Hi Cerberus!

For the most part, people in Metamor City are limited to present-day and near-future tech when it comes to weaponry. Most guns still use gunpowder to propel lead bullets, and for close-up fighting people depend on knives, brass knuckles, etc. There are some guns that use electronic ignition (see www.metalstorm.com for an example of this), but these are rare outside the military. Various armed forces also have access to railguns (big ones mounted on ships and skyships) and some directed-energy weapons (mostly on aerofighters), but these are the exceptions rather than the rule.

Mundane weapons can indeed be enhanced with magic; the most common enchantments are designed to enhance accuracy (and therefore range) for guns, or penetration for blades (e.g., making a blade that can punch through steel without losing its edge). Those who plan on fighting monsters can have their weapons blessed (short-term effect) or sanctified (permanent effect), which makes them more effective against dark and unholy creatures. The downside is that a blessed or holy weapon loses all magical properties if it is ever used for an act of evil.

A variety of other enchantments are also possible, limited by the skill of the enchanter and the reagents he has at his disposal. In addition, some enchantments are closely-guarded magical secrets; the legendary vorpal enchantment, which empowers a blade to sever the heads of its targets, is restricted to a small number of mage guilds, and is only taught to licensed master wizards. The most powerful weapons are all artifacts from ages past, and few of these actually see use in the modern day.

As far as purely magical weaponry goes, the wand is the most common format. Wands can be filled with charges for just about any simple spell; the most common ones shoot fire, electricity, or mana bolts. These weapons have to be licensed just like any other lethal weapon, but rogue mages sometimes learn how to make them on their own. A wand loaded with lethal spells is controlled a bit more tightly than a handgun, but there are also self-defense wands that fire nonlethal spells designed to bind, freeze, or otherwise immobilize an attacker.

These are mostly guidelines; the Street-level "wolf packs" tend to be creative and ruthless in their choices of weaponry, and a clever mage could come up with a new way to carry spells that is different from the norm. One thing to keep in mind is that it takes a lot of expensive reagents to craft a new wand, so most Street rats will make do with what they can scrounge, steal or buy second-hand. It's a lot cheaper to re-charge an existing wand than to build one from scratch -- and of course, bullets and blades are ALWAYS cheaper than magic.

Cheers,

Chris

Sometimes the world feels very campaign-y. If this was, at some point, a tabletop, what system did you use?
My next game after the space opera I'm running is going to be a Metamor City game. I plan to use the tri-stat system originally created by Guardians of Order, now owned by White Wolf.  Do you have a "definitive guide" to the world anywhere? Anything along those lines would be a fantastic help. This world is incredibly rich and vibrant and I enjoy each installment thoroughly. The potential for it to become a ridiculously fun tabletop exists and I only hope I can do it justice. There's plenty of potential for combat, which is fine when the players are chomping at the bit for some action, but I like how rich the relationships can be, which fits best with my GMing style.

Hi Philippe!

I am a huge fan of pen-and-paper RPGs, and have been playing them for most of the last nine years. Since fall 2002 I have been running a d20 Modern/Shadow Chasers/Urban Arcana game for my friends in California, a game that has persisted through the magic of Skype even after I moved back to Michigan. I have never used Metamor City as a campaign setting, but it's undeniable that my experience with gaming has influenced the world. In some cases this has been a deliberate decision -- beings like tieflings and cansins have been lifted directly from D&D books and Dragon magazine, and the idea of sorcerers as instinctive magic-users and wizards as theory-based magic users is inspired by 3rd-Edition D&D. In other cases I've drawn inspiration from GURPS, especially for the Psi Collective; most of the different psionic disciplines, and the distinction between power and skill, were taken from 3rd-Edition GURPS Psionics.

There is a wiki for Metamor City that serves as the universe "bible," but it's only open to those who plan to write stories in the setting. That's because (1) it has a ton of spoilers, and (2) not everything in there has been decided on with certainty. One thing I've found as I'm writing MAKING THE CUT is that some aspects of the world are evolving and growing to serve the needs of the story.

That having been said, there are some resources I might be able to direct you to. Send me a private email and I'll point you to the old setting notes that I prepared in the early days of this project; some aspects are no longer 100% accurate, but it should be close enough for RPG purposes.

Cheers,

Chris

Chris

I've looked around this forum and haven't seen any clear place to ask this so I'll ask it here.  What is needed by us (me) if we'd like to participate in writing inside Metamor city?

thank you

    Thats is what I need to know. know I can make some changes to my
character sheet

> I've looked around this forum and haven't seen any clear place to ask this so I'll

> ask it here.  What is needed by us (me) if we'd like to participate in writing

>  inside Metamor city?

Mostly, you just need to email me and let me know what you have in mind. :)   If your story ideas look like they could mesh with what I'm doing with the universe as a whole, then I'll give you access to the wiki. If you then take those ideas and resources and put together a solid, entertaining tale, then I'll feature your work on the podcast, as I did with Nobilis's story "Metamor City Anniversary."  Several other writers are already in the process of doing this.

I can't stop anyone from writing Metamor City fanfic, of course, nor would I want to -- hence the ShareAlike Creative Commons license -- but I reserve the right to limit which stories I recognize as "canon." If you work with me on the details, though, and write a story that (in my opinion) is up to the standards of the setting, I'll be happy to acknowledge your work and promote it.

Amongst the forms the curse takes: Vampires, Theriomorphs (anthros) and  to a lesser extent Androgynts (gender switching) respectively have been around for a while or are fairly new but popular concepts; unique to Metamor and new to me is the notion of Pedomorphs.

What inspired that particular curse type and what prompted you to include it in the Metamor universe?

Pedomorphs, also known as the Age-Regressed or ARs, were a part of the original Metamor Keep setting created by Copernicus. In the late 1990s he and I were both part of TSA-Talk, the mailing list for the Transformation Story Archive. Age Regression was one of the three most common types of transformations explored on the List (as we called it); the other two were animal transformations and gender transformations. Cope wanted everyone on the List to feel welcome to play in his sandbox, so he set up the Curse of Metamor to randomly change people in accordance with one of these three categories.  (Vampires are not a manifestation of the Curse; they are created by a separate magical contagion, which can affect the Cursed just as readily as anyone else.)

The population of Metamor Keep was theoretically divided evenly between the three variants of the Curse, since people couldn't choose which version they received. In practice, however, most of the people who wrote stories for MK were "furry" authors who preferred stories about the animal morphs, so most of the great heroes of MK fell into that category.

The best-known AR in Metamor was probably Father Hough, an Ecclesiast priest created by prolific MK author Charles Matthias.  Hough regressed into a boy when he was forced to stay in Metamor Valley long enough for the Curse to take hold on him. I also made extensive use of the ARs as acolytes of the Lothanasi, temple servants who copied scrolls, tended wounds, conducted research, and took care of the daily business of the Lightbringer Order. For the most part, though, ARs were given little attention by MK authors, and for good reason: their frail bodies didn't lend themselves to fantastic feats of derring-do.

When I started putting together Metamor City, I knew that I wanted the Curse to be more controllable than it was in MK. It naturally followed that, if people were given a choice of which variant of the Curse to take, most sane people would NOT choose to become pedomorphs; the drawbacks were simply too great. I decided that the only people who would still take this form of the Curse were those who were (1) terrified of getting old or (2) obsessed with honoring the heroism of their AR ancestors -- which is why they have shrunk from one-third of Metamor's population to barely 2% today.

Hey Chris

I have been listening to your podcast for about a week, and after listening to all the stories thus far, I am thoroughly entrenched in the lore. So much so that I am coming up with a storyline for a paper based game for my RP club here in the UK.

I wanted to ask though, what would happen with an Androgyne Psychic? Would the two personalities share the same powers? Or would they effectively develop seperate from each other?

Great question, Raikiri!  Psi powers fall into six broad disciplines: telepathy, psychokinesis, ESP, psychic healing, psychometabolism, and the very rare psychoportation. A person generally only has powers in one or two of these disciplines -- occasionally three, if one discipline is strong and the others are weak.  Each discipline has its own power rating, which represents the potential that person has within that discipline. A person's discipline and power rating are fixed by their genetics, so for an androgyne they would be the same in both sexes.

Within each discipline, though, there are a number of directions in which powers can be developed. A telepath might be good at long-range communication but not so good at deep mind probes. A psychokinetic might have telekinesis but not pyrokinesis, or might be able to levitate himself easily while his external teek is unable to lift much more than a loaf of bread. A psychic healer might have a gift for curing cancer but be unable to knit bones.  These different psi-skills manifest themselves according to a person's temperament and the amount of effort he or she puts into learning them.

The two halves of an androgyne may indeed develop different psychic skill set within their given disciplines. This depends on how bifurcated the androgyne is -- i.e., the degree to which the male and female egos perceive themselves as being different people. A strongly bifurcated androgyne is more likely to develop different skills in eir different forms than one who perceives emself as a single person.  (Spivak pronouns FTW!) If the androgyne is cursed later in life, eir skill set will start out the same in both sexes and may gradually drift apart over time.

Hi there.

I was wondering if there are any religions that see Metamor City as a den of heathens or something, similar to extreme fundamentalists...kinda like a bible-thumper, though I don't know if conventional Christianity exists here.

Thanks.

EDIT:  Also, is there a university or college in Metamor City?

Hi Outcast!

The Earth of Metamor City has certainly seen its share of hatred and intolerance, including some rather ugly wars between the followers of Eli and the servants of the pantheon. Those religious wars were short-circuited when the gods of the pantheon fell to earth, but there are still people who make it their business to deal in hatred.

The closest analogue to real-world Christianity is the Ecclesia, which mirrors the RL Catholic Church in most respects. There are also various "Rebuilder" denominations who are similar to our world's Protestants, though many people who might otherwise be Rebuilders have chosen to follow the teachings of the Meraist Church instead. The mainline churches generally have fairly moderate views, though the Ecclesia maintains a quite conservative viewpoint on the role of women in society and teaches that the use of certain branches of magic (specifically Divination, Conjuration, Mind-Affecting Enchantment, and death-aspected Necromancy) is a mortal sin.

There are religious extremist cults out there, but they tend to be fairly small and few people give them much credence. An upcoming novella will involve one of these cults; look for that story sometime before the end of the year.

As for universities and colleges, there are a lot of them in Metamor City. One of the largest and most prestigious is Empire University, where Will currently attends and where Daniel and Rebecca got their degrees.

Cheers,

Chris

Thanks for the quick response on my last question; it's helping with a new project of mine.

I do have another one, though...can a Theriomorph male have children with a human female?  Would he have to be in his human form for it to work, and if such a thing is possible, would the offspring be Theriomorph or 'normal?'

Thanks.

Another good question! Theriomorphs are still genetically close enough to baseline humans to be reproductively compatible, and the offspring of such a union will be born human. The same is true for the offspring of two theriomorphs who have different animals forms. Among theriomorphs with the same animal species, however, there is a chance of the offspring being born "pre-Cursed" with the same form as their parents; this is called form retention.
The actual probability of form retention increases with the number of
generations that the same Curse has been carried in a bloodline. For
example: a pair of mundane humans come to Metamor and are Cursed as
wolf-morphs. If they have never had any wolf-morphs in their ancestry,
the chance of form retention is approximately 40%. If their child is
Cursed as a wolf-morph (whether because of form retention or by
deliberate choice) and then marries a wolf-morph himself, the
probability of form retention occurring in their children rises to 60% —
or more, if his wife is also a second-generation wolf-morph.

In practice, there is always at least some chance of a child being born human. These genetic throwbacks are important to the health of the theriomorph noble houses, such as House Matthias (who take the form of the rat), House Brightleaf (foxes), and House Hassan (horses). If too many successive generations take the same Curse they start to show signs of Feralistic Psychosocial Developmental Disorder (FPDD), a disability in which the brain develops more like an animal's than a human's. Every few generations a member of one of these bloodlines has to make the "sacrifice" of staying unCursed and marrying a mundy, in order to reset the cumulative effects of the Curse. These individuals are both honored and pitied by the other members of their houses, and some of them come to resent their roles as the genetic saviors of their families. Unfortunately, no one has yet found any other way to prevent FPDD from taking hold.  As might be expected, the noble houses take genealogy VERY seriously; House Matthias, the semi-official record keeper for the houses, has a genealogical library so large it would put the Mormons to shame.

I noticed from most of your interviews you make it a point of making sure that people understand that you are working from a pre-existing world and modifying my question is is do you find it easier to work that way or would you rather of created the world from scratch yourself ?

There are advantages and disadvantages to both. I like having other people's ideas to build off of, but sometimes it results in friction when people disagree about the creative direction of the story setting. Part of the reason I spun off Metamor City from Metamor Keep was because not everyone agreed on the direction Metamor Keep was going, and it was easier to create my own spin-off and maintain creative control than to try to convince everyone else. In software terms, I forked the source code. :)

lol I have here the term forked the source code in a long time

So, just as the amulets prevent the curse, is there anything like a psi-crystal to improve psi abilities?

Not a crystal, no. There are psi-enhancing drugs that were developed for MID, and the Collective continues to manufacture them in secret for its own purposes. Most of them are dangerous for one reason or another, though. Mad John enhances a psi's effective skill with his/her powers, but it's also a slow-acting neurotoxin that will fry the user's brain unless they are injected with the antagonist within ~20 minutes. Vortex greatly boosts a psi's effective power level, but at the price of a loss of fine control -- and it has a good chance of burning out one's psi powers entirely. Shimmer is fairly safe, but its formula is too weak to be of any use for the military, so it found its way into the recreational drug market. The bottom line is, there's no quick-and-easy solution for boosting psi abilities.

In the "power has a price" theme, you could have a psi-boosting crystal, but the crystal itself is sentient and the longer you maintain contact with it, the more you risk its mind tainting yours.

And no one knows what the crystals ultimately WANT.

That's a cool idea -- but the implications are so big that I fear it would derail my long-term plot. :)

Please pardon the intrusion, but a previous post begs further information regarding the Metamor Religions...

What are the various (clerical) positions within each of the respective (mainstream) beliefs?
What religious indoctrination (physical, spritual, psi or magical) are required of any of them?
Religious icons and symbols are referred to in the podcasts, but none are displayed in the library; what do they look like? For example: The Yew-Tree? U-Tree? (Their version of a crucifix.)
And finally, have any previously unknown religious or magical articles from the time of Metamor Keep ever been unearthed, and if so, will they be featured in any upcoming texts or broadcasts?

Thank you for the efforts you put forth, and good luck in Cali.

Regards,

Scott Ellenwood,
Lake Havasu City, AZ