Orthogenesis

Neat idea for a game just hit me while typing up a page on Arcana Wiki about Orthogenesis, a discredited alternative to Darwinian evolution. Orthogenesis proposes linear evolution, instead of branching, so that no two species share a common ancestor. It's kinda silly.

But let's, for the sake of gaming, take it as true. You could run a game with a very limited gene pool, just a few dozen species fighting for survival. Player Characters might be reincarnated, or you just might play an entire species at a time. Point being, each PC is a different species. After every major plot point, the time line is advanced by 30,000 to a million years. When this happens, you spend your experience points evolving your species. I suspect this is going to need a competitive structure - defeating other players in the short term gets you the points to evolve in the future. Eventually, though, the divide between PCs would get pretty big, at which point the GM invokes an external threat to even the playing field (or just hide the difference). Or, perhaps as you evolve to fill niches, your xp awards change. Yes, Mr T-Rex gets points for eating me, but as an r-Strategist herbivore, I get points for hiding, eating plants, and having sex.

At the beginning of the campaign, there's no culture, or language, or tool-use. Those are things you can choose to evolve, along with gills, limbs, venom, camouflage, psychic powers, etc. Obviously, the game system would need to be pretty flexible, yet at the same time have defined options for adaptation.

Ooh, adaptation! How about, at the end of the story arc, you get to propose one evolution for each way you died. He keeps eating me, so I evolve poison and bright coloration in his visual range.

Reincarnation in Gaming

Reincarnation is a theme I've explored several times in gaming. I keep coming back to it in RPGs every couple of years. I make sure I never hit on it in two back-to-back campaigns, because I don't want it to feel like a mandatory part of Rolfe's GMing.

That said, I really enjoy what it does to storylines. Here's some examples...

1) I once ran an Amber campaign once where the Amberite PCs were incarnations of Chaosites from the days before the Pattern was drawn. Certain NPCs were holding grudges from things that had happened in a whole different lifetime. It really got the plots moving quickly, though was perhaps a little heavy-handed, to tell players "You hate him from the moment you meet him, as though he'd already done something unforgivably horrible."

2) In 7th Sea, Sarah's character was the reincarnation of the wife of a Senator of the Old Republic. Her character was an archaeologist exploring the ruins of that Senator's villa. Her past self had engaged in a sorcery-creating bargain with things beyond the veil, would her latest incarnation make the same mistakes?

3) In my current Scion campaign, I just dropped a bombshell. One PC was captured by a Villain who didn't kill her because she looked so much like his wife who'd died two thousand years ago. I dropped just the right hints, and the player jumped at them. The villain had turned to evil to get revenge at things that had been done to that wife. He felt remorse at his own gradual corruption and dishonor over the centuries. He fell upon his sword, leaving the PC with a lot of issues to ponder.

4) In another Amber campaign way back in the day, we had one PC and one NPC who were both suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder and Shape-Shifting. When the NPC got hit with a pretty nasty metaphysical attack, she split into parts. Each healed as an incarnation of a different one of her personalities.

I'm really looking forward to one day running a game where the PCs are reincarnations of PCs or NPCs from another campaign. It'd be especially cool if they were reincarnations from multiple campaigns or a whole other setting/system. Very Moorcockian.