Having just reviewed Planetary and seen its completion I finally sat down and devoted some time and thought to how the same concept could be applied to the RPG world. RPGs have their own culture, their own memes, their own references and given The Four’s attempts to explore the fictiverse there’s a key to exploring fictional and well developed worlds, such as those found in RPGs, established genre fiction and MMORPGs. These settings and places are the bread and butter of a gamer’s popular culture, just as comics were the setting for the action of Planetary.

After the end of the main Planetary story there’s still plenty to find and the possibilities of the fictiverse, infraverse and the bleed combined give plenty of room for other field teams to investigate more secret history.

A Planetary field team modelled on the existing storyline would consist of three people with different specialities:

• An Investigator/Leader (Elijah Snow)
• The Muscle (Jakita Wagner)
• An Information Source (Drums)

My suggested versions of these three are given below, using Aberrant as the superhero game model, though you can substitute your own.

Investigator/Leader – Justin Bard
Nature: Critic
STR: 2 DEX: 2 STA: 2
PER: 5 INT: 5 WITS: 5
APP: 2 MAN: 5 CHA: 4
DEX – Drive: 2 Melee: 2
INT – Academics: 3 Computer: 3 Linguistics: 3 Science: 2
WITS – Arts: 5 (Writing)
APP – Intimidation: 3
MAN – Streetwise: 2 Subterfuge: 3
CHA – Perform: 3
Backgrounds – Allies: 3 Backing: 4 Contacts: 4 Resources: 3
Willpower: 3 Quantum: 3 Initiative: 6
Powers – Mega Wits: 3 (Artistic Genius) Description Theory: 1
Quantum Pool: 30

Bard was a writer on The Four’s fictiverse intrusion experiment and helped craft the story that they projected their exploration vessel into. With an uncommon grasp of fiction and some small grasp of science the intrusion into the fictiverse was enough to drag Bard with it, weakening the barriers between reality and allowing him to escape the project ‘clean up’ team long enough to survive and to return to the real world under his own power. Despite this his mind is a little messed up, he remembers little about the project or its aims, or what they were seeking to return from the fictiverse.

Bard is a hard-bitten, cynical bastard, a borderline alcoholic who goes through at least a pack of cigarettes a day. Often shabby and unkempt he has a keen insight into narrative, something that often substitutes for investigative talent in many cases that the team investigates. Combined with his ability to rewrite reality according to his own narrative sense Bard is a powerful individual, an author of destiny.

Description Theory
Level: 3
Quantum Minimum: 3
Dice Pool: Description Theory + Wits
Range: Line of sight.
Area: Visible distance.
Duration: Maintain with 1 quantum per turn.
Effect: Dice pools, successes and other effects can be increased or decreased by a factor equal to rolled successes (maximum of quantum). Items can also be brought into existence or eliminated and the nature of local physics and other factors altered in the same way. One success is enough to alter colours or tints, two to alter shapes or bring small items into or out of existence, three for larger items or small animals or for unlikely events or allies to turn up, four for larger animals and non-descript people and five to alter physics or conjure a whole, fully realised person into existence.

Muscle – Eighteen-Hundred (1800)
Nature: Bravo
STR: 5 DEX: 4 STA: 5
PER: 2 INT: 2 WITS: 4
APP: 2 MAN: 2 CHA: 2
STR – Brawl: 5 Might: 5
DEX – Athletics: 5 Drive: 1 Melee: 5
STA – Endurance: 4 Resistance: 4
PER – Awareness: 3
INT – Medicine: 1 Survival: 3
APP – Intimidation: 3
Backgrounds – Allies: 3 Backing: 4
Willpower: 3 Quantum: 3 Initiative: 9
Powers – Mega Strength: 3 Mega Stamina: 3
Quantum Pool: 26

A century baby from the year of his name, 1800 is half Scottish and half Native-American, raised amongst an obscure and now dead tribe and grown up half amongst that tribe and half in the wild due to their destruction. 1800 retains a distrust of civilisation as a whole and tends to live according to his own rules, regardless of those of the world around him. Unnaturally strong and tough, 1800 is essential back-up for the field team across the myriad of worlds that the team find themselves in, his strength being useful in almost all circumstances.

Information Source – Inspector Diane Harshaw
Nature: Judge
STR: 3 DEX: 3 STA: 3
PER: 5 INT: 4 WITS: 4
APP: 3 MAN: 4 CHA: 4
STR – Brawl: 2
DEX – Athletics: 2 Drive: 4 Firearms: 2 Melee: 2
PER – Awareness: 4 Investigation: 5
INT – Computer: 2 Intrusion: 5 Medicine: 1
WITS – Rapport: 4
APP – Intimidation: 4
MAN – Interrogation: 4 Streetwise: 4 Subterfuge: 4
CHA – Command: 4
Backgrounds – Allies: 3 Backing: 4 Contacts: 6
Willpower: 10 Quantum: 3 Initiative: 7
Powers – Bookstep: 2
Quantum Pool: 30

One of Planetary’s first encounters in the fictiverse , Diane was already a fictional character imbued, within their own stories, with the capability of moving between different fictional worlds in a manner similar to that found in the Thursday Next stories. Her recruitment by Planetary followed and while there’s a lot of confusion over what constitutes the ‘real world’ in relation to the Inspector her contacts across the fictiverse make her a valuable asset, along with her keen investigating skills and the relative ease with which she adapts to even the strangest of fictional universes.  A striking, if not beautiful, woman in her forties, Inspector Harshaw retains an offbeat sense of humour and a tendency to make inappropriate comments at inopportune moments.

Bookstep
Level: 3
Quantum Minimum: 3
Dice Pool: N/A
Range: (Quantum + Power Rating metres).
Area: N/A.
Duration: Special.
Effect: The character can create a ‘gate’ into a fictiverse, allowing them and their companions to move into that fictiverse through a hole in space. In order to do a link is needed to that fictiverse. A DVD, a book, notes, collectables, anything that inspires people to remember that fictional universe and helps make it more ‘real’. Fictiversal items will only work in the real world if they could, theoretically, do so.

Story Ideas
1. In a cabin in the woods near Lake Geneva, in Big Foot Beach state park, shrouded from normal view by a shimmering interface between realities, a group of men sit, apparently in a meditative trance where they have been since the 1970s. An experimental drug that they took recreationally allowed them to project their consciousness into an unformed fictiverse that they have been populating and creating ever since, a fantasy realm, influenced by Jack Vance, Tolkien, Howard and others that has been unfurling for some forty years. Now though, two of the lost men have died, their bodies no longer able to sustain them and the fantasy world is coming apart, leaking fantasy into the real world and coming apart, threatening to destroy the remaining dreamers who are locked into the world. The only way to get them out again and to seal the breach is an epic quest.

2. Human traffickers have been using a fictiversal boring device to drill into adolescent power fantasies and retrieve ‘slave girls’ to be sold in the human trafficking underground. Despite their pliant willingness to conform to the desires of almost any man, the real world nature of these depredations takes its toll and this is still exploitation and misuse of fictiversal technology, which needs to be recovered from these gangsters.

3. A dark god from a particularly vile fictiverse has escaped through the thinned walls of reality after the use of an experimental description bomb on a remote cave complex. It has infected a unit of American soldiers in Afghanistan with its peculiar power, twisting and warping their bodies, mutating them – and even their vehicles – into twisted mockeries and sending them forth to kill, to destroy and to fetch skulls for its throne…