I recommend you read it in full: it's distilled Patrick, and it's set my brain on fire like nothing else has since Veins of the Earth.
In brief, it covers a lot of the sci-fi worldbuilding around the Avatar film series and its paramedia, and follows those premises where they lead, rather than compressing them into an unathorized Dances With Wolves remake.
In particular, he puts a lot of attention on Ey'wa, the planet-spanning fungus consciousness (oh, yeah, now I see why the creator of Veins of the Earth is into this), not just as the mandatory vague animistic deity for Cameron's noble savage blue cat aliens to worship, but as an agent with its own goals and means. While he doesn't mention it explicitly in the post, it's not hard to tease out an interpretation in which Pandora is, on the scale of deep time, a post-apocalyptic setting, the long aftermath of some great conflict or catastrophe in which psychic mushrooms were the ultimate winner: a million years after the zombie apocalypse, a new kind of life blooms again, even intelligent life which the fungus cannot directly control, so it establishes rules.
Remain close to nature, symbiotic, harmonious. Do not separate yourself from nature with walls of stone, or metal tools. It remembers a time when such things existed, and it won the war against them, but it might not win a second time against creatures already adapted to its spores, so best to prevent their creation at all.
Then, of course, the sky-people arrive from their distant star in vessels of metal, so separated from nature that they can traverse the void of space. They're here for the planet's natural resources (a room-temperature superconductor in the first movie, apparently later movies introduce Pandoran whale juice that makes humans immortal???? idk I never watched the sequels), but their presence makes everything much more complicated: not only does their technology tempt the Pandoran sophonts to abandon the laws of Ey'wa and separate themselves from nature for comfort and power (not exactly many takers in the first movie, but apparently later films introduce some breakaway Na'vi factions that take up human weaponry and rebel against Ey'wa), but the humans have also developed their Avatar tech: they can directly transmit one organism's consciousness into another kind of organism, and later films show the technology develop to the point that consciousnesses can be downloaded, cloned, and uploaded virtually at will.
Not only does this enable the humans to send infiltrators among the Na'vi, but once the Pandoran sophonts learn about it, it raises a lot of very uncomfortable questions about the Na'vi's animistic religion, in which the souls of dead Na'vi find a kind of immortality within the Ey'wa supernetwork, and can even be reincarnated into new bodies later on.
It's enough of a blow to any religion to discover that aliens (humans, in this case) are real, they've never heard of your god before, and they have weapons that can pose a serious threat to it... it's potentially fatal if it turns out that the primary promise of your religion, a kind of eternal consciousness and life after death, has been replicated by these aliens... but they're just making copies of the dead with no continuity. Blue cat aliens are not prepared for the teletransportation paradox.
So yeah, the humans gotta go. No making trade deals, no special exception to the Laws of Ey'wa so the Sky People can take the shiny minerals they want and then leave. It's an existential fight, one in which Ey'wa has the upper hand, because the other side hasn't realized the scale yet.
The humans think they're fighting a resource war. They laugh in their top scientist's face when she suggests that the natives' belief that their entire planet is a living superconsciousness might have some merit. They haven't even begun to suspect that Ey'wa is playing the long game: that the military losses the human resource extraction machine faces at the hands of technologically underpowered natives is only a tiny fraction of the force a planet-spanning superconsciousness could throw at them if it wanted to. Just token resistance, throwing expendable sophonts into the grinder so the humans don't start worrying that this is all too easy.
Meanwhile, colossal quantities of Pandora's mineral, and later biochemical, bounty, are on express shipments back to Earth, the latter for the explicit and direct consumption of the human elite.
I can really only quote Stuart here:
Bits of Mycelial Web - if you are taking people and materials off Pandora and transporting them back to earth, surely no matter how careful you are, bits and pieces of mycelial web are going to be transported too? Maybe this doesn’t matter if the pieces are too small to ever come into contact with each other and too small to carry any ‘Eywa’ identity, but what happens if they do meet, and do start to grow in earths Anthrocene Environment - could there be a Hive Mind Plague on Earth? If a Hive Mind emerges on Earth, what would its character be?She would be derived from whatever fragments of Ey’wa survived in the fungi, but much of her impression of sentience would be born from the human species – a much more cosmopolitan, technophilic, dominant species, which, unlike the Naavi, has not spent several millennia ‘living in balance’ with nature, but trying to control it. Shadow-Ey’wa might be a lot less pleasant to deal with than Hippy Ey’wa, and might also be more directly intelligent – having absorbed the knowledge of relentless centuries of human development. Imperial Ey’wa?
I rather prefer the interpretation that the Pandoran superconsciousness is only appears like a 'hippy' because it has already won millions of years ago: the fungus is, by its nature, imperial, it just operates on a longer timescale. But if it did replicate on earth, how much of the original personality, if we can speak in those terms, would survive? Would humanity influence it back? Could this potentially lead to a colossal, interstellar war between the two superconsciousnesses? Perhaps the original Ey'wa suspects it might lose this bout, but better that my daughter-clone should rule the universe than a bunch of monocorporal monkeys.
But of course, this interpretation is waaaaay off in deep future, just as Ey'wa's theoretical origins lie waaaaay back in deep history. In the near term, it's in battle with humanity's very own superconsciousness: the Resource Development Association megacorporation. I quite like the possibility of players in this kind of campaign coming to rebel against the evil, imperialist megacorporation (most players will, given the chance), only later discovering that this cycle has played itself out before, when the stars were different. That Lovecraftian vertigo on realizing one's place in deep time is really delicious.
Okay, But What About an Actual Campaign
Stuart outlines the basic premise of a campaign set in this interpretation of the Pandora setting and the outline of what kinds of scenarios we might expect to see, and I like it all so much I'm going to adopt it straightforwardly with a few tweaks.
First, I have no intention of setting mine in the actual setting of Pandora, reinterpreted or no. I simply have no attachment to the series, haven't seen any of it since the first movie, and don't plan to start now. I'd rather take these lovely worldbuilding ideas and use them to start from scratch.
Second, I'm rather more inclined to play out a survival/first contact premise, rather than the more developed 'hive of scum and villainy' 'conjunction of worlds' premise that Stuart lays out in the specifics.
Third, I'll probably try to use a modified version of the Pathfinder 2e system for this one, where Stuart defaults to an unspecified OSR system. This is mainly out of convenience with finding players.
Broadly, here's how I would structure such a campaign:
Intro: 0 level
The players (all 0-level humans with an intended class and a background) meet for the first time in Cryonics. They're all some kind of specialist that have (for varying reasons) joined a long-haul mission to colonize a faraway planet: they're reassured about the incredible safety of the cryosleep technology and spaceflight as a whole, but even so, this mission carries a good deal of risk. Even in the best case scenario, they'll likely never see earth again - humans and technology go in one direction, go back in the other. And even if they do one day get to return to earth and see the improvements made to it by this mission, it's over 800 years each way: everyone they ever knew will be long dead (1).
Give the players a little while to talk and get to know the people they'll be waking up next to in almost a millennium. Let the players talk about why they're here. Normal, happy people don't do this kind of thing!
Then time comes to enter cryosleep, and all goes dark.
After a dark eternity, they wake up in hell. Their bodily extremities are still freezing, but their lungs are on fire. Flashing lights and klaxons overwhelm their senses. In front of them is some... thing.
Tall and bulky, but most certainly not human: through tear-streaked eyes, they can make out something chitinous and green... except it's not actually green. It's wearing fatigues.
They'll be quite surprised when it starts pulling bulky masks over their faces... and then all of a sudden they can breathe.
In the moments to come, they learn about what happened: their interstellar transport wavered off-course on approach to the primary colony site on this planet, and wound up making a catastrophic landing attempt at nearly the opposite pole from their destination. Almost everyone died, almost everything was destroyed.
But in their attempts to make a landing, a lot of cryopods and equipment modules were ejected and landed in a fan along the colony ship's trajectory, and though many of these were smashed to pieces against mountains or fell into the depths of the ocean, a fair number actually made it through the fall partly intact and even maintained cryonics functionality using their backup fission reactors. Including yours.
Once the survivors of the main crash site got their bearings and established basic survival functions at their settlement, they started following transponder signals and rescuing other survivors as fast as they could.
In your case, that took about twenty years.
The beetle-like thing in front of you is a human being... or at least what twenty years on this planet have forced a human being to turn into, in order to survive long-distance journeys on foot across the planet's inimical surface.
The only place in this hemisphere that gene-standard humans can breathe without filter masks is the wreck colony of Splashdown. And Colonel Maine -- again, the beetle -- is taking you there whether you like it or not. Not too many specialists of your caliber survived the crash, and that means he'll get a big payday for bringing you back.
That's the premise of the first, 0-level adventure: travel from your crash site to Splashdown, across an archipelago dense with jungles and swamps, interrupted by stretches of shallow ocean. Outrun, outwit, or fight the hostile wildlife. Make it to Splashdown in one piece.
Maybe there's a bunch of other 0-level NPC survivors in your cryo-cluster, and you've got to keep as many of the alive as possible too.
Mechanics
To change assumed settings so completely, we'll need to adjust certain mechanics.
Progression, Ancestry and General Feats
At the start of the campaign, all players begin as 0-level gene-standard humans. As the campaign goes on, those starting characters can be mutated and changed in different ways.
The first is by deliberate gene modification: a lot of the researchers and equipment on board the ship was related to bio-genetic modification research, and boy if the alien environment isn't just lousy with samples. In play, this is accomplished using PF2e's General Feats: instead of some of the General Feat options already available, a given player may choose to undergo an experimental genetic modification: this may allow them to more survive longer in the atmosphere, or to be able to metabolize local biomaterial and drink the water (albeit inefficiently, requiring them to consume larger quantities compared to regular food), et cetera. I'll need to create these feats.
The second is by wholesale mutation into something entirely non-human. This can happen under some conditions when a human dies in the not-Pandoran ecosystem but their body remains relatively whole and exposed.
The psychic essence of the planet itself reaches out to you, and offers you another chance: to be reborn as part of itself, as something totally new, and live. Don't resist: take this planet's native ecosystem into yourself, and allow it to mutate you.
This results in far more fundamental and extreme changes than the gene modification: mechanically, this is a full ancestry change, mechanically, wiping away your previous ancestry feats (and general feats related to gene modification, if applicable) and giving yourself a whole new set of feats, reselected up to your current level.
This comes with several major advantages: for one, becoming a mutant directly allows you to breathe the planet's air without a filter, drink the water, and metabolize local biomass. At the same time, you lose the ability to survive in a human-standard atmosphere or metabolize regular food. You need a new kind of filtered mask in order to survive in a hermetic human settlement, and those masks are produced much less commonly and are harder to find and replace the filters for.
Then, of course, comes the fear, loathing, and discrimination that is laid on you by some other humans. Mutants tend to live in a small settlement just outside the regular human techno-city.
Many mutants keep the mystical aspect of this experience to themselves, though a handful have confided this to human leadership, who are extremely alarmed. Eventually, this will lead to many mutants worshiping the planet itself as a god, much as the native sophonts already do, a major challenge to corporate human hegemony.
Third: the native sophonts of not-Pandora. Though at the beginning of the campaign, humans won't know the local languages and vice versa (and some factions within the human leadership will expend a lot of resources keeping people convinced that the local fauna are not, in fact, sapient), it will inevitably eventually come out that communication is possible, and boy are those early conversations going to be awkward.
The exact path taken by inter-species relations from this stage forward will be extremely dependent on campaign specifics, but it's quite likely that interaction with at least some members of these other species will become relatively routine, and with that, the party may eventually come to include some of them, especially as players flow in and out of the campaign and player characters die.
Fourth: 'Avatars'. Because of course. Humans have developed the technology to implant the memories and consciousness of one being into another, and this only becomes more common as time goes on. The full implications of this is explored more in Stuart's original post, but it's by no means unexpected that, with time, the party could come to include human minds implanted in the bodies of local sophonts... or vice versa.
All these ancestry options will need to be detailed and statted up with their own feat selection. Nontrivial.
Logistics and Survival
Unlike a lot of PF2e games, this would be one in which the Survival skill is core, rather than an afterthought. We'll want to change the system's existing, but extremely lax rules for nutrition and water, which at present basically allows a party to carry weeks of food and water without issue. We'll make that limitation harsher.
We'll also have to consider what kind of human-compatible food is even being produced here: are they hyper-processing the local fauna and flora to remove toxic components and bring out the nutrients humans need? Are they performing hydroponics with purified water and seed stores?
Modified humans that are able to metabolize local biomatter will be able to supplement their food intake by hunting or foraging on journeys, but they need to consume several times more than if they were eating earth food. Fully mutated humans who can no longer breathe an earth atmosphere are able to metabolize local biomatter without issue.
We'll also probably want to emphasize hexcrawl mechanics and random encounter tables for exploration and traversal throughout the setting. The restrictions this places on a party's chosen activities, especially if their goals are located further away from Splashdown, is going to motivate a lot of very fun planning and side-objectives. Yes, we want to investigate the cryo-cluster transponder signal over in the western archipelago, but it's too far for us to make it on foot and back without starving to death. This could be resolved by:
1) Turning more members of the party into mutants and new-genes and doing more foraging
2) Establishing friendly (or at least non-hostile) relations with the local sophonts, such that their settlements could serve as places of respite, trade, and resupply.
3) Acquire forms of transportation that can make it through the thick jungle more quickly, while carrying more weight, or both. Or figure out reliable sea and air travel to bypass the jungle completely. Guess who has millennia of experience doing just that...
It may be a good idea to plunder the UltraViolet Grasslands book for caravan and exploration mechanics. Frankly, this whole setting would make for a good UVG campaign, but I'm more likely to find players for PF2e, so there we go.
Alignment Chart
Wait a hot second, what do we need an alignment chart for? PF2e Remaster completely removed alignment, didn't it? Why are we adding it back?
Mainly because, as I pointed out several years ago in Down With the Law/Chaos, alignment is actually a really neat tool if your setting does actually revolve around the conflict it models. And our setting very much revolves around the conflict between humanity/technology/dominion and the natives/symbiocity/harmony.
The player characters would start out Unaligned, and as they learn more about the alien world they're stranded on, they can develop a point of view and eventually a set alignment.
For the time being, I think we can make do with a single axis: Dominion vs Harmony. All the nuances and subtleties of morality can be left off the scale.
That said, I am tempted to add an Idealist/Pragmatist axis on top of it: very on point for a scifi game.
Fire and Guns
While fire isn't unknown on our not-Pandora, it's certainly less common and harder to produce: something-something non-reactive gases, something-something high proportion of CO2, something-something.
One side effect of this is that firearms don't work nearly as well as they do on Earth: they'll fire, but they're much less powerful, delivering less force at lower ranges. Guns adapted for the not-Pandoran atmosphere tend, by great coincidence, to have performance characteristics similar to early modern gunpowder weapons which PF2e models: they fire more slowly, are more cumbersome, and take dedicated expertise to use well.
Just like that, melee weapons and bows are looking like pretty good options, aren't they? Especially since they don't immediately give away your location to every hostile lifeform in a mile.
Magic
I've left off talking about the elephant in the room for quite a while. How, exactly, do we fit magic into this setting? We've managed to justify melee weapons being relevant in the 2Xth century, but what about literal magic spells?
To that I will answer: Psychic Mushrooms.
Or, if nothing else, it means that we have to curate the PF2e class list to emphasize the more relevant options and remove the ones that don't quite fit.
PF2e does have, for example an Intelligence-based caster called the Psychic. I didn't put them on the class list for my last campaign, but they make perfect sense here: we can probably remove wizards and sorcerers, but maybe we can leave Witches (their familiars being weird intelligent animals with crazy powers?) and we're definitely keeping druids. Not sure about bards.
At some point after the zero-level adventure, when the party is getting set up in Splashdown, a combination of weird experiences and testing will reveal that they've developed some strange powers, seemingly related to the strange magnetic and biological phenomena of the planet.
This isn't a hard sci-fi game, I'm pretty satisfied with this answer.
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I think that's where I'll end today. This idea's got good legs, and as I'm looking to form a new tabletop group in NYC right about now, this might be just the right kind of neat premise to start with.
If you liked this post, be sure to follow the blog so you see the next one! Until next time, have a great week.
Footnotes
(1) In Avatar, Pandora orbits around our closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri A, just over 4 light years away. Lucky humanity, finding a life-bearing planet and a room-temperature superconductor on literally the closest place outside of our solar system! But I'm inclined towards larger distances and larger timescales: this isn't humanity's first rodeo when it comes to colonizing an exoplanet, perhaps even a life-bearing one, though this may well be the first planet humanity in this setting encounters with preexisting intelligent life.
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