Ape, Conqueror, & King - Twelve Seconds To Midnight A Mash Up Campaign Setting

The Supernatural  Wars in Nineteen Fifty five mark the end of the Third Reich & Adolf Hilter's reign. Two years later the first serious time travel experiments begin with a journey in time to the twenty third century. This resulted in a national incident with a United State Government think tank involved in artificial intelligent experimental work of Dr. Merinoe. This think tank was deeply involved in the practical applications of Great Race Yith technologies during the Cold War. This work would later on be instrumental in the artificial intelligence work of Dr. Charles A. Forbin but this wouldn't come to much later. Professor Ernest Von Hauser later took many of Dr. Merinoe's theoretical work to complete his own time travel experiments in Nineteen Sixty Three.


The United States government & air force then retrofitted many of these advances for 'faster then light drive' systems for the application of retro engineering several downed alien craft in area fifty one. The advances in space flight technology leaped ahead by leaps and bounds as a space station then a permanent moon colony were established in Sixty Five. Moon exploration had happened as early as Nineteen Fifty but it wasn't until much later that permanent colonies were established. By this time already several brush fire & small atomic incidents had already happened across Earth. Earth by this time had had several covert contacts with alien races & galactic intelligences across the globe.


Science advanced at an astounding rate & genetic engineering had lead to the creation of intelligent apes working along side mankind in many fields. By Nineteen Seventy Two an uprising happened that caused a United Nations resolution to grant permanent citizenship to ape kind across the globe. The ape philosopher Lisa was instrumental in bridging the gap between ape & human kind. Mankind itself had problems of its own as mutations started to appear as a direct result of soft factional genetic drift taking hold within society. The rise of the Eugenics movement began in Seventy Three with several incidents of eco terrorism in isolated incidents across the globe. The Eastern Bloc had mounting tensions with the Untied States over several international incidents & Moon based colonial issues were rearing their head. In 1974 the United States uncovered an extraterrestrial artifact that sent a signal into space near one of the moons of Jupiter. In 1979 the Moon along with her colonies were wrenched from orbit as the signal was received, we were visited by an alien presence & contact was lost with Discovery One. It was the failure of the Jupiter mission that was the wick that touched off the powder keg of World War III.


It is the future of 2017, you have awakened from cyrosleeep, the forbidden zones crackle with trade as stalkers & barbarians compete for the alien prize. Strange & twisted things emerge from the zones themselves & recently the scientists have begun receiving strange signals from deep space. Apes rule large swaths of the Earth now, mutant enclaves & factional settlements abound, but the Institute pays well for those that brave the forbidden zones. But there are rumors that those that venture into the zones don't come back or if they do they are changed. The world is a mess but your a part of the solution and maybe with some luck you can change it. 


So this is a Frankencampaign using the Stalker Rpg from Burger Games which I received for Christmas plus Apes Victorious, a good dose of Star Ships & Space Men Second Edition, Mutant Future, & lots of pop culture influences. So how does this work? Well because Adventurer, Conqueror, King uses Labyrinth Lord as a base system even though its been reworked. All of this falls back to my love affair with OD&D & B/X D&D itself as a system. There's lots that this style of campaign  has to offer including DM & player system issues, a boat load of opportunities to figure out how this sort of a timeline would work together and what parts of the system to take and choose.



I would also go so far as to mix and match a bit of LoFP Carcosa along with Realms of Crawling Chaos for some of the weirder aspects of this sort of a mix. The PC's step into a zone area & step out onto Carcosa. I would also say that this would make the Institute a Type II or III market for buying & selling of artifacts. If the players get really bold then I might mix in the recent AD&D Carcosa modules to boot.



As for the technology level I would keep it a standard black powder/modern mix for the sake of simplicity especially using the ACK's campaign system which is the point here in my mind. All in all I actually think this could be made to work into a long term campaign. But this would take an experienced group of players willing to put in and pull from some serious time.