Degenesis setting explained! Primal Punk breakdown (Degenesis series: 1 of 3) 💡 RPG Deep Dive

like subscribe notifications to genesis primal punk is the first of two books that make up the core of the degenesis role-playing game the game was published by six more vodka out of germany and now enjoys an international following in five and going on six languages the game itself takes place 500 years in the future largely in western and central europe as well as super sahara in africa humanity faces the threat of ongoing extinction amidst alien-like mutations they live divided and tribalized in an utterly hostile environment where the people plants and earth itself has been warped into something strange there are a few things i want to point out about this video one this is the first of three deep dive videos that i will be doing about the genesis the first one covers primal punk the setting book the second one will cover catharsis the game's rules and gm guidance book and the third will cover artifacts and expansion of the rules that deepen the mechanics and the gaming experience two i was asked by six more vodka to do this series in a promotional capacity but they were cool with me including any of my honest opinions which i do include three this video will only cover the setting of the genesis as it is presented in this book the genesis primal punk since its publication there have been many expansions and supplements adding to the setting but those are beyond the scope of this video the genesis began in 2001 as an rpg meant in part to showcase a german design firm's artistic prowess in 2004 its original creator christian gunther teamed up with concept and marvel artist marco jojovic and the game was revitalized with a ton of hyper-realized artwork fast forward to 2014 where the game was revamped and released as the genesis rebirth with all of its setting mechanics and essential layout redone to be more readable streamlined and playable the game was available primarily as a deluxe edition print and picked up a reputation as a very compelling but hard to access european post-apocalypse role-playing game in 2020 six more vodka decided to release the genesis as a free to play game which is to say that right now you can grab all of the pdfs for the two core rulebooks as well as every one of the supplements and expansions for free from their website the physical books are still for sale and they are still extremely premium quality the idea of course is that you read the materials for free and then decide whether or not you want to support the creators and invest in the world of genesis by buying the physical books you can find a promo code below for an exclusive discount on anything from their website i had the fortune of receiving the books from six more vodka thanks to the generosity of marco and erwan and the gang and as a bibliophile i was overjoyed at the quality of the presentation and construction the box that contains the two core books itself is really thick and heavy and the book's cover is similarly super sturdy and the pages are stitch bound the paper itself is thick and glossy and the colors are vibrant and sharp in the end after actually reading these books they seem talismanic like a lot of collector's edition caliber books it's difficult to see oneself bringing these books out into the wild and using them in a rough and tumble fashion they're not just relatively expensive they're precious and the instinct to preserve them is overwhelming at least for me personally if i find myself needing to take these books out of the house for reference in an in-person game somewhere i'd probably cobble together some kind of hand-stitched book covers for them just to be safe so here's the story of the genesis i'm not going to do a year by year synopsis since that would take too long but it's worth noting that there are two timelines at the end of primal punk which cover the same period and do a very good job of explaining a number of unanswered questions that come up in the first parts of the book in march of the year 2073 planet earth is pelted by a series of meteors that decimates the human species as far as anyone in europe can tell the continent itself suffers instant mass casualties as thousands of extremely high velocity impacts large and small peppered the planet this event was later referred to as the esheton immediate fallout from the impact was not the only problem the meteors carried with them a dna-based life form or collection of life forms called the primer a microscopic invader that brought its own phenotypes and mutated not only plants and animals but sometimes time and space itself over the course of several centuries five major sites across europe played as host to five different versions of the primer which in a lot of ways spread like a fungus but in each of the five craters the actual nature of the horror was different additionally a sixth kind of primer resembling plant life in a superficial way proliferated in africa of the humans who became infected and changed they didn't just mutate they evolved these new species were collectively called homodogenesis humanity didn't die out completely of course but in the case of the euro-african zone they were hemmed in by exactly four sides to the west the atlantic ocean was corrupted by a gigantic asteroid and the proliferation of eldritch lifeforms such as giant trilobites and mollusks to the north a glacial phenomenon simply called the ice barrier the result of several centuries of global cooling encroached upon the continent to the east a nearly impenetrable infestation of fungal apocalypse proved to be extremely stubborn and adaptable closing off passage to asia and to the south which does reach past a drying and dying mediterranean sea north africa was isolated from most of the former saharan desert and everything below due to a unique scourge a super deadly psychoactive plant life that kills on contact it is in this pressure cooker that the continent plus the northern coast of africa has bred several regional cultures each with their own flavor of primer and people problems and within these seven cultures or regions 13 cults emerged these are each a people with traditions goals rights and ranks they are the mean potatoes of this game's setting where the most fascinating details reside and ultimately where degenesis truly earns its reputation with all this being said it should be noted that genesis is not a post-apocalyptic game it's much more of a mid-apocalypse situation one in which the challenges of humanity are simply more drawn out over time compared to a one-time or single generation event i'm going to briefly cover each culture and cult as they are presented in primal punk here we go borka is the one region of europe untouched by the ravages of the sepsis it's dusty rocky and devoid of trees it is split by the reaper's blow a tectonic phenomenon that creates an uncrossable divide for hundreds of miles north to south to the west there is significant civilization chiefly in the form of the great city of justician there is so much dust in west borka that much of the area is referred to as the black lung to the east it's a no man's land dotted with lonely scrappers clanters and wood forests once there was a great fortified city-state called praha but it was destroyed overnight by a giant sort of demigod called chernabog the spatalians of the region fight hard to stamp out infection which spreads here when people use the spores as a drug called burn infection also invades from within the lungs of unwitting immigrants and travelers but the spatalians do more than just treat the infected they go out and burn entire settlements at the first sign of infection and since the so-called sepsis travels through insects as well all bugs are suspect the chronicler and battalion cults founded the city of justician here and together with the other order-minded cults formed the protectorate a semi-fascist roman empire-like civilization that aims to beat back the primer wherever it crops up and to spread order across the continent at the spatal doctors and researchers of this battalion cult treat the sick and wounded and try to decode the mysteries of the primer at cathedral city religious zealots of the anabaptist cult are headquartered forming a political nexus of influence with their allies all relatively safe from the primer the other locations are each given less importance in the book standing as plot hooks such as pharapol a haven for fugitives and wanderers that is also plagued by huge metal eating bugs called ferrites franca franca is host to one of the five major impact sites on the continent these are each referred to as earth chakras since they embody mystical interconnected energy with each other but each of the five are different in franca the look and feel of the land is defined by the crater suffrance and its particular rapture or plague that plague is pheromancy where the primer has invaded people and insects alike turning them into drones that mindlessly build giant mud ziggeraths and dissolve entire villages and swarms of relentless spread like all forms of the primer infection is airborne and can turn a human into either a creepy mindless worker covered in tubercular lumps or something far worse a pale bloated queen pheromancer covered in pheromone-emitting glands the people have always tried to fight back either by tearing down the mud ziggerath strongholds or covering themselves in a substance called marduk oil to shield themselves from the pheromones and raid tunnels to burn them out and bombing the endless landscape of termitariums that emit gases and sepsis spores there are no great cities here anymore paris is a swamp covered in hornet's nests and stinking mud there's the stukov desert full of husk spiders armored snails giant scorpions and reclusive human clanners and to the north the people of britain fight a hopeless war against pheromancers under-trained and under-supplied furthest north is britain a wasteland ruled entirely by a ruthless paler called the vulture pollen in the furthest northeast reaches is mostly barren except for the outpost city of warclaw the landscape has been forfeited to the drifts of spores into the supercrater here pandora with the exception of a few well-guarded and highly secret eternal oases pollen is a deadly wasteland anyone outside the protection of a large group or the city itself is nomadic moving on at a moment's notice and navigating between a war of two alien and incomprehensible environmental mutations at the furthest eastern reaches a continuous region of deadly spore fields create spore wall one that has yet to be permanently penetrated even after years of fungicidal warfare and scorched earth pandora produces so-called biokinetics high-powered humanoid mutants who can grow bone blades from their arms and bulging spurs from their skulls at will they carry venomous bugs in the folds of their skin and attack the uninfected with pure rage but there is another foreign element here fractal forests occasionally a spore field will be suddenly overtaken by a fast-growing forest that grows in a fractal pattern but the plants of this forest are glassy brittle and deadly to the touch these fractal forests can exist for days weeks or even years but in almost an instant can snuff out leaving neither spore nor plant behind most cults steer clear of the fractal forest because they are deadly and unpredictable but the native clans of the region worship the forests offering live sacrifices to them and eating the fruit after hours of cooking some cults want to destroy the forest while others want to harvest them for their fruit and sell them back in the cities as high-priced hallucinogenic drugs balkan is a land of four extreme seasons and of both farmland and spore fields huge swathes of the land are riddled underground with tunnels and labyrinths and play host to bunkers where people once hid before the meteor struck there are a number of cities large and small most of them city-states called voivedates ruled by a voivode or tyrannical leader but power was always changing hands the earth chakra called usud resides in the northern mountains here and its peculiar feature is that it is the center of a constant far-reaching vibration anyone who gets too close to the vibration loses control of their will and becomes a so-called dushani the spirit of the balcony is so strong that they earned the reputation of making bad slaves nevertheless they are still constantly fighting off the dushani invaders from africa tyrants from the voivodates and other cults who come for one reason or another hyperspania is home to thick humid forests and deep lakes and ponds to the north there is the castilian plateau unreachable by invaders and home to relative peace to the southwest lisbon is an isolated city reachable only by boat it is more connected to the strange and mystical animals of the atlantic ocean than the people of the continent and in the center of hyperspania is the crater of marar maraar produces a mutation in humans that confers various kinds of prognostication thus the aberrants here are called pragnatics unlike the hive-minded infected of suffrance or the vibrationally persuaded ones of usude or the monstrous guardians of pandora pragnatics are not inherently hostile to humans in fact for centuries they have worked with them in one capacity or another to help fight their wars by looking into the future or even reaching out and changing the future in order to beat back african invaders hyperspania had the misfortune of being granted a partial land ridge across the strait of gibraltar when the ice caps began to freeze and the sea level sank dramatically after the echton human labor finished the land bridge connecting the two continents here and triggering an immediate invasion by hyperspanians into oil-rich north africa this led to hundreds of years of war between the two continents with a counter-invasion by the superior africans and finally a very uneasy stalemate pregare is a harsh land to the north is tenuous but usable farmland the island known as corpse is a hotbed of pirates and fortified by a vast rusting barrier of ships lashed together the former sicily now called bedane is untouched by the primer and is home to lush farmland olive groves and vineyards beyond the coast is a dead mediterranean sea and then there is the super crater or earth chakra known as knox nox is the epicenter of spores that create mutated humans called psychokinetics the chakra itself warps time and space all around it creating phenomena such as floating stones clouds of pure darkness and crystalline filaments shimmering in clouds of sharp glass-like substance and the psychokinetics themselves can harness this weirdness in their own bodies by leaching psychic energy out of entire villages of people than releasing it in a destructive fiery explosion the life and politics of pergans are dominated by ruling families in each city almost like a throwback to 16th century italy and like the distant past they are still embroiled in friction in this case it's the traditions and power structure of the old families versus spread and influence of the anabaptist cult africa at first it would seem odd that a continent as large as africa would only get one culture assigned to it in the book but in actuality most of africa is cut off from the world of the genesis at least in the primal punk core source book in the wake of eshitan and drastic climate change north africans began to reap the benefits of deserts converted to lush jungles and forests but they were hemmed in from the south by an unforgiving new invader not stemming from an earth chakra the psychovore is an invasive kingdom of plant-like life-forms that grow in perfectly symmetrical leaves in the shapes of pentagons and octagons and are as brittle as glass and covered with thorns they replaced the old familiar vegetation of the continent to the point that an impenetrable wall spanning the width of africa closed human civilization in at the north most anyone who is scratched by a psycho or thorn will die a painful death within minutes but those merely living in proximity to the plants begin speaking in a common tongue something ancient and shared by all the others in the continent who are also in proximity this language is called the warui in the setting the various cults of northern africa reside at the pinnacle of human civilization their ruthless colonialism has garnered them the greatest riches all mediated managed and hoarded through the bank of commerce in the capital of the empire triple three of the 13 cults presented in the book are african cults and they compose the merchant warrior and mystic arms of a cohesive african empire it's battalions this battalions began their role as medical scientists and defenders of public health even before the eschaton when a hyperinfectious strain of hiv called hiv extreme or hive ravaged africa and europe soon after the meteors hit they fortified themselves in a massive hospital and research complex called the spital and their influence in the region only grew spatalians recognized the primer as the cause of many strange and different manifestations of the mutations across the continent although they have not come to grasp the true origins or of fundamentally how any of it works their aim is to beat back the spread anywhere they can find it to isolate and either cure or burn the infected from the land and to penetrate the spore wall to the east and reach asia they are ruthless in their execution of hygiene and public health protocols and as members of the so-called protectorate in borka they reside in relative safety spatal itself is a fortress divided into various wings dedicated to research treatment of the ill and creation of medicines to be distributed across the continent a recruit must be intelligent and willing to give up their past for a life of public service they start by doing menial tasks as a family answer cleaning fermenters and surgery instruments and can work their way up the organization into various specializations several of these ranks are less physician or researcher and more warrior and public health enforcer armed with a fungicide rifle and a staff with a sepsis infected tissue culture at the end of it that can detect the presence of infected from a distance chroniclers in the years leading up to the esheton the internet had evolved into something that pervaded everyone's life in every conceivable way it had become a global data network so vast and complex that the public and experts alike began to speculate whether new digital life forms were being created inside this massive all-encompassing network was called the stream and speculation of digital life inside of it spawned a cult following after the esheton survivors of this following called streamers did everything they could to reconstruct the network eventually stylizing themselves as cybernetic gods and calling themselves chroniclers who were meant to preserve the total knowledge of the bygone era chroniclers were able to use information to leverage power and influence in virtually every city they clustered in and this led to them becoming one of the most powerful and wealthiest cults of the continent their goal of snatching up every last piece of bygone technology and fragment of data is simply in order to restore the stream and to shed some light on the mystery of the stream's demise because this stream actually went dark days before the meteors hit earth chroniclers can be found in many major cities and reside in complexes called clusters they play a critical part of the continental economy of scrap and technology salvage since it is to them that many scrappers sell their wares public-facing chroniclers are always masked and speak through a harsh vocoder and day by day they buy back the bygone era from scrappers one bit at a time using money that they print themselves it is said that the chroniclers take children who doctors diagnose as being on the autism spectrum as well as those who have any particularly strong fascination for bygone writings or technology if the recruit can pass a logic test then they are assigned a mentor a bar code is burned onto their forehead and they are given a rank or level ostensibly they are forbidden from ever using deadly weapons but further up the hierarchy a chronicler may find themselves as nothing less than a spy or assassin who leaves behind a trail of dead bodies all for the sake of protecting and restoring the sacred collective knowledge of mankind of course medics in the weeks and days before the esheton the swiss opened the doors to their alpine fortress and let a number of aspiring survivors in when the meteor fall was over they opened their doors to a gaping chasm of lava that split their own territory and the entire continent in two the reaper's blow against all odds they built six bridges that spanned this chasm and over time created tunnels that allowed more access between the two sides to survive centuries of struggle they adopted a strict military code of conduct and way of life one that along with their adherence to complete neutrality has served them extremely well the helvetics are toll masters who have absolute control over who passes across the reaper's blow thus they earn a steady stream of resources just by allowing people to pass through but their ultimate goal is survival and adherence to their own militant austerity all is not well though as the primer worms its way through the rocks of their mountains and survival is about to become a lot more of a challenge for them they are based entirely in helvetica which is divided into four numbered territorial regions they have no functional agriculture system or natural resources to exploit nor do they employ their incredibly trained soldiers for any conflicts amongst allies or enemies they are a fortress in more ways than one recruitment as a helvetic first requires that they are a descendant of the former swiss population at age 14 they begin drilling and training and at age 15 they receive their standard issued trailblazer a high-tech super rifle with on-board computer for performance evaluation if they lose or destroy their trailblazer they are out of the helvetics for good moving up the ranks requires accomplishing as much as possible with as little as possible specialization follows along the expected roles of a mountain army and is probably the most rigid and predictable hierarchy amongst all the cults of the setting judges about 200 years before the present year of 2595 a man known only as the judge brutally executed a suspected criminal with a hammer in a town square and garnered a cult following his followers began to emulate him as judge jury and executioner and eventually they carried out his work without him then one day a chronicler handed them a book of laws a codex and they were given a home base in the city of justician judges roamed the land as guardians of their own self-professed laws they are expected to have those laws memorized but the laws are always morphing and changing depending on who the supreme judge back in judgment hall and justician is their punishments range from dying the lips of liars with an ink that lasts for a few days or weeks to levying a fine to breaking a knuckle of a thief or splitting the tongue of a fraudster some are sent to labor camps and the most serious crimes like rape and murder warrant smashing a whole limb or turning over the suspect to the family of the victims and i say suspect because there's hardly any due process and no trial to speak of with a judge's adjudication judges may listen to both sides of a story but by the backing of the protectorate and the brute force of their own presence their verdicts are final the judges are ruled by a supreme judge who brings in his or her own version of the codex prospects are expected to learn this codex and are divided into one of two general paths a protector who enforces the law with their own two hands and an advocate who writes the law and mentors junior judges the judges love to recruit children who have lost their parents to violent crime and to harness that unending rage into a hunger for justice other recruits come from legacy advocate families whatever the case they spend years without a hammer and codex just listening to their elders and learning the law only after years are they tested and then serve in the city to learn the ropes although technically they can be deployed to war right away if leadership deems it necessary planners after the eschaton some of the population coalesced into named cults such as the ones mentioned thus far but many people gathered into less formalized groups called clans there are hundreds maybe thousands of different clans across the land each eeking out their existence in a way specific to whatever horrors they have to face some clans are nomadic while others are agrarian some are violent raiders while others are ascetic and peaceful clanners tend to be some of the least protected people in the northern continent whereas in africa they are often protected and showered with wealth their goal tends to be survival in most cases the primer can turn an entire village into mindless drones or worse in a matter of hours and enemy clans and vicious cults could come a knocking at any time of the day or night each of the cultures or regions has their own flavor of clans where they are defined by the region's history and their current environment but generally speaking and for the sake of game play ability there is a straightforward hierarchy presented one that loosely tracks the ranks of native tribes of millennia past there is no applying to being a clan you're either born into it or you're not as far as specialization goes it would depend on the clan in a best case scenario a clan would nurture the child and watch closely to see what they naturally gravitate towards hunting or gathering warfare or medicine follower or leader but due to the nature of the setting violence is never far away for a clanner scrappers human civilization became so advanced right before the esheton that it was hailed as the beginning of the trans-human era miracles of science and technology were finally coming to fruition and then it ended scrappers were nothing more than people trying to snatch a piece of that past to sell it to the city for food or shelter most carried on like this for centuries while others learned about the technology they salvaged and became tinkerers and inventors the goal of a scrapper is to recover as much scrap technology and data from the bygone era as possible and sell it to either a chronicler in the nearest city or to a mechanist or manufacturer outfit composed of other scrappers scrappers from the northern continent are lonely nobody scavengers who might team up with one or two others for a little while before returning to their solitary lives they can communicate with other scrappers using symbols that they scratch onto the sides of walls and rocks and eventually they die alone in the wasteland african scrappers on the other hand are part of a culture of scrappers who attach symbolic importance to their scavenging and they always work in groups when they salvage anything they think of it as an honor to their village clan or culture as they are adding to its wealth becoming a scrapper in most cases just means being an opportunist or a desperate survivor in the case of those who can create such as the mechanist it is a matter of life experience and natural proclivity as there is no scrapper university to speak of libyans about 200 years ago a merchant called the libyan forged a new way of life he decreed that all life was based on just three things exploration diplomacy and trade he built a trading empire from those tenants which led to the centralized bank simply known as the bank of commerce and to the greatest colonialist power of the known world neolibians worship wealth and more importantly the appearance of wealth every deal they make in the northern continent every white person they enslave and every new map that they draw is for the sake of enrichment and elevated status of themselves and their people they coddle african villages and clans with protection education and riches because it is from that pool of people that they can recruit the best minds to fill their ranks their presence is felt everywhere but they are based in the jewel of africa the city of triple through the sheer economic might of the bank of commerce ambassadors and consuls manage the maintenance of settlements and ports in order to sustain trade routes at the lower levels highly educated merchants cartographers and magnates run the empire of trade and deal-making any young one can be given over to the neo-libyans where they toil for years to learn how to read write and understand the economy of trade diplomacy and exploration eventually they graduate to merchant by the blessing of the auctioneer and either continue their formal training or go right out and start their own business scourgers the pain and suffering of centuries of white colonialism and slavery lives on in the hearts of the warrior cult of africa the scourgers the african people are referred to as the lion and the scourgers are its claws it is said that eight ancestors descended upon the lion in its time of greatest need and their power is channeled through these warriors scourgers are forever burdened with the thrill and the need for vengeance against the european descendants in the north but more immediately they are meant to do any kind of violence that would protect the african peoples they eat psychevoir seeds that connect all of their minds into the same ancestral language the while rui and they are loathed to stray far from the mother continent scourgers are given weapons and supplies by the neo-libyans and act as the merchant cult's military arm they strictly enforce modesty and discipline among themselves and are a source of great admiration amongst villagers and the common folk their hierarchy is simple and straightforward only the mother of a potential recruit can dictate whether her child can apply to be a scourger first there is a difficult trial at age 12 such as hunting down a freed slave or surviving the jungle alone then they are scorcher who lives and fights until the age of 28 by that age if they are still alive they are considered elders and given more cerebral and leadership oriented tasks if they make it to age 50 they are considered sages but it's hard to tell when that is supposed to happen because they stop counting their years after 28. the prehistoric cult of anubis rose again from the past its true practices somehow surviving not just the first 6 000 years before the eshetan but the meteor apocalypse itself and its aftermath now the mystical religion that worships the god of death mummification and the afterlife thrives in a time where the psychovorp primer unlocks new dimensions in the mind and in reality itself on one level the anubians serve the community by offering healing embalming the dead and guidance to their afterlife this is the accepted role of the anubians in most of northern africa but at a higher level the anubian elite wished to shed the superstition and earned the right to enter cairo a lost city engulfed by the psychevoid plants and unreachable by any but the highest ranking it's there where an ultimate truth is revealed a truth not revealed in the book by the way anubians structure their operation around the concept of ascendancy to cairo through public service then intense surprisingly scientific research and finally mastery of both science and the mystical usage of psychivores whereas psychivores would kill any other person within minutes it only briefly harms an anubian the book stays mum on what exactly awaits anubians in cairo but their entire operation seems to be bent towards and led from the lost city it's not clear who gets selected to attempt to become an anubian but initiation is extremely harsh the recruit is dropped into a dark pit of bones where they have to fend for themselves eating bugs and a rotten mash mixed with drugs then if they survive they are embalmed alive like a mummy and made immobile for three days allowed only to drink water from a straw finally they are given seven concentric white tattoos on their belly each one disappearing as they work their way up the ranks of the cult jehomadongs the jehomadans got their start when a man known as johamud appeared upon the top of the kaaba in mecca and named himself the last of the prophets he professed a religion of simplified faith where there were only humans animals and the lord he named the father of each household the abrami who would take a wife called the hagari and a second wife called the sareli any sons born to the sorelli would be held as sacred warriors and leaders to the people the male head of the family or abrami is expected to have as many children as possible and to be nomadic but the reality is that the world is closing in around them and settling down in one place with fewer children is their new future aside from waging bloody wars with members of the rival regional religion the anabaptists they keep to themselves into their simple life despite the rigid expectations of bigamous families the actual result is a huge mess of roles for women who don't quite fit into the framework the roles of warriors and high leaders are not closed to women either which not or available one is born into the cult and much of their fate does depend on their gender at first much of what makes a member of this cult great is not knowledge since most of them are illiterate but rather martial prowess and the ability to sire or produce male offspring in just the right fashion apocalyptic in the years before the esheton there was a billionaire named jerome gatrell who preached a lot of things including his embrace of hedonism passion over mind and his following was passionate about that lifestyle to the point where they even overtook cartels and black markets after the meteors these folks survived and stylized themselves as apocalyptics they want nothing more than to live in the moment and to destroy anything that gets in the way of that the apocalyptics actually had a hand in spreading the primer across the continent by selling spores as a drug called burn to people in otherwise untouched cities aside from illicit drug trade they are the ones in each city who operate brothels gambling dens and other houses of vice they name themselves after birds knife fighters might be called battle crows and thieves are magpies and innkeepers woodpeckers youth is worshipped and anyone showing any weakness or signs of aging are pushed from a flock but that being said the cleverest and most manipulative apocalyptics do not lose their position due to age instead they slip into the shadows and control the younger members unseen at the top of this hierarchy is a shadowy leader who pulls all the strings called the mother of ravens it is said she could be centuries old to be young and willing to do one kind of dirty job or another is what it takes to be an apocalyptic by force of will and recognizable successes one can climb the ranks but the climb is short they are ever only one bad knife fight away from losing everything his name was rebus the baptist and he wrote down a new religion it was a mix of christianity and the teachings of johamud and it taught its followers that suffering on farmland was the way of god his religion was a sort of gnosticism and he aptly named it geonosis in time the members of this new religion grew to be intensely violent but allied themselves with the battalions in borka and carved out a base in cathedral city the anabaptists wish to eradicate the primer as much as the spatalians but they have their own religious justifications for doing so they work the land with religious fervor as well to produce food for cities near where they have settled their members move up the ranks by having godly visions or emanations which are judged by a council of emanations who verify whether they are really communicating with god there are two paths as an anabaptist either as an orgyastic or fierce warrior or as a farmer and frontiersman who forces a harvest out of the soil at higher levels they either command armies or work in the church administration where finally the temptation of exposing oneself to the primer in order to achieve the ultimate emanation is too great to resist anabaptists do not recruit actively but rather accept anyone who comes to them in cathedral city wanting to be a part of the movement they all wear a nose ring and put three dots on their heads of any style particular to their gang and then they get to work in the fields or in battle hailers remember that billionaire from before the eschaton who started the hedonism movement that led to the apocalyptics he was also the ceo of a company called recombination group in the years leading up to the meteors hitting the company put into motion a plan to shelter thousands of people in 44 different fallout shelters as the plan went these vaults or dispensers would be home to generations of survivors who themselves would be indoctrinated and released out onto the surface in hundred year intervals where they would then hypnotically program surface survivors to be farmy and religious the idea was that the vault dwellers would be highly trained elite overlords to the docile surface dwellers and a new society would be born in the image of recombination group's master plan it did not work out that way the technology and the dispensers broke down over centuries and lots of dwellers refused to leave them even when it was time the result was a generation of ghoulish inbred mostly blind humanoids with no moral compass and occasionally the ability to control minds with their voice the palers from the four dozen dispensers are not united in cause but they all engage in nighttime raids of villages stealing food and resources and doing violence to unsuspecting folk there are five so-called sleeper prophets who wield violent and destructive powers any paler who chooses to leave their dispensers and follow these prophets pursue some mysterious greater power along with their chosen prophet the sole and supremely unfortunate way to join the palers is to be born as one screaming in the dark in one of the dispensers one rises through the ranks by having a booming commanding voice one that can change the memetic programming of other palers and eek out more influence amongst their own i have a lot of thoughts about the genesis but i'll keep it as brief as possible if i had one criticism of the setting book it would be that the information is presented in several different writing styles that are all blended across each subsection there are the straightforward sober exposition paragraphs that tell you straight up what's going on but a lot of the book lurches between that mode and a more in-fiction unreliable narrator mode where it's meant to be read as a biased voice trying to paint the cultures and cults in a certain light then there's a fair amount of jumping back and forth between the past and the present tense it's all really only mildly problematic for a first time reader and if you happen to be watching this entire video these problems will be almost non-existent since having an overview of the world is going to really lubricate the reading experience by knowing what to expect generally and having a one-time exposure to all the new terminology and concepts you can actually sit back and enjoy the exotic presentation of information there are several things i really do like about this book despite my complaining about the oscillating writing modes the actual writing is very engaging i specifically enjoyed the way words have been redeployed using more esoteric interpretations of their meaning all of the new terminology can be challenging at first but if you dig in a little bit none of the terms are random it's all a very deliberate application of english words and prefixes at least in the english version i like this because it sort of emulates how language evolves it's supposed to be 500 years in the future here with no internet so of course language and word usage is going to have changed from the present day the artwork is stunning at virtually every turn with the creators aiming for full-color hyper-realism to show the world as you've seen in this video the impact and the scope of the illustrations really speak for themselves primal punk and virtually all degenesis books and supplements are free in their digital form at their website i had the great fortune of getting the physical copy of primal punk in the mail as part of the two book core set the quality is just about as high as it gets from what i can tell all the physical materials printed for degenesis are made at the highest possible quality that they can muster so it's almost like the collector's edition is the only thing they're selling the depth of the setting is really very satisfying at first blush when reading through the book one could get the impression that everything has been explained but in fact the year 2595 is in media res everything is in motion and there are hundreds of unanswered questions presented across the book and each and every one of these uncertainties in the world is intended as a plot hook to be answered at your table with your characters well some of the uncertainties are actually addressed in subsequent books and supplements but those are for another video another time thanks as always for watching this is dave signing off see ya [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Dave Thaumavore RPG Reviews

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Length: 40min 28sec (2428 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021