Atomic Overmind Press

Reign: Realities - Out of the Violent Planet

Everyone is psychic. Everyone in the known universe. Everyone except us.

Think about what that means for a minute. Humankind is unique. Alone in all the cosmos, we have sentience without psychic ability. 99+% of humankind is psychically inert, while 100% of alien sentience is psychically active.

Aliens don’t have language.

At least, they don’t have spoken language. Their written communication is quite advanced, better than ours in some ways, but why would they need to talk? They can just beam thoughts and ideas across.

Some alien cultures have traditions of profound intellectual discourse and debates. Others? They get by with a nifty little trick that humans translate as “ego breaking.” Instead of persuasion, they just invade minds and rewire them so that disobedience is inconceivable (or, if you’re not that good, at least uncomfortable). The most degraded inmate in the harshest Earthly prison has a freedom of thought that is beyond the reach of 80% of the galaxy’s sentients.

Aliens don’t build weapons.

Let me repeat that: Aliens don’t build weapons. Until they met us, they had no concept of making a machine with no purpose beside harming others. Why would they? The carnivores either have all the fighting gear they need bestowed by nature, or they can just think their prey dead. The aliens who can’t kill with their brains can make a meal want to walk over and lie down in their fire, or they can make it lie there whether it wants to or not.

Then they came to Earth.

They tried to turn humans into fawning pets. They hit humans with ego breaks that would turn an average psychic into a slavering fanatic, and one Earthling in a thousand was receptive enough to think that maybe they’d smelled a pleasant aroma.

They tried to simply seize control of human bodies. One in a thousand was receptive enough to get a mild tremor or facial tic.

They tried to kill us, and one in a thousand felt their hearts briefly slow.

The extraterrestrials came to invade Earth and found a race invulnerable to attacks so commonplace that they were instinctive.

A race with guns.

A History of Violence

Out of the Violent Planet is Greg Stolze's foray into unhinged psi-fi. A lot of SF posits that humans are the most _______ in the setting—the most creative, the most ruthless, the most empathetic, the most adaptable. But what about the idea that we were the least something—the least psychic of all the known sentient species? From that, Greg branched into the idea that every other galactic culture is built on telepathy, and the conflicts arose naturally. Play Out of the Violent Planet if you want to see the sinister human conspiracies of The X-Files deal with obvious aliens that don’t quite know what to make of us. Encounter the Leatherbacks, Cyblobs, or the people of the Free Worlds. Ally yourself with the Global Eite, Internationalists or Ideo-Fascists. Become a Ductee, Suck-puppy, Gundaddy, Soul, or Xenobiologist. Lock and load your guns and go to Sniper School. Be Cool under Fire or walk the Path of the Crazy M**********r.

The aliens are here. Humanity is a thousand times less societaly and technologically advance...but also a thousand times more violent.

What could possibly go wrong?

Reign: Realities - Out of the Violent Planet requires the Reign: Rules book to play.