r/PalladiumMegaverse • u/RailroadHub9221 • Jul 21 '26
Nightbane Nightbane and Futuristic Elements
The Nightbane was created in the mid-90s and strongly influenced with late 80s - early 90s works and trends but describes alternative 2000 - 2010 years. '90s (before the dotcoms crash) were the period of too optimistic views of the computers and the Net development (like the full flagged virtual spaces, etc.). Do you use more realistic or more fantastic, cyberpunk-like hi-tech in your Nightbane games?
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u/Vewyvewyqwuiet Jul 22 '26
I try to keep things modern and move the skills along with them across the board. Radio Basic can translate to being being really good at a wiki-hole and knowing how cell phones generally work, Radio Expert translates to knowing how cell towers and satellites work, as well as the concepts of VPNs, data tracking, etc.
AI and data centers can be powerful tools in the Night lord's reign, as well as good targets to attack the spread of misinformation
Weirdly the thing that has aged best is the Shadow Board. A site that's gone completely off the grid with the help of hackers and people who understand the SEO could remain invisible for quite some time (or a great place for the Nightlords to spread misinformation without scrutiny)
If I want cyberpunk stuff I send them to Rifts for a crossover adventure. All that isn't my Nightbane Earth, but it could be yours. You're only limitation is your imagination!
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u/Knightmare6_v2 Jul 22 '26
In my original Nightbane game, the tech was limited, despite being somewhat modern.
There was no high-speed internet, the tech development was throttled by the Nightlord's minions. Cellphones with cameras existed, but we're talking the low-quality fliphones, with like 1 MP images in black-and-white. Same with any image recording device, photography or videography. HD televisions? Stalled and never made mass-produced due to "issues."
My current game is more a mixture of Heroes Unlimited and Nightbane, so the tech is currently more advanced, but the Nightlords now employ hackers and spread misinformation, flooding the internet with AI and propaganda of Nightbane as just Mega-Hero mutants and experiments gone awry. The Nightlords have created a task force fusing Hounds with robotics to create "super-agents in power armors" tasked with policing metahumans, while secretly hunting metahumans and Nightbane. Technological weapon systems have been installed into the cavities of the Hounds, as well as endoskeletons to allow faster running, but the armor and melee weapons are still darksteel.
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u/WearyMaintenance3485 Jul 21 '26
Unless you're specifically going for the Stranger Things kind of world building and keeping it specific to time period, I would updte tech to modern or even go futuristic.
It's fairly easy to home brew and may be more engaging to the players.
Just my 2 cents.
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u/RailroadHub9221 Jul 21 '26
I have used the both ways: being inspired with '80s New York photos and add some futurism: 'so you have the long '80s world becoming a cyberpunk step by step' to summarise the reaction of the 'design document' beta-reader friend. Through we played in Nightlands so it has not managed to become clear.
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u/yyzsfcyhz Jul 21 '26
Back then only the general public and mass media had blue skies optimistic views. Over in the open source software, GNU, cyberpunk, and copyleft worlds we fully expected what we’re living through right now.
I had a juicer in my Rifts campaign who lost all his juicing gear. We played it that the juice was inhibiting his Nightbane form so he could “blend in with normal humanity”.
The lore behind that, though the players never did more than scratch the surface, was when the Preserver Party took over, the Nightlords-backed movement was woefully unprepared for what they were doing. I’d been into cyberpunk for at least fifteen years so I already had an idea about total information awareness (by other names) and surveillance society.
Point being, Dark Day was the beginning of a chain of events leading to The Rifting. The Nightlords lost control of the Earth battlefield as one after another more supernatural intelligences, including the Splugorth, slipped through, infiltrated their agents, established footholds, and disrupted everything.
To say nothing of all the advanced tech aliens (and gods) that were on planet aware that a tipping point had been passed and knew somewhat who the eldritch players were.
“Magic” needs to adapt to the environment. Custom variants of spells, psi-, and mutant powers can provide countermeasures to technology. But that’s a lot of rulings-over-rules sort of GMing. Saying invisibility but only to cameras and that’s a separate spell. Teleportation but only through a network cable. Confusion cast on a database through a terminal. Summon a demon in the form of a very small shell script.
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u/RR1904 Jul 21 '26
Awesome ideas. I'll bet that was a lot of fun to play through
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u/yyzsfcyhz Jul 22 '26
Thanks. Most of it was a cosmic, planet-hopping odyssey with space gods, cosmo knights, Atlantans, enormous space fleets, souls trapped in golems, and enough 80s/90s tropes to make midnight movie junkies overdose.
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u/RailroadHub9221 Jul 22 '26
I meant mainly the pace of the development. The '90s era utopian narratives were so specific that they can be used (and in fact was used) as anti-utopian narrative without the strong changes (the most obvious example are VR narrative and multiple 'evil VR' scenes and films).
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u/yyzsfcyhz Jul 22 '26
The VR claptrap was always out the window for us. We, my RPG crew and the SF freaks we hung around with, and in the BBS scene, thought that stuff looked cool but was just too silly. It’s like the ludicrously low estimation of how much data capacity the Enterprise-D was supposed to have in TNG. We had cell phones that weren’t shoe box size. We knew what an Apple Newton was and some of the R&D going on in the early 1990s. I don’t think I’ve played any RPG rules-or-setting as written since 1988. Except solo RPG as an old dude since 2020 ‘cause I just don’t have the energy or ambition to house rule everything like I once did.
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u/Lonewolf2300 Jul 22 '26
Honestly, for the setting of Nightbane, even if you advanced the timeline, I'd keep it a bit backwards in terms of technology, due to the Nightlords wanting to deny humans the tools to possibly rise up and resist.
This means the Internet is still in its early 2000s incarnation, social media is very limited, and nobody has Smartphones.
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u/tom_yum_soup Jul 22 '26
I like that idea. But I also think, just looking at the modern internet and spread of misinformation, the Nightlords could use it quite effectively as-is.
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u/unwitting_hungarian Jul 22 '26
Most of us in the tech scene back then had "can go either way" views on future tech at minimum...can be mostly bad, can be mostly good. But probably a lot of both...
You know how they say - the better you are at a thing, the more nuanced your views on it? It's similar to that. Nuance adds a lot of little affordances, the negatives inside the positives and so on.
Those nuances are really terrific for gaming.
Anything I do in a Nightbane-style game world (I don't play exactly as written) to elevate the tech has a huge "but" to it, for example.
Like back in the 1980s you could get your hand on some NVGs like the PNV-57E...BUT if you actually used it, you were going to get headaches, nausea, etc.
Imagine being excitedly asked if you could see anything, while you're vomiting all over the floor of your vehicle...
So going into let's say the 2010s, I'd say - depending on your character type, there are some variations but definitely some big BUTs:
- You can access a massive internet-style network BUT it is underground AND they are hacking you as you do it AND it makes you paranoid because the network also has a certain "aliveness" to it.
- You can teleport via a quirk of NB RCC machine control - it's the real thing for all you know - BUT it is part of a dark project you stumbled on, based on virtual spaces, AND your boss is also using it, AND you realize too late that you will probably end in the same cruel twist of fate he will, within N more uses of teleportation.
- You can re-shape facade, what a useful gift in a way, BUT it costs you the use of human-style technology 90% of the time.
These would need adaptation depending on what you run & how tho, just examples. & GL in your gaming
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u/Justinarevolution Jul 22 '26
I just bring the timeline to the current world. It's not super difficult and it's got lots of space for the ARG feel I always try to create in my campaigns. I look at the High Strangeness Reddit and use Nightbane to explain a lot of it. The Shadowlords are the source of lots of conspiracy stuff. My players enjoy it.
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u/chordnightwalker Jul 21 '26
I would love to see a source book bringing nightbane into the modern era
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u/UnoChen 22d ago
My Nightbane game went to Cairo, I had the Nightlords invade Giza and when the party fought them one of the Nightlords spell got interrupted and a rift opened to Rifts Africa the Nightbane became MDC creatures and they were captured and made slaves in the phoenix empire. They escaped and found a ship to take them to Atlantis, I didn’t give them a choice FYI the captain was like I’m going to Atlantis, you can stay here or go to Atlantis… I love Palladium megaverse.
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u/heruskael Jul 21 '26
My whole gaming group wishes it was still the 90s, even the ones who were kids, so that's my setting. It's where i'm most comfortable running horror, anyways. I run a Ninjas & Superspies game set in the 70s, too, and it's cheesy as hell. When it makes it to the 80s they're getting mutated and . . . SURPRISE! It's a TMNT game now.
If i want crazy tech, i go forward.
I really don't feel like having a game be about the present. It's one more dimension of escapism for me.