Hot Wet Planet

Thanks to the beautiful people at Fandom Wank, I discovered this thread over at RPG.net about a game called, ahem, Hot Wet Planet. It's pretty much as horrible as it sounds. Or as Darren MacLennen put it, "You can develop your writing skills by playing a dumb barbarian, a rape victim or a tentacle monster."

Here are two "attribute scores":

Attr = Attractiveness, beauty, appearance. It's chosen as -2, -1, +0. +1, +2, etc... It may not be more negative than a -2 for any player-character. +0 is normal, but still considered attractive by human standards. For female characters, Attr adds to Def when they are attacked with harmful intentions (such as somebody trying to kill them or injure them), but subtracts from Def when they are attacked with lustful intentions.

So, if you're a woman, being hot means that you can't be killed, but you can be raped.

HWPE = Hot Wet Planet Effect, which is an overall level of the Hot Wet Planet's mysterious energy influence upon the character. The higher the HWPE, also the higher the character's libido & constant arousal (more than exponentially increased for each level up), but also HWPE can add to Psi for "danger-sense", and makes it less likely that the character will be attacked for the purpose of becoming a meal. On the negative side, a higher HWPE makes it more difficult to resist the Hot Wet Planet's mental & emotional effects. A higher HWPE for the guys makes them more aggressive, domineering, sexist towards the girls, more likely to fight each other, etc... A higher HWPE for the girls makes them more submissive, more shy & easily embarrassed, a lot hornier & wetter (all the time), less able to cover themselves, and overwhelms their willpower to force them to flirt & sexually expose themselves - even when they don't want to, nor intend to - and magnifies pleasurable sensations. The mental & emotional effects can be countered by Det.

And some more game text!

In addition, some unidentifiable element of the environment is changing the survivors, eroticising them, making the females constantly horny yet more shy at the same time, more youthful, more like a guy's wet-dream fantasy, and removing all their body hair from their neck to their toes. The guys get bigger dicks, muscles, a penchant for crude violence, and that sort of thing, as if the planet was turning the men into barbarian warriors.

In the background, unknown at least at first to the Offworlder survivors, the planet's higher lifeforms have a simple mass-mind that is using it's powerful psionics to mentally influence and sometimes dominate the humans in lecherous ways, having it's strongest effect on the females (who gain the benefit of being occasionally protected, & subtly forewarned about real dangers); many of the younger (or younger appearing) women discover they are incapable of wearing underwear, or any kind of pants, or even anything more covering than an indecently short tunic or mini-dress...and the effect is becoming stronger with the passing of time.

Then there are the Tentacle Monsters to contend with....the size of a small car or as large as a house, in many shapes and forms, but always having phallic tentacles and a sexual obsession with humanoid females.

What more needs to be said? But, on dear lord in heaven in whom I don't believe, a great deal more is said. The author of this game is offended at people's offense, apparently living in a world where publicly discussing wanting to pretend to be a rapist tentacle monster is socially acceptable. Still, it's handled with the typical RPG.net subtlety of trolling the person, flaming them, and then banning them, but, hey, it's RPG.net. That's why people go, I guess. But, yes, a great, great deal more is said.

This hobby is depraved, isn't it?

Planet Hulk and World War Hulk

I just got done reading the Planet Hulk and World War Hulk storyline. And . . . well, I've got some comments on it and the nature of heroism and villainy in Marvel comics.

First, in Planet Hulk - or at least in the Illuminati stuff that preceded it - Doctor Strange, Mister Fantastic, Iron Man and Black Bolt decide to take the Hulk and shoot him into outer space. The only person who objects is Namor.

OK, let's make this clear. None of these people had the right to do this. They kidnapped the Hulk. That's just the plain truth. Was he a danger? Oh, sure, some of the time, definitely. He also did a number of good things, too, and much of the bad he did was done under a variety of duress.

I believe the point they were trying to raise was . . . how do you handle power when the government can't do it. That's sort of the subtext of all superhero comics. The legal authorities can't handle things so superheroes, generally unaffiliated with the government, fill the gap. Y'know, the military can't handle Magneto so the X-Men come in and do that, or whatever.

However, traditionally, superheroes were very reactive and employed a minimum amount of force to handle the situation (and place the well-being of civilians above everything else). They don't do pre-emptive strikes. They went to great lengths not to kill anyone. They took extraordinary care to avoid civilian casualties. What I would say the traditionally accepted justification for this is the authorities would regard seeking out fights as vigilantism - but a citizen is allowed to act to save themselves and others in a crisis situation. Going out and finding Norman Osborn and beating him up before he does something wrong is vigilantism. Preventing him from blowing up the Thanksgiving Day Parade is just being a good citizen.

So, Fantastic, Black Bolt, Iron Man and Dr. Strange violated that precept. Furthermore, I mean, if you're gonna do something like that . . . the Hulk? Most of of the time, y'know, the Hulk is hitting the right person or acting in self-defense. We're not talking the Red Skull, here, but a nice guy in a horrible situation. What they did was kidnapping.

But it wasn't just kidnapping. To trick Bruce Banner - a very clever person - into being shot into space, they misappropriated an android of Nick Fury. I . . . I mean, uh, SHIELD is this big, important para-military organization in the MU. They impersonated an officer, they almost certainly broke a dozen security clearance issues, they misappropriated SHIELD resources - just this really big laundry list of security violations. The kind of stuff that would get a person prison time.

Or to break it down in a different way, what would be the reaction of heroes if Doctor Doom reprogrammed an android of Nick Fury in order to kidnap the Hulk and shoot him into outer space?

Or to break it down even further: Marvel decided to turn Strange, Black Bolt, Tony Stark and Reed Richards into villains. They violated a whole raft of laws to kidnap Bruce Banner and they shot him into space.

Then it goes wrong. I mean, not even blaming those four for what happened to the Hulk on Sakaar, it goes wrong and the Hulk comes back and destroys Manhattan in World War Hulk because he's pissed off at being shot into space.

Oh, sure, he doesn't kill anyone. He does kidnap people, torture them (obedience disks?!) and destroy a major American city in the process. Yeah, they were bad guys, but two wrongs don't make a right. STILL. We all know this.

So, they also decide that the Hulk needs to be a villain, too.

I wish people actually read this journal because I'd really like an answer to why Marvel seems bound and determined to turn virtually every "hero" in their universe into a villain? I mean, you've got Cyclops ordering torture and murder, you've got Professor X having been revealed to be doing cruel mental manipulation for decades - I mean, stuff like making Scott and Alex Summers forget that they had another brother kind of horrible mental rape (and, again, not even to someone it could be argued "deserved" it like, y'know, Sabertooth or Mystique, but doing it to hide the fact Xavier was responsible for their deaths). You've got "heroes" kidnapping people and shooting them into space, or putting people in indefinite lock-up in extradimensional prisons. I mean, is there a single major hero out there, as Marvel hero, who hasn't done things that simply can't be justified as being "heroic"? And why have they decided to turn so many of their marquee characters into bad guys? I'm not getting it.