'Forbidden Things' - 'A Mutated Campaign Idea Setting ' For The Apes Victorious Rpg

The Apes Victorious rpg appeared in print on Lulu & its on my short 'to get list' but I went back to the pdf for a quick read through but got a bit distracted with the Thanksgiving holiday. But some ideas began to gel especial after catching up with my 'Net flixs' que. Last week I binge watched 'Stranger Things' on Netflix's with my other half & like so many people it got me thinking. This is as far as 'Stranger Things' impact happens for a moment. I began to think about the impact of what might be happening in a world where 'special people' were real. Now combined that with growing up where the events of  'Apes Victorious' happened but forget the apes and ape kind for a moment. Imagine a world tearing itself apart, WWIII might happen any day now, there are wars & rumors of war. Huge numbers of government black ops programs, psychic powers are on the rise, weird cults are flourishing in the back water areas of the world, rumors of time travel & alternative worlds, etc. Sounds like Stranger Things doesn't it? Its actually the timeline for 'Battle for the Planet of The Apes' & 'Beneath The Planet of the Apes' following up the events of 'Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes'



I've lived in my skin for a very long time & over the years I've thought about the impact of the weirdness of pop culture. How it echoes through society back & forth, take for example 'psychic powers'. When I was a kid back in the Seventies 'psychic powers' seemed to be everywhere from kids movies,comic books, weird phenomenon  television shows, and more. Then like everything in time they just seemed to fade away or did they!? With the world tearing itself apart in the Apes timeline its easy to forget that there were factional lines being drawn across society on all levels.


Are the Underdwellers of  'Apes Victorious' simply the descendants of one of those factions or cults of  psychic humans? I think so who were being developed, maintained, encouraged by various powers within the United States Government. The Cold War in the Planet Of The Apes was on the boil & the United States government knew it & psychic phenomenon was on the up tick along with it. MK Ultra got unlimited funding. Different factions of psychics were appearing all over the Earth right before the appearance of 'Ape kind'.

Hidden psychic communities were beginning to emerge back into the world after decades of being hidden in remote locations. Humanity was at a cross roads & the world's paranormal community sensed it. The next three years saw incredible strides in genetic engineering & the appearance of mutations across the globe.  Society seemed to be on the knife's edge, the appearance of  psychic powers perhaps gave it a bit of an extra push. The Alpha Omega bomb was only one part of the madness that infected the Apes Earth.

We get a taste of this in the Marvel Planet of the Apes magazine which ran from Seventy Four through Seventy Five & featured all kinds of weirdness that was right in line with Goblinoid Games Mutant Future rpg. According to the Planet of  The Apes Wiki ;"The new, original stories included in the magazine, written by Doug Moench, were full of wildly imaginative scenarios far beyond what was depicted in the movies or the TV series. In Terror on the Planet of the Apes, for example, the fugitives Jason and Alex had to combat giant mutated river monsters while on their way to confront 'The Inheritors', the society of vaguely-human Mutant Drones controlled by a network of five huge disembodied brains suspended in glass cases. The Inheritors also kept a menagerie of mutated monsters which they used for pit-fighting for their entertainment. The Inheritors had a rival race of mutant human descendants known as 'The Makers'. The Makers were slightly more human in appearance, though they were extensively reconstructed with bionic replacement body-parts. They were also more paranoid, and therefore destructive, than the power-hungry but calculating Inheritors. How their races diverged and became sworn enemies is not revealed. A race of Winged Monkey-Demons served the stranded alien 'Keepers' in their vast, buried ship - the 'Psychedrome'. The origin of the Monkey-Demons isn't known, whether they were fellow-aliens or Earthly mutations."
So what does this have to do with the Forbidden Zone? What if the reason that all of those space craft & astronauts keep splashing down into the various forbidden zones is that the United States Government of the Apes films were playing around with psychic time travel. Was there a Planet Of The Apes version of 'Eleven' who was opening doors in space and time? Was the Planet Of The Apes version MK Ultra using forbidden Seventies psychic mind retro technology to see through holes in time? Was this to possibly prevent the coming destruction of  the Earth? Was this unknown psychic close to ending the Earth themselves? Someone who linked up with various psychics across United States?



The planet of the Apes time space continuum is a closed loop with various branches & dead ends. They seem to touch other universes in the various 'forbidden zones' with high areas of radiation. Perhaps because the United States government dropped bombs on U.S. soil along with the Russians to prevent the world falling into the hands of one of the psychic factions or before they could end it!?
According to the Planet of the Apes Wiki;

"When Rod Serling adapted the novel to a screenplay, he first introduced the notion of a radioactive wasteland. This, in turn, would provide a perfect hiding place for the astronauts' advanced technology. In Serling's draft scripts, the ship automatically touches-down in a valley within a mountain range - hidden even from the watchful helicopters Serling's apes used for transport. The crew travel across a body of water to reach the more promising verdent lands beyond. Later, an ape reporter questions Thomas about the whereabouts of his craft: "We've been told that your ship landed in the Island area which has been quarantined to our race for many centuries." At an ape University, Thomas is told some more about this 'quarantined area' when he asks why the apes inhabit only a tiny part of the land-mass. Dr Ernestine of the Biology Department replies: "Did anyone explain the contamination to you, Mr. Thomas?... Expeditions have been sent out, Mr. Thomas - west on our own continent and to several of the continents beyond. There has been evidence of some form of radio-activity. But of a massive nature... It's mentioned in many of our historical documents. Places where plant life and human life existed in abundance, totally wiped out. So we've been rather cautious in our expeditions beyond." The reason for all this is spelt out to Thomas at the archaeological dig, where a nuclear fallout shelter is unearthed, holding the skeletal remains of advanced human beings. The jungle area the astronauts had crossed to, and where they were captured, was named by Dr. Zira when she asked the hunt-leader, Mr. Digby, about his "expedition into the inner-land."

Because the Forbidden Zone map perfectly lines up with modern day New York & New Jersey.

But why on Earth would psychics be using their powers to peer into the future or alternative timelines? The answer actually is build right into the Apes Victorious rpg & The Planet of the Apes movie. The answer is FTL travel more importantly hyper-spacial travel; the astronauts in the beginning of 'Planet of the Apes' are engaged in an Einstein space expedition to see if FTL is possible. "George Taylor (Charlton Heston) speaks of how their ship is traveling 700 years into the future but they are not aging. He and three colleagues, fame-seeker Landon (Robert Gunner), man of science Dodge (Jeff Burton), and 'future Eve' Stewart (in what amounts to a cameo role for Dianne Stanley), have been in space for six months, having departed in January 1972. The deep space experiment involves Dr Hasslein's theory in which the astronauts age only a few years while the citizens of Earth age centuries. Taylor is floating among the stars and in his self-inflicted malaise wonders if man will ever change.  Then he gives himself a sleeper shot and goes into a sleeping chamber like his companions." Since Apes Victorious takes its game ABC's as a homage from Planet of the Apes we can assume that the game's crew is on the cutting edge of  '2001 A Space Odyssey' retro technology.


So by the time we get to Apes Victorious 'Conquest Of The Planet of the Apes'  era it might even be up to the bleeding edge of Logan's Run. This could also lead to some very weird bleed back through time to the Sixties of the Apes Victorious timeline. Imagine being an underdweller child back in the Apes Victorious time line whose been thrown back in time or whose lived in  of the alternative futures?


We know that the Planet of the Apes 1975 cartoon had a very different take on the Underdwellers. They were highly advanced & powerfully psychic as well.

These might be simply another faction of mutated underdweller psychics within the Apes timeline. Could this time line have dimensional holes in it for PC's to travel through into an alternative hyper spacial realm straight out of Realms of Crawling Chaos? I think so. Given the nature of the 'Forbidden Zones' there might be holes & realms that appear within these zones during times of great electrical or weather related phenomenon perhaps triggered by those psychic events of the past.
This might mean that we'd be seeing adventurers hex crawling through 'Forbidden Zones looking for hyper spacial dimensional doors into alternative timelines. They would be taking great risks


Kids in the past might have some dangerous encounters with underdweller time travelers who are a part of a secret government enclave who are trying to prevent the future. All of this might have some dire consequences if there are other alternative time lines meet.


Of course all of this goes back to the Sixties so who knows what dark & mysterious secrets that the US or the world governments might be hiding. This is the type of a campaign where lies & secrets are going to be stacked & tangled upon one another.


So now the print version of Apes Victorious is on my must get list but its going to be awhile yet. But rest assured it will be mine eventually.

APES VICTORIOUS RPG  IS AVAILABLE
IN PDF & PRINT HERE 

 

  This blog entry is neither intended as a violation nor copyright or trademark infringement on Goblinoid Games nor the owners of the Planet of the Apes films, cartoons, or Marvel properties.  This blog entry is not intended to violate the copyright nor trade mark of  'The Fury' film nor is it trying to violate the copy right or trade mark of Disney's Escape To Witch Mountain.
My apologies to the makers of 'The Stranger Things' television drama, their inclusion is not intended as a copyright or trademark violation. This blog post is for educational & informational purposes only. This blog entry is entirely my writing & ideas, none of the parties mentioned above are responsible for its contents. The writing and ideas are copyrighted to their author. All ideas, materials are intended as parodies of the above films. My thanks to the John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV blog    &  the Planet of the Apes Wiki without whom this blog entry wouldn't have been possible. All contents are copyrighted and trademarked to their respective authors.