Welcome to the New World

[Brendan]

You were tried, or maybe you weren't; the courts are crowded and the amendments not as strict as they once were. You were sentenced to death. Your sentence was commuted to transportation.

It's a long ride between the stars, and it kills one in four of those who try it--but of course when you're dead already it's not much of a risk. You lost bone density and muscle tone, and they made you dance with electricity so you'd walk again someday. You lived. You crawled onto the dirt of an alien world.

It's blue.

All the light, everywhere, is blue.

[jmstar]

Cool, the Fatal Shore in space .... tell us more!

[Brendan]

Welcome to the New World is a game about the horror of survival in monochrome. You and your fellow players are prisoner colonists, scrambling to pull an existence from the rock of a planet whose entire population you know by sight.

It'd be hard enough to live on Binary Five if it was just a matter of colonization, but even a billion miles from home, no one wants to see you loose in society. Prisoners are watched, punished and sometimes executed by semihuman Wardens who know enough not to let you gang up on them. The Wardens get most of the water, food, comfort and joy.

But there's one resource they can't synthesize no matter how hard they try--one thing for which everyone is desperate, Wardens included: color. The occasional scrap of red toilet paper is worth a week in solitary. A green bottle is worth your life.

No one here should be able to see anything other than white, black and blue, but somehow these bits of visible color show up. Trash heaps, cot frames and pocket fuzz. A dead man's finger. A puff of smoke. Wardens get most of the color too, of course, because they have the power to take it. But no Warden can make new color, and no Warden has found the way to release the hope that burns in these scraps.

This is your desperate secret: the color is the psychic expression of the prisoners' suffering, loss and death. It's the ephemeral currency used to pay pain against the debt of a second chance. Against a third. Against as many chances as you can stand.

[Doug Ruff]

Wow, that's cool. So cool it's....blue.

A quick comment from the gallery: I'm guessing this lust for different colours lends itself to a certain bloodthirstiness? Like groups of people beating a man up, just to watch him bleed?

[Brendan]

That's entirely possible, Doug, but all that blood would look black under the blue sun. The consequences are always indirect; when that group was done with their victim, for example, there would be a new piece of color somewhere in the colony--maybe an old handmade baseball would split to show a purple core, or someone's crude prison tat would turn bright green.

The prisoners may betray each other for favors, food or the compulsion of madness, but the one law you never break is that nobody lets the Wardens understand the connection between your suffering and the appearance of color. If they ever do, nobody on Binary Five will know a moment without pain again.

[Brendan]

Scene Order

Somebody dies every night on Binary Five. This is important. Every time you play, it will be the second thing that happens--but that doesn't mean the dead character's player will be sitting out the rest of the game. Stories on Binary Five start at the beginning and end and work toward the middle.

Should you try to keep your story's continuity intact from scene to scene? Sure. Will you slip sometimes? Almost certainly. Is this a reason to break the game, or have a sudden attack of chagrin the next day when you realize two things didn't quite mesh? Nope.

If you need a justification for contradictions or mistakes, attribute it to the sheer mental dissociation that living on Binary Five entails. Attribute it to the badly fermented toilet wine the prisoners make themselves drink. Attribute it to whatever you like, but don't let the facts get in the way of the story.

The continuity rule goes like this: Veto, don't retcon.

[Jason Petrasko]

Wow. I'm blown away by the gripping ideas. So when is the deep vin diesel / keannu reeves movie version coming? (And actually, I think I'd watch it still!) Way to go

[Doug Ruff]

[Rossum]

Brendan,

This sounds incredibly awesome. I'm not sure if the game could be a sustained campaign, but who cares?

I'd love to see this with artwork, too.

MDK

[Brendan]