The year is
2047. Capital Punishment has been outlawed by the world government for just over
a decade and prisons are overflowing. Cryostasis has been suggested as a method
of confining those sentenced to spend their lives in jail, but the technology is
still imperfect, and many consider the possibility as controversial as the
storage of nuclear waste at the turn of the century - is it really fair to leave
our "social debris" to future generations?
You are social debris of the highest grade. There are quite a lot of people
that would like you dead for one reason or another. Parole is Not an option. As
things stand at the moment about the best that you can hope for is that they'll
work out some way to "fix" the bits of your brain they don't like before you
die, although whether you'll be you once they've done that is an interesting
conundrum.
You look again at the letter you found dropped through your door this morning.
Dear Inmate.
I write to you as the MD of VeriCorp. We are a private security company under
contract to provide penal services to the world government. We are trialling a
new system as an alternative to the current True Life Imprisonment to which you
have been sentenced.
As you may be aware, over the last few years there have been discoveries of
several planets outside the solar system which appear to fulfil all the
prerequisites for the support of human life. Unfortunately the more promising of
these lie over five light-decade away, which at presently attainable speeds
means well over twenty years of travel. It would be feasible to send a crew in
cryostasis but, as you may also be aware, long term cryostasis has been shown to cause
behavioural abnormalities in a proportion of test subjects. Because of this
there has been an understandable shortage of volunteers for a manned mission.
At VeriCorp we try to strive for rehabilitation wherever feasible, and for the
first time we feel that this may be possible in the case of yourself and others
like you. We intend to send a mission to one of the newly discovered planets,
manned entirely by specially selected True-Lifers. This will be a one-way trip;
both ourselves and the World Government consider the risk of you managing to
return to Earth to be negligible. Once on the new world however you will regain
your freedom, and perhaps help to create a colony that future Terrans can be proud to
associate with.
This is a one time offer. If you wish to be considered tear off the top left
hand corner of this letter and slide it back under your door within the next
twenty four hours.
Yours,
Dr. Vladimir Riselle.
MD, Vericorp Inc.
--------
In this PBEM game I intend to take a bunch of six characters from a high tech
level setting and maroon them in a pretty low level setting. The characters may
not be evil or psychotic, but there will be good (not necessarily fair) reasons
that they are looking at spending the rest of their lives in a high-security
facility.
The chances of
their survival will be far higher if they can
find a way to work together against the environment.
We'll be using GURPS, probably 4th edition, although with a bit of luck things
will work out fairly rules light. Don't let a lack of familiarity with the GURPS
system stop you contacting me if you like the sound of the game otherwise.
Steps will be taken to keep the posting
frequency at two posts per character per week or higher. This is the
first PBEM I've GMed in a while; the last one continued for a couple of years
before failing to survive a switch in game system (should never have started off
using Palladium!), and I hope I've learned lessons from that which will keep
this one going longer.
If you're interested, have a read of the game mechanics and character generation
pages. If you're still interested after that mail me with a brief character
description.
Jon Bray