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The campaign’s premise and flavor

In December 2098, the Great Cataclysm ended the Golden Age of Mankind and brought with it torrents of magical energies tearing open rifts in space and time all over Earth. Out of those rifts came creatures long extinct, aliens and previously thought to be supernatural beings of all kinds. The remnants of humanity cowered in the shadows as the world as they knew it shattered around them.

300 years later, humanity has risen out of their ashes and have begun to organize into larger communities again — some do so by recovering previously lost technologies of the Golden Age, others do so by gaining mastery over the ample magical energies now running through the Earth. Despite continual assaults by horrors from beyond, humanity’s desire to survive always prevails.

The Emperor of the Coalition has called for a crusade against all things alien and supernatural and has claimed all of the territories of the fallen American Empire. The “Dead Boys” of the Coalition States fight an unending xenophobic war on a scale unseen in America for half a millennia using technological terrors to rival their enemies summoned from beyond the rifts. They’ve leveled entire city-states of mages and D-Bee sympathizers. Their expansion continues.

Travellers and those seeking to reclaim the wasteland in even the most civilized regions of North America are plagued by monsters — including other humans, vampires, werewolves, spirits, dragons, cryptids and much worse. Most people are willing to trade freedom for safety and welcome the intervention of petty tyrants able to protect them.

The four horsemen of the apocalypse, a devouring swarm of demons, a terrible eater of souls, and many more dooms have been foreseen by psychics and sages across the planet. Menaced on multiple fronts by sinister beings as old as the cosmos itself, humanity faces oblivion.

Uniting under a common banner, many such as yourself flock to a group known as the Tomorrow Legion. The Legion’s headquarters are the budding city-state of Castle Refuge — a community that accepts anyone willing to resist evil and tyranny in all its forms.

The Tomorrow Legion sends its soldiers on expeditions into the wasteland to defend the weak — then invites them to join an alliance of trade and mutual protection. Already, the Legionnaires are creating a bold new legacy of prosperity in this post-post apocalypse on Rifts Earth.

Will you join them?

What separates this campaign from others?

• A more open-ended sandboxy Tier 1 operator / Cowboy roleplaying experience in a “worlds colliding with everything turned up to 11” setting.
• The Savage Worlds rules combined with the Savage Rifts supplements will provide a lot of freedom during character creation, character advancement and in n’ out of combat.
• Foundry VTT supports both the Savage Worlds core rules and the Savage Rifts supplements allowing for a relatively hassle-free experience for both players and GM — allowing for more freeform play due to the ease of dragging and dropping fully statted up enemies onto the battlefield as needed.
• Combat encounters in this campaign will be something I focus on and I hope that they’ll be both crunchy and fun more often than not. Balancing them is going to be a challenge in a system with this much going on but the challenge is one that I’m up for. Players should expect to sometimes come out of combat with dead or damaged characters whether due to bad tactics, bad rolls or bad GMing (I apologize in advance). Although players can usually choose to let their characters go out in a blaze of glory or survive to fight another day.

What are the main things about this campaign that the characters would know going in?

• The basic premise of the Savage Rifts setting — basically a post-post-apocalypse kicked off by the cataclysmic return of magic on Earth and the opening of inter-dimensional portals all over it — creating a pressure cooker environment with cyborgs, demons, aliens from outer and inner space, fascists, anything you can think of rubbing up against one another.
• Each PC was referred to the Tomorrow Legion by someone — each PC knows who referred them to the Legion and they know why.
• Each PC could eke out a living elsewhere if they wanted to but they’ve chosen to sign up with the Tomorrow Legion — each PC knows why.
• The PCs, who may or may not have pre-existing relationships with one another, have been training together in preparation for their first mission as part of the Special Operations Fireteam Gamma 9 — a promotion from their previous

What characters work best in the campaign?

We’ll be using the Savage Worlds system for this campaign — any character classes/edges/skills/etc you want from the Savage Rifts sourcebooks being fair-game (ideally books with official Foundry VTT modules, see here).

I want to support absolutely any kind of character you can come up with in this campaign. This ranges from a human living in the post-post-apocalypse trying their best to survive, a previously hive mind-ed alien who finds themselves separated from the hive after falling into a portal to Earth, a spirit bonded to a suit of armor, …

Even if you think that the rules as written don’t support the kind of character you’d like to play — I’d like to try and figure it out!

What potentially troubling themes might this campaign include?

Everything mentioned below is up for discussion/removal if anyone isn’t comfortable:

• Deadly combat against sapient beings of all kinds is to be expected.
• Fascism. Players should expect to fight and kill a lot of fascists.
• Good and evil are not black and white. Yes, most people can agree that the actions of the higher ups in a fascist nation-state are “evil” but the actions conscripted grunts are forced to take aren’t so clear. PCs should think what killing means for each of them:
  • Is killing enemy soldiers a necessary evil for the greater good? Is life so cheap that killing doesn’t really matter? Does death simply quicken the newly dead’s journey to a higher plane of existence? You decide!

What group patrons might the players select as a group? Who might serve as their primary quest giver?

First Chief Elle of Owls, Head of Morale and Discipline for the Tomorrow Legion will be the one to send the Spec. Ops. Fireteam Gamma 9er on their first mission and she’ll be the one they report to. But they’ll be expected to help out around the Tomorrow Legion’s base of operations Castle Refuge in any way they can.