I'm not much of a writer so I'll keep this "backstory" bit rather simple, blunt and to the point. I'm not sure if you'll even need to read it-If people don't want to 'roleplay' this, then you pretty much wont need to look at the backstory (Even if I would personally love to see some roleplay). It's mostly their for my enjoyment and aid in visualizing what's going on.
Backstory type thingSorry humanity-(And other species, whatever you may be)-But we're all wiped out. The entire known galaxy has been conquered and absored by an alien species who use the harvested biomatter as tiny capsules of currency. Why? Well, it's obvious. Everything in the galaxy is 'wrong', so they've decided to start over! ..With a game!
Upon each of this unnknowable entities ships lies a massive biomatter converter, shaped roughly into a sphere. Inside this sphere, a habitable planet is created by the biomatter owned by the ships pilot-Who in turn charges currency from each person boarded onto the ship-A fee for him creating a playing space for them, as WELL as allowing them residency in the quarters of the ship. From there, each player will spend his biomatter capsules in trying to influence the life growing on the ship in the way that he feels best. There isn't really a way to 'win', as the creatures growing upon the ships have no idea of the existence of the aliens. However, creating marvelous creatures-Whether beautiful, extremely strong (Maybe the aliens think new threats might be coming to challenge their dominance of-You know-The ENTIRE galaxy?) or even just very durable. Livestock for those among their people who can't afford biomatter. All-consuming alien life's gotta eat too ya-know. It's in the name.
As it turns out, YOU players are the aliens mentioned above. You'll be guiding the life that springs up over the course of time on one such ship.
RulingsThe planet already exists. You can't create new planets or "planes" or other such things. Atleast for now-Maybe the rules will change. This is only the first addition, so to speak.
If creatures grow eyes strong to see high into the sky, there will be a sky there. The ship generates it.
Flora will evolve in the background as the fauna evolves. Unless players take a specific interest in plants, it will be assumed that they evolve at a steady rate with everything else. So the planet begins essentially barren, but by the times things start to climb out of the primordial ooze, we'll have primitive plants. A good way to think of it.
There isn't a definite time between turns. I'm not going to say, a year, a thousand years, a million years. No. The time between turns is "Enough for 'stuff' to happen". This simply allows things to stay fluid and fun without me having to drag things out simply because we're not working with simple organisms anymore, if that makes sense. If it helps your roleplaying mind, we can assume the ship the planet is stored in artificially simulates time speeding up between 'turns'. Perhaps the aliens are just as vexed about how much time this stuff takes as I am.
The System: How to Actually playI had quite a thing typed up here, but I sort of realized I was sort of sounding up my own arse. Here's the gist of it-You know those "type what happens next" games, where players will all say what they think the main character should do, then the game master tallys them all up and the highest number wins? It's similar to that, except multiple things can happen on one turn. One player certainly can offer more than 1 thing happening (Though certainly, the more you offer the less and less likely what you ask to happen will happen. As if your "character" was spreading his resources too thin?").
As well as this, I'd like to keep it rather grounded in reality. ..To an extent. There wont be any magic. And we wont go from microscopic organisms to wolves in the space of four turns. It takes times for limbs, or senses or so on to develope.
More NotesAs I mentioned above, I deleted quite a bit of what I typed as I felt I was getting a bit pretentious. I'm not sure if this would garner any interest, and if it did, I'm not sure if it would gather the interest of roleplayers.. Or competitive people. Or what have you. The short of what I mentioned is that I did want to develope a little bit of a "system" for myself (You guys have seen the "Gridhood" game on this forum? That's what helped me come up with the idea) to measure how strong particular creatures were in different areas, how much currency each players character had.. How much they were impressing potential investors who were watching them and their creation... That type of thing. But I don't have a system like that yet, so I'm not going to pretend like I have this whole cool thing set up behind the scene. ESPECIALLY when the people playing might only be interested in the controlled evolution aspect of the game (Which would be perfectly fine too :3)
The images for the creatures are being done using the spore creature creator. I was part of a game that did something similar with the creature creator many, many years ago and I thought it was alot of fun. SO! Here we go
Next post is the games first post. Hope you join up!