Jump chain edition

here we have an impossibly vast and impossibly ancient industrial city of unknown origins, Mortasheen is populated by mad geniuses and otherworldly mutants whose entire lives depend upon the bizarre powers of the bio-engineered monsters they modify and train. It's lawless, polluted and impossibly dangerous, but it's a world that also exists in surprising harmony. Its ghoulish, violent inhabitants aren't "bad guys" - being ghoulish and violent is just their way, and they're happy that way. They may inevitably die in the corrosive jaws of some biological abomination, but until then, every day is a gory, slimy adventure. You now have 1000 CP



starting area,
role one D8 or pay 100 CP to choose
1. Mortasheen: this is the city of freedom a metropolis whose only structure is the policies of various corporations and the only law they agree on no slavery.  Mortasheen is a vast, uncontrolled, unplanned, and untamed urban sprawl, so massive it has created its own twisted ecosystem. Much like a scar when seen from space, it's roughly a whole continent, and in many ways, it's better to treat it like one; to say that Mortasheen is a "city" (though this is the common vernacular) is to underestimate the whole shebang. Mortasheen is only a "city" in the sense that a slight majority of it consists of towering metal and concrete buildings; it's long outgrown that old definition, much like its forests, swamps, and marshes have outgrown the office buildings, laboratories, and sewers they started in--Mortasheen spills out everywhere like a festering wound nobody ever bothered to treat. Mortasheen is divided into vast subsections by geography, and into somewhat smaller subsections by leadership (or lack thereof), often crudely constructed over many layers of much older structures like some invasive disease. Wires, pipes, and metal walkways stretch like cobwebs between the spires, while a forest of smokestacks and antennae reach to a sky of thick, black clouds, painted an eerie red during the day by the seldom-seen and dying sun. It’s pretty much perpetually dark (most people carry some form of light with them), and ninety percent of the buildings are old schools or universities now given over to other business. The City Proper is what most people think of when they think of Mortasheen: The great city of skyscrapers and shadows, and the wan little lights scurrying in the dark.



2. G!zjhdt: considered the spiritual homeland of all sapient undead, this  city was cobbled together in the early days of the old zombie uprising by those few members of the undead who retained a faint memory of civilization and society in their rotting skulls. Built, like all island civilizations in the Corpse Sea, on a rocky plateau, the city is crudely constructed from bones and trash and inhabited by any zombie intelligent enough to figure out that the place has small handholds carved out of its rocky walls, and use them. As most undead are far too stupid to understand the concept of "climbing," much less smart enough to examine a rock wall to see if there are handholds to use, this ingeniously simple litmus test keeps out the vast majority of mindless undead. While the most intelligent zombies often decide not to live in G!zjhdt, instead favoring Mortasheen, practically all zombies still enjoy G!zjhdt’s slower and simpler culture, and the wealthiest zombies often have a "summer home" or two there, to enjoy the countryside. You may get some funny looks from the locals If you're still alive when you're arrive here, but mind your manners and you won't be run out of town.
3.  Scraptown.
Built from the castoff machinery and nonworking parts of Mortasheen's mad science industry, Scraptown is a slum that spreads for tens of miles eastward beyond the big retainer wall of the massive city. There are millions of near-humans who inhabit the ghetto, called scrappers--the poorest of the poor who have nowhere else to go. All scrappers have some skill at repurposing Mortasheen's tech, but not by grand design or deliberate planning; those who are bad at it simply don't survive for long.  It's easy to forget that Mortasheen is a center of wealth and prosperity, and that the field of mad science is a bigtime money-maker. The forgotten of Scraptown tinker daily with weapons beyond their understanding, seeking simply to beat the beast of natural selection, and riots are a matter of fact--so much so that communities near the retainer wall have established neighborhood watches of multiple think tanks constantly on the lookout for trouble. Some less ethical mad scientists have been known to use the chaos to their advantage, and have turned scrappers--willing or unwilling--into lab rats or guinea pigs. (To be fair, sometimes they do turn them back, afterward.) Rumors persist of machine-worshiping cults, like gangs, that control swathes of territory inside the slums. Nobody in the City Proper takes these stories seriously, though.  Not yet.


4.  Cannontown :Cannontown lives up to its name: A fully mobile desert community in which each building is a large, armored weapons platform. Some tanks are specialized--drilling for water, generating power, manufacturing, shopping centers, even self-contained parks--but most are private residences keyed solely to blow large holes in anything that approaches.  Citizens are not civilians; there are no civilians in Cannontown. All of its people are considered soldiers in a military force, protecting themselves from the many roaming monsters and zombies of their world--a job they do with great skill. As in Mortasheen, gladiatorial combat is a popular sport, though not usually between monsters--instead, Cannoneers prefer remotely controlled robots. Diplomatic enough mad scientists have been welcomed to participate, but need to be careful not to offend anyone in a city where every man, woman and child has access to heavy artillery at all times. The City Proper's recent prejudice against the Discipline of Engineering hasn't borne fruit, here; too many gadgets need repairing and there is too much reliance upon ordnance as opposed to monstrous companions and bodyguards. On the other hand, Cannoneers have little enough use for geneticists or surgeons, contra to the Respect such traditional mad scientists hold in Mortasheen. Recently, the big city's inattention toward the political and social niceties with Cannontown have begun to manifest in other ways, too, and urban citizens are less and less welcome in the roving armada of militiamen

5.  Medama: a series of beautiful tropical islands and a hotspot of contention, Medama is dominated by a culture of honor and wisdom with the help of a great deal of modern technology--and some surprisingly advanced robotics. Medama is probably the largest and most powerful of the near-human territories, and the reason why is obvious: The nation is a military powerhouse.  Armies of ornately decorated borg protect the islands from monsters, outsiders, monstrous outsiders, and anything else stupid enough to try and take them on. When things that the borg cannot handle come calling, certain strategically placed "buildings" in each of Medama’s cities transform themselves into huge insectoid robots. In cases of great emergency, such as an outright invasion or a powerful vampire force from the ocean, each of the eight main islands of Medama have one last defense...  Medama’s government is actually based on these gigantic defenders; once every four years, the islands engage in an all-out robot brawl on the ninth, barren island to determine which of the eight will enjoy majority political power for the next term. The mantis has won the last four times in a row, though the crab has almost beaten him a few times and is bound to get lucky at some point.

6.  Thogome: Many miles out to sea, safely away from all the crazy land-dwellers, Thogome is the home of the vampires. It resembles an immense, exaggerated castle, carved from black stone and rising dozens of stories above the waves. This is only the tip of an ancient city ruled by vampires of all kinds; human-descended vampires are in control above the water, while vampires descended from aquatic life dominate the structures below. Natural near-humans are a more common sight in the streets of the upper city, but all are servants and blood-banks to vampiric masters. The deepest floors before sea-level are labyrinthine colonies of orlok, maintaining electrical equipment and serving as mass-produced nourishment for land and water vampires alike, while warring on each other for the right to serve the greatest vampires as masters.

7. Brundlecorp: Among the most technologically advanced communities on the planet, Brundlecorp is a floating research station shaped kind of like a giant flying saucer, traveling the world in search of knowledge. Its inhabitants are brilliant, though possessed of a cold and furious sort of madness that makes them some of the most dangerous people on the planet. Brundlecorp claims to have been around before Mortasheen, and to be formed from the “greatest remnants of old humanity," a claim strongly objected to by certain other cultures...
\this claim seems doubtful, since no one in Brundlecorp is a near-human. Perhaps they were, once, but now they’ve become something else, neither human nor mutant. This is most likely a result of their unusual procreation methods: These great thinkers and inventors keep themselves sterile in order to fixate on knowledge and knowledge alone (which probably helps explain their madness), and so cannot reproduce in the normal manner. When children are required, in order to carry on research or to be researched, Brundlecorp’s scientists artificially engineer "perfect" clone children whose harsh, loveless upbringing drives them insane. Thus, the next generation grow up as crazy as the first, and Brundlecorp’s research carries on uninterrupted. No outsider knows anything about Brundlecorp’s internal politics, or even whether they have such a thing; the area is a total blank.

8. Lucky you choose one of the above for free




drop-in -0
well. On the plus side you don't have anything changing you, on the minus side, this could be bad since purestrain unmutated humans are seen as uncontacted natives at best and throwback animals at worst. On the plus side you have no memories influencing your judgment or tying you to this place, on the minus side you have no experience with this world.

Shade +400cp
despite their vantablack exterior shades aren't made of living darkness or anything time-consuming like him him that, it's merely that they are artificial crystal skeletons veined with wiry substructures that subsist entirely on absorbed light, while shades can be male or female in their own mind this is really just an effort by them to fit in better as they are completely synthetic and lacked any kind of physical gender, indeed, they don't even have much in the way of a sense of touch, and as photovores they lack a sense of taste and suffer blurry vision. Originally created as a way to get around Mortasheen's  strict anti-slavery laws Shades have so little in the way of  imagination, almost all them simply doing the job they were instructed to do once they  were created out of lack of other ideas. The thought of payment simply not occurring to them. Of course, a few of them rise above this and become semi-accomplished mad scientists you will not be one of them  However. Fortunately , you have access to the same discounts as near human native.

Near human native - 50cp
you are one of the near human subspecies found throughout this world, you could be a gill man a race or slippery as servants by the vampires, they are simply humans with a few traits from saltwater fish, such as beaks tentacles or scaly skin, these amphibians do, however , need special aquatic suits or hydro-rebreathers to keep wet--but that's no problem for a mad scientist.  Zombies, on the other hand... They don't have to keep wet, or dry, or eat, or sleep, or breathe. The result of an incurable virus spread through the bodily fluids of humans long ago, zombies just kind of...keep going after they bite it (no pun, there); after all, death is no excuse to stop working!   Unfortunately, most zombies lose any semblance of sapience after their inevitable transformation. Those that don't often devote their eternal unlives to mad science, mastering the fields of surgery and genetics. They never quite get over a craving for raw brains, but probably somebody somewhere has bred a monster for that. If not—opportunity! Zombies don't always look rotten, and not everyone who's dead is a zombie--mutants of all kinds and most near-humans, in general, are immune to the genetic virus. Proper zombies keep themselves clean and maintained, just like a borg, in order to avoid decay and parasites. Dismemberment and worse are only inconveniences for a zombie, who is even harder to kill than a typical mad scientist, but they do have their pride and appearance counts for a lot, when you're dead.

Mutants are the closest to regular humans, relatively speaking, of course. They are most often humanoid in shape, but come equipped with extra features including everything from spare eyes to third, fourth, and fifth arms, and more. A lot of geneticists take up tinkering with their own DNA as a hobby, to keep them in practice.
Borg are somewhere in the same arena, constantly tweaking their bodies to make them better. The difference here is, borg have messed their physical forms about so much that nearly all that's left is quite often a brain, a heart, or another vital organ or two, their outer shells replaced with heavy-duty non-corrosive polymers and machinery or attachments. They are the Swiss Army knives of mad science, although they're falling more and more out of fashion these days...
   if you choose mutant   consult the table below and roll it as normal to determine your form or pay 100 CP to choose for every option . http://www.bogleech.com/mutants.html

Emancipated monster – 50cp
choose an average or lower-level  monster from the below list That is not a vampire, since ages and lifecycle cycles vary you will begin at around early adulthood.  Note that the neurobiology and memories of your monster form does affect your thought patterns and thusly , you will tend to lean towards whatever dispositions or quirks, monster form  generally has.
http://bogleech.com/mortasheen.htm


Vampire noble – 100cp
you are a vampire noble ,  born to rule, and with the predatory cunning and power to back it up. You might find yourself floundering in dryland given how aquatic vampire nobility usually is. your age is 3D8X100 +2 D8 X5 +1 D8

Mad scientist - 100cp



Step 4: Choose Your Perks!# A 100, 200, 400, 800  for each background #
General  Rules:
As usual, Perks from your selected Origin are 50%, and the 100 point perkis free for your background. Drop in jumpers must pay for the 100 point perk.


Drop In!

Near human native


Emancipated monster

king of beasts -800/2000  CP.
In this world, everything has a place in food chain and you are near the top, you aren't quite the apex so nothing like a Oovule or one of the ultimates, however something like a Mephilas or a Bezulga   would you will be all right. Alternately, for the full 2000 CP you can become any monster

Vampire noble
vampire Lord. -100, required for vampire noble.



minions attack!-200 CP

Mad scientist
diploma 100CP, each additional purchase is X3 The last one, the one free purchase, counts as 100 CP for purposes of additional purchases.

you have a diploma from a subspecialty of one of the great fields.
Choose a degree in Surgery,Genetics,Electricity,Engineering, Management,Psionics,,Alchemy or Necromization.


it's alive! -800.
 Every decent mad scientist knows that electricity is what makes things alive, even if they aren't students of electricity  or Necromization. And so with   sufficient voltage  and wattage you can raise the dead, just don't expect to be quite as quick mentally or physically, unless they have some really good regeneration.





gear and supplies

Command device. Free for mad scientist -100 #awaiting feedback from creator#

semi-organic computer mainframe -200
what has more processing power per inch than a living brain? Answer, nothing which is why this computer is composed of a half foot of living vat grown brain tissue kept on life support inside a 2 foot rectangular box, has all the standard ports and interfaces you'd expect on a computer , it simply works better because brains work better than most silicon stuff , of course you are going to want to keep it away from heat sources and make sure the nutrient  slurry tank stays full.


YGORE (Your Go-to Option Regarding Enemies) -400 CP, discount for mad scientist
a lot of mad scientists find it convenient to have a meaning deal with  any form of combat. You have such a minion in the form of a semi-loyal  slightly more than midrange combat oriented monster, such as a  Tetroxic,Polyfrog, chainsaw kid, or Troglodile,

Mobile Manson -400, discount for mad scientist.
A fairly expensive and advanced dirigible lair, includes room to house your monsters, splice them, breed them, transport them, store them, feed them... And of course, you've got  the bedroom, the kitchenette and the big holoscreen, not to mention the  bath. It has Significant defensive and offense of capabilities, but it's certainly not a war machine by this universe is standards.


Drawbacks
you may take up to 600 points worth of drawbacks

come on and pukkerup! +100 CP
something about you  attracts a swarm of pukkerup, no matter where you go. At least once a week they will find you Eventually and start covering you with their filthy kisses, if you kill them more will come.  And their numbers scale to just beyond your strength to resist.



Notes
this a creator approved jump, having been designed with aid and approval from the creator of  Mortasheen.  Jonathan Wojcik.