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Project Biomodus: Fallout + [PROTOTYPE] + Warframe = ???

MJ12 Commando

MJ12 Commando

Shadow Cabal Barristerminator
Arbitrator
I ran into a few mentions of this game poking at Warframe twitter, and nobody here seems to know about it despite the fact that there's a mostly-finished free text-only playtest doc around and it has/will have some good-looking art (by yuikami and Minki, the latter of whom is the Warframe concept artist) so I'm making a thread about it.

Project Biomodus | The First TAPM20 Tabletop Roleplaying Game

Project Biomodus is a post-apocalyptic game where someone attempted to uplift all of humanity into perfect immortal highly adaptable biomechanical cyborgs and it didn't go as planned. Due to what are probably programming oversights, the target class was increased just a little bit, and instead of turning all humans into immortal highly adaptable biomechanical cyborgs that can survive anything, they accidentally augmented all life on earth with the ability to grow military-grade armor plate and weapons. This, as you might expect, led to tragedy as the biosphere went mad and completely shit the bed. A long time later, the world has gone to shit. Because a lot of the biosphere went mad and died trying to assimilate the infinite power of nanoaugmentation, environmental feedback went completely bonkers, most of the planet is unsurvivable to unaugmented humans due to intense heat, just about everything is toxic and/or hardcore because it's full of nanomachines, etc.

Fortunately, no unaugmented humans exist anymore. Everyone has a 'bioforge,' an internal organ which generates do-anything nanomachines. Bioforged organisms are just better than normal people-they can survive extremes of temperature, are immune to normal diseases, don't die of old age, and are generally faster, stronger, and more hardcore. You play a 'biomodus,' someone whose bioforge has migrated and integrated to their brain. This means that you're better at controlling the bioforge, but also means that you can straight-up swap bodies like this was Eclipse Phase. Your character can even literally hot-swap bodies-a buddy can rip you out of your cooling corpse and install you in like, a cyber-cow carcass in an emergency if they need you up and mobile. Society has sort of kind of rebuilt itself, with new organized civilizations being a thing ,but there's still nomadic raiders and civilization is certainly not the durable edifice that we know of today.

The ruleset itself is a d20-based action point system, which is interesting at first glance although I haven't actually looked into how it breaks, and the example art on the page is quite good. But you might ask "okay, that's [PROTOTYPE] (weird viral monsters) and Fallout (post-apocalypse rebuilding), where's the Warframe?" Well, besides for the biomechanical art style being very Warframey and Biomodi having nanomachine powers which are pretty akin to Warframe abilities, a lot of the backers are either Warframe players or part of Digital Extremes. One of them is in fact, the Lotus, who exists in this game as an AI Space Mom. :V
 
This could be cool, although it might need a "no guns" house rule... *goes off to read the link*
 
I just want to know, can we create a cyber robot t-Rex and use it as a player character? Would it even be against the spirit of the setting?
 
MJ12 Commando said:
Why do you want a 'no guns' houserule?
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Well, compare these metal-ized people to transformers. It doesn't matter which Transformers series you look at, all the good combat is with swords, martial arts, or biting and clawing. Gun combat is a lousy roleplaying experience in my personal opinion (and it would be my house rule). Plus, biometal should still follow some rules of biology, and it's really rare to find a biological organism that shoots solid projectiles. It would be a huge waste of 'nutrition' to produce, say, a missile that's 5% of the mass of your body, and throw it away in combat hoping to do some damage with it. It's also rater implausible that you could grow any kind of guidance system into your missile; either it would be untrained and thus clumsy, or it would be smart and prone to rebel like every biometal organism in this setting is stated to be.
 
It's actually only uncommon. There king Cobras spit venom and their are fish that can spit water to knock down insect. Also some whales use echolocation to stun their prey.
 
Hot damn. This sounds basically perfect. Although that could just be the fact that I am petting my cat rn too.

Seriously, body horror and biofuckery are probably my favorite things after white hair and cats.
 
sunandshadow said:
It's also rater implausible that you could grow any kind of guidance system into your missile; either it would be untrained and thus clumsy, or it would be smart and prone to rebel like every biometal organism in this setting is stated to be.
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How are guided missiles implausible for biologics? Killer bee drones are naturally evolved guided missiles! Liquid pheromone sprayer + a symbiotic hive of flying poison syringes= :evil:
 
sunandshadow said:
Well, compare these metal-ized people to transformers. It doesn't matter which Transformers series you look at, all the good combat is with swords, martial arts, or biting and clawing. Gun combat is a lousy roleplaying experience in my personal opinion (and it would be my house rule). Plus, biometal should still follow some rules of biology, and it's really rare to find a biological organism that shoots solid projectiles. It would be a huge waste of 'nutrition' to produce, say, a missile that's 5% of the mass of your body, and throw it away in combat hoping to do some damage with it. It's also rater implausible that you could grow any kind of guidance system into your missile; either it would be untrained and thus clumsy, or it would be smart and prone to rebel like every biometal organism in this setting is stated to be.
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Why are we comparing them to transformers instead of like, their actual inspirations, i.e. Warframes? Also, you fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the bioforge and the environment. Not everything has to be 'living' or 'grown' because when people say that all things are biomechanical they mean that there are significant mechanical components to a lot of things, which includes fairly complex stuff. And it's not like the survivors don't have sapience or technology. Which speaks against trying to melee a lot of wasteland creatures, because that's like trying to stab a deathclaw to death with a knife.

If I had a choice between shooting a cyber-bear with a rocket launcher and trying to poke a cyber-bear with a sharp stick, I would choose #1, because #2 would lead me to have my face bitten off, if I don't die from the bear's laser eyes first.

All organisms are angry and dangerous because they possess a bioforge-but possession of a bioforge is not necessary for technology. You can still make-or even grow regular old guns and load them up with regular old ammunition. There's a reason I brought up Fallout-because there is a technological civilization on Earth, it's just not a robust, widespread one because the wastelands are a horrible place. This is especially because with how the bioforge works, it's more than possible that some people here may have been born before the apocalypse, possibly well before, and have the relevant technical education.
 
tempted to get a sub just so I can make a [return of the why boner] tag

MJ12 Commando said:
I ran into a few mentions of this game poking at Warframe twitter, and nobody here seems to know about it despite the fact that there's a mostly-finished free text-only playtest doc around and it has/will have some good-looking art (by yuikami and Minki, the latter of whom is the Warframe concept artist) so I'm making a thread about it.

Project Biomodus | The First TAPM20 Tabletop Roleplaying Game

Project Biomodus is a post-apocalyptic game where someone attempted to uplift all of humanity into perfect immortal highly adaptable biomechanical cyborgs and it didn't go as planned. Due to what are probably programming oversights, the target class was increased just a little bit, and instead of turning all humans into immortal highly adaptable biomechanical cyborgs that can survive anything, they accidentally augmented all life on earth with the ability to grow military-grade armor plate and weapons. This, as you might expect, led to tragedy as the biosphere went mad and completely shit the bed. A long time later, the world has gone to shit. Because a lot of the biosphere went mad and died trying to assimilate the infinite power of nanoaugmentation, environmental feedback went completely bonkers, most of the planet is unsurvivable to unaugmented humans due to intense heat, just about everything is toxic and/or hardcore because it's full of nanomachines, etc.

Fortunately, no unaugmented humans exist anymore. Everyone has a 'bioforge,' an internal organ which generates do-anything nanomachines. Bioforged organisms are just better than normal people-they can survive extremes of temperature, are immune to normal diseases, don't die of old age, and are generally faster, stronger, and more hardcore. You play a 'biomodus,' someone whose bioforge has migrated and integrated to their brain. This means that you're better at controlling the bioforge, but also means that you can straight-up swap bodies like this was Eclipse Phase. Your character can even literally hot-swap bodies-a buddy can rip you out of your cooling corpse and install you in like, a cyber-cow carcass in an emergency if they need you up and mobile. Society has sort of kind of rebuilt itself, with new organized civilizations being a thing ,but there's still nomadic raiders and civilization is certainly not the durable edifice that we know of today.

The ruleset itself is a d20-based action point system, which is interesting at first glance although I haven't actually looked into how it breaks, and the example art on the page is quite good. But you might ask "okay, that's [PROTOTYPE] (weird viral monsters) and Fallout (post-apocalypse rebuilding), where's the Warframe?" Well, besides for the biomechanical art style being very Warframey and Biomodi having nanomachine powers which are pretty akin to Warframe abilities, a lot of the backers are either Warframe players or part of Digital Extremes. One of them is in fact, the Lotus, who exists in this game as an AI Space Mom. :V
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Weeeeeevillllltechhhhhhhhh
 
tamarak73 said:
It's actually only uncommon. There king Cobras spit venom and their are fish that can spit water to knock down insect. Also some whales use echolocation to stun their prey.
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I did actually specify solid projectiles. And even then I wouldn't have a problem with things equivalent to spears or stone ammo or bolas or throwing nets: short-range projectiles that don't explode and aren't armor-piercing and aren't made out of metals that are probably hard to replace from the environment.

MJ12 Commando said:
Why are we comparing them to transformers instead of like, their actual inspirations, i.e. Warframes? Also, you fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the bioforge and the environment. Not everything has to be 'living' or 'grown' because when people say that all things are biomechanical they mean that there are significant mechanical components to a lot of things, which includes fairly complex stuff. And it's not like the survivors don't have sapience or technology. Which speaks against trying to melee a lot of wasteland creatures, because that's like trying to stab a deathclaw to death with a knife.

If I had a choice between shooting a cyber-bear with a rocket launcher and trying to poke a cyber-bear with a sharp stick, I would choose #1, because #2 would lead me to have my face bitten off, if I don't die from the bear's laser eyes first.

All organisms are angry and dangerous because they possess a bioforge-but possession of a bioforge is not necessary for technology. You can still make-or even grow regular old guns and load them up with regular old ammunition. There's a reason I brought up Fallout-because there is a technological civilization on Earth, it's just not a robust, widespread one because the wastelands are a horrible place. This is especially because with how the bioforge works, it's more than possible that some people here may have been born before the apocalypse, possibly well before, and have the relevant technical education.
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Keep in mind that I am explaining how and why I as a GM would adapt this system to tell a story I want to tell. I'm explaining because you asked and I was wiling to satisfy your curiosity and I was also hoping for some discussion about how other GMs in the thread would do their own customization to this system. Your criticism is kind of inappropriate in the context of a campaign created and run by me, where I have to explain how bioforges work to my players and moderate how they can be used to build my players' characters, and I have both the power and the responsibility to adapt the system-provided explanation to better fit the particular campaign I create.

Also when you talk about trying to stab a deathclaw with a knife, that's just inaccurate. The players are monsters just as much as anything else in the setting, especially at the point in time many many years after the nanobot makeover swept the planet. Unless you are using literal newborns, every character already IS a deathclaw. They'd laugh at the idea of using a knife because such a weapon would be much weaker than their 'natural' melee weaponry. A battle between 2 deathclaws is dramatic, even if the player deathclaw will probably have the advantage due to being smarter. A battle between an intelligent deathclaw with missile launchers and a regular deathclaw is not dramatic, it's little better than shooting fish in a barrel.
 
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sunandshadow said:
A battle between 2 deathclaws is dramatic, even if the player deathclaw will probably have the advantage due to being smarter. A battle between an intelligent deathclaw with missile launchers and a regular deathclaw is not dramatic, it's little better than shooting fish in a barrel.
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>implying both deathclaws won't have missile launchers and flare shit
 
That hypothetical fight between armed deathclaw and unarmed deathclaw doesn't have to be shooting fish in a barrel. It'd be interesting and tbh, killing a comparatively more powerful enemy by being clever about stuff is always a great option in games. It just feels good.
 
Honestly, it's like Gundam. The universe was/is written out so a certain outcome is the most logical and natural given the settings constraints.

You need a living being to help direct the nanofrorge. If it gets an impulse that says 'thing there, want shoot' it builds a method.

Why do you have theoretically infinite supplies but can only have so much gear? Your body can only work with so many nanites and once and without direct control they go dormant/unusable, etc..
 
sunandshadow said:
I did actually specify solid projectiles. And even then I wouldn't have a problem with things equivalent to spears or stone ammo or bolas or throwing nets: short-range projectiles that don't explode and aren't armor-piercing and aren't made out of metals that are probably hard to replace from the environment.
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Keep in mind that I am explaining how and why I as a GM would adapt this system to tell a story I want to tell. I'm explaining because you asked and I was wiling to satisfy your curiosity and I was also hoping for some discussion about how other GMs in the thread would do their own customization to this system. Your criticism is kind of inappropriate in the context of a campaign created and run by me, where I have to explain how bioforges work to my players and moderate how they can be used to build my players' characters, and I have both the power and the responsibility to adapt the system-provided explanation to better fit the particular campaign I create.
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No offense, but you're suggesting a campaign where the majority of the actual armory and most of the offensive configurations provided by the game are off limits because the GM is declaring that no, these really cool powers aren't 'dramatic' because it's 'not realistic.' You're acting like one of those Stop Having Fun Guys. It's absolutely appropriate to comment that maybe you shouldn't declare most of the game combat system off limits on a lark.

Also when you talk about trying to stab a deathclaw with a knife, that's just inaccurate. The players are monsters just as much as anything else in the setting, especially at the point in time many many years after the nanobot makeover swept the planet. Unless you are using literal newborns, every character already IS a deathclaw. They'd laugh at the idea of using a knife because such a weapon would be much weaker than their 'natural' melee weaponry. A battle between 2 deathclaws is dramatic, even if the player deathclaw will probably have the advantage due to being smarter. A battle between an intelligent deathclaw with missile launchers and a regular deathclaw is not dramatic, it's little better than shooting fish in a barrel.
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Fortunately, when you're facing mobs of regular predators, they're mobs-i.e. huge groups. A guy with a machine-gun against a bear is shooting fish in a barrel, a guy with a machine-gun against 50 bears might find things a little more challenging. More importantly, the player characters are rare-they're full up biomodi. The vast majority of people in Biomodus are 'muns,' who are much, much weaker than everything else on the planet and would find that poking shit with spears is suboptimal because that way is hugely risky. And your average enemy isn't wildlife. It's shit like SkyNET's military-grade death robots, hordes of hiveminded super-fast plague cyberzombies, and weirdo biohorror superpredators like human-intelligent dragons or quantum tunneling parasitic wasps.

Biomodi shouldn't be challenged by the vast majority of wildlife in the wastes, because it's not intended to be a shitfarmer survival RPG. You're a Tenno facing grineer, you should win most one-on-one battles.
 
Anyone else having issues with the playtest document. Mine seems ro be missing the top and bottom few lines of text on each page, which renders it unreadable.
 
Man, puberty is hardcore in this world.

Someone punched your teeth out? Now you just ate your old jaw with your new mettalic fangs

Also, armoured wombs.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
Why do you want a 'no guns' houserule?
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Because if you use your newfound power as a superhuman cyborg death machine to carry bigger guns you are officially the most boring lameo on the planet.

If you aren't slicing Giger-bears in half to reach into their ruined bodies and rip out their cyberspines to absorb on the spot for a quick Gatorade boost then you better run when the sun comes up motherfucker 'cause your life's on the line.
 
ZerbanDaGreat said:
Because if you use your newfound power as a superhuman cyborg death machine to carry bigger guns you are officially the most boring lameo on the planet.

If you aren't slicing Giger-bears in half to reach into their ruined bodies and rip out their cyberspines to absorb on the spot for a quick Gatorade boost then you better run when the sun comes up motherfucker 'cause your life's on the line.
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Raiden used rocket launchers a bunch of times though. :V
 
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