Dead... and Back is a survival horror Role Playing Game. The Anarchy Zones is its official setting - aliens, reanimates, and the ruins of 2055 America.

Monday, November 25, 2013

10 Things about Planetary Citizens

  1. Glass and Carbon Without Steel
    • Citizen technology progressed in a different order than human industry. They always had less easily accessible metal and less hydrocarbons. (Rather like Japan, without the stagnation of the Shogunate.) Most of their constructs are far more reliant of materials like ceramics, fiberglass, and carbon composite laminates than on metal or plastic.
  2. Individual Personalities
    • It is hard to get a sense of the individual when they are only encountered in combat situations, but Citizens do show as much variability as humans. Some do mark their vehicles with family, guild, or national marks or other distinct paint patterns, and can easily become reoccurring friends or enemies.
  3. Making Friends
    • There are places where the live and let live mentality goes on to mutual cooperation. Usually this takes the form of Citizens delivering messages, or using their helicopters as sky cranes in recovery and building projects. Mutual defense, scouting, bartering salvage,or hunting bandits are also possibilities.
  4. Start Simple
    • Despite the obvious use of Faster-Than-Light travel to get to Earth, the Planetary Citizens show very little in the way of technology beyond human understanding. Part of it is because the colony was a mostly civilian effort, and thus the most advanced shielding mechanisms were unavailable. Mostly, however, is that there would be no factories waiting for them when they landed, so everything needed to be simple to maintain until an actual infrastructure could be set up.
  5.  Lacking Strongholds
    •  Hard rock mines, power plants, aircraft factories - all of these are long term projects that the citizens have had trouble setting up so far. Human attacks, reanimates, and scattered landing sites continue to push back completion dates.
  6. Parliament by the Numbers
    •  Unlike the various human social experiments throughout the zone, Citizens have maintained a respect for their parliamentary democracy, even with the inefficiency that come with it.
  7. Outnumbered, but no Outgunned
    • The human population is still close to a billion people, PC numbers are barely ten percent of that. On the other hand, they still have aircraft and beam weaponry that requires recharging rather than reloading. Extended conflicts are far more in their favor.
  8. Military Intelligence
    • Citizens have some capability of maintaining satellite surveillance, and have far greater access to aircraft than all but the biggest human factions. The orbiting machines move in predictable patterns, and the flying ones are not up constantly. But generally, they can see everything that isn't painstakingly hidden from them.
  9. Hit and Run
    • Humans have familiarity with the terrain, and anti-armor weapons. A long fight might go their way, but not a big one. Thus they are unwilling to attack large enclaves (and certainly not a city-state) directly.
  10. Separate and Unequal
    • Most zones controlled by the aliens are no larger than a city - ten or twenty square miles of terrain, and patrols or laser towers set up at farther intervals. These territories can be dozens or even hundreds of miles apart, effectively making them states to themselves. Available resources and presence of human civilization mean that actual claimed size and power can vary wildly.

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