer the less and less likely what you ask to happen will happen. As if your "character" was spreading his resources too thin?").
As well as this, I'd like to keep it rather grounded in reality. ..To an extent. There wont be any magic. And we wont go from microscopic organisms to wolves in the space of four turns. It takes times for limbs, or senses or so on to develope.

More Notes
As I mentioned above, I deleted quite a bit of what I typed as I felt I was getting a bit pretentious. I'm not sure if this would garner any interest, and if it did, I'm not sure if it would gather the interest of roleplayers.. Or competitive people. Or what have you. The short of what I mentioned is that I did want to develope a little bit of a "system" for myself (You guys have seen the "Gridhood" game on this forum? That's what helped me come up with the idea) to measure how strong particular creatures were in different areas, how much currency each players character had.. How much they were impressing potential investors who were watching them and their creation... That type of thing. But I don't have a system like that yet, so I'm not going to pretend like I have this whole cool thing set up behind the scene. ESPECIALLY when the people playing might only be interested in the controlled evolution aspect of the game (Which would be perfectly fine too :3)

The images for the creatures are being done using the spore creature creator. I was part of a game that did something similar with the creature creator many, many years ago and I thought it was alot of fun. SO! Here we go 
Next post is the games first post. Hope you join up!

I THOUGHT it was floor 2. I wasn't in the swamp for a very long time. According to the morgue file though, I actually got to floor 4/4. So.. Likely the rune vault. I guess next time I get to that point, I'll spend wand and scroll uses more freely.. Might actually survive it XD

And naw, I got that far because I ran away a lot. I'd try to get only one thing to see me, run away a bit, kill it, go back, kill its friend. So on.
Except in the cases of things that I knew die quickly. Rats, bats, green slime. So on. Don't tell Trog though.