Dungeon World Notes: Project ORI
So, due to pandemic-related social isolation, I had to unfortunately put my Dungeon World campaign on long-term hiatus and essentially halted work on my homebrewed far-future setting six months ago.
At this point it has effectively ended on a cliffhanger, with the party creeping outside their abandoned home settlement of Ori, having returned to find the machine-intellects in the ruins underneath. To recap, Ori was a large village of hundreds of humans, mutants, biological androids, and the odd man-machine hybrid, cobbled together among the ruins of civilizations from past epochs. Underneath these shacks of metal and concrete rubble lay a labyrinthine technological complex, deteriorated to nearly unrecognizable ruin. In those ruins, Ori's settlers were able to scrounge the occasional powerful artifacts and speak with a collective of machine-intellects. Despite the machines' odd perspectives and lack of a clear concept of individual identity, Ori came to rely upon them for wisdom and leadership.
Two of the most pressing questions since the start of the campaign following the destruction of Ori have been the nature of the machine-intellect overlords beneath the settlement and the status of the massive machine-beast known commonly as 'Bahamut Zero', the most overt threat in the region (before the calamity that was the sudden outpouring of deadly caustic gas, killing nearly everyone in Ori).
Since I can't expect to resume the campaign in the foreseeable future, I will detail my notes on these two subjects here.
The ORI Facility
Part of the awkwardness of pursuing the backstory of this far-future dying earth setting in 2020 is that, even back when I first began drafting it in 2018 based on a series of nightmares, its history has always been steeped in what I consider the most under-sung silencer of civilizations: plagues.
The structures in the Ori settlement date before the post-civilization time frame of the game by perhaps tens of thousands of years, during an extended period of protracted total war scenarios known as the Last War Era. Following the complete urbanization of the Earth's landmasses and a breakdown of the Hi-Tek Era's techno-magical infrastructure, civilization began to experience further ecological collapse and population drops pressured by resource scarcity. The atmosphere was heavily regulated by oxygen generators and sea levels had dropped by two miles due to evaporation. Civilization had fallen into isolated societies of techno-barbarism, focused on maintaining the hubs of the pinnacles of technology which included priceless wonders such as endless supplies of materials, energy, hubs of knowledge, and immortality. Such machines exploited the very limits of reality and as such were primarily maintained by artificial intellects which processed data and taught themselves calculations and theories of science beyond normal human understanding; in most cases these machine-intellects were the only bridge between harnessed magic and pre-industrial scavenging.
Given their inscrutable tasks these machine-intellects in turn gave out inscrutable demands. As humanity increasingly turned to the machines for decision-making their orders grew increasing obtuse and violent, directing hostilities towards other centers of civilization to either capture or eliminate their hoards of technomagic.
The Ori region was situated in the center of a peninsula on the western end of the European continent. Towards the end of the Last War Era, this peninsula was populated by over a million inhabitants, largely under control of a machine-intellect collective known as the Ebiran Coalition. In response to anti-Coalition rebellions, the machines had engineered a biological-mimetic hybrid weapon known as a metavirus. With both genetic and digitized elements encapsulated in a techno-magical form, this metavirus was strategically deployed to target the rebels' own machine-intellects and human leadership, progressively disrupting thought processes to inhibit short-term memory, train of thought, and reallocating mental processing towards generating further avenues for the metavirus to adapt. The development of symptoms were gradual but in all known cases resulted in complete mental debilitation in a matter of months. It was designed to cross man-machine interfaces to infect biological, synthetic, and virtual entities equally. The metavirus was capable of spreading to virtual 'dreamscape' environs and even across remote resurrection technology.
In response, Project ORI was assembled within a substructure facility in the rebel-controlled urban wastelands.
Project ORI
Project ORI had two goals: Develop a cure to the metavirus and re-purpose the metavirus to use against the Ebiran Coalition. Four specialized machine-intellects were spawned from existing environmental and epidemiological machine-intellects (through a process known as 'heuristic budding') to analyze the metavirus:
BM8-0: Collect infected and uninfected samples and isolate their biomass/inert matter, neurological data and dream-intellect patterns into physical, pseudo-physical, and digital containment
CLA: Analyze isolated samples, generate potential solutions for altering or eliminating elements of the metavirus
^DS: Replicate samples for testing stock, test solutions and prepare abnormal samples for further analysis
LI-A10: Implementation of viable treatments into subject stock, reconstituting cured/immune entities, and distribution of cures/immunizations/counter-Coalition metavirus into environment
(Yes, they're named after great sea monsters of revelation/mythology: Bahamut/Behemoth, Leviathan. Scylla and Charybdis). Don't judge me, Nate started it by naming Bahamut Zero as a local threat and it was too fun not to roll with it).
ORI found limited success in breaking down infected subjects into base materials and reconstituting them after purging all traces of the metavirus, but continuation of consciousness would be lost. Some forms of bio-mechanical hybrids were found to be highly resistant to the metavirus but LI-A10 never found a fabrication method that consistently produced ones viable for mind-transference. But by most appearances the machine-intellects' procedures involved BM8-0 disintegrating test subjects en masse and LI-A10 converting them into a menagerie of failed grotesques, adding to the mutants and simulacra from previous eras already roaming the wastelands. Anti-Coalition forces began to refer to the machines collectively as 'the heralds of the apocalypse', waiting helplessly for a solution to be found.
Project ORI never completed. Eventually, a variation of the metavirus (whether produced by Project ORI, the Coalition, or an unrelated strain engineered by a third party) emerged in the wild which somehow bore a bacterial infection within the encapsulated biological elements. This variant was highly infectious and carried across the same vectors, and though did not effect purely mechanical or non-physical entities it produced high fatality rates among biological lifeforms and synthetic-based life. The Plague of Staves, as it became known, flared across centuries as isolated human populations would encounter the infection in dormant machines, wandering simulacra, or within dreamscapes.
Ninety percent of humanity died off before the Plague of Staves subsided, by this point the survivors were effectively immune and had isolated themselves into the self-sufficient rigid Cenobium societies that defined the last vestiges of civilization of the Cenobitic Era.
. . .
So with that in mind, I had a rough outline for what the machine-intellects of Ori were doing the campaign and how they were going to still achieve their original goals. I'll save that briefer story for whomever asks, but here's a hint for my campaign's players in the form a a little riddle: What sleeps before sunrise, flies before noon, and limps before sunset?
