Wretched New Flesh - Next from the Red Room

Wretched New Flesh - Postcards from Avalidad

Today I start working on the next Wretched thing, the new version of Postcards from Avalidad, tentatively named Wretched New Flesh. Here's a preview:

Wretched New Flesh - Postcards from Avalidad is a near-future sci-fi/horror game inspired by William S. Burroughs, David Cronenberg, William Gibson, and Clive Barker. The story is centred on Takeda Technologies, a Japanese corporation conducting research in genetics, cybernetics, augmented and virtual reality, and biotechnology.

They had a significant breakthrough, sometime before the beginning of the story, by dealing with supernatural entities, whose leading representative in our world lives in disguise as a human millionaire. Hideo Kobayashi, head of a vast economic empire, furnished Takeda with future tech for reverse engineering in exchange for control over their business and the products of their research.

Though Takeda accepted the deal – and sold his soul to the "Devil" in the process – he has managed to conceal some of the more ambitious projects from Kobayashi.

At least until the story starts.

This darkly surreal tech-noir game setting combines cyber, bio and psi punk to create a Burroughsian nightmare world of decadence, drugs, Libertarianism, violence, glamour and oppression. By default, characters are expected to be ZoneSec operatives or executives for Takeda Technologies, but other roles such as Avalidad’s celebrities, fiscal royalty and seedy underbelly, are obviously possible, depending on the type of scenario you are planning.

Wretched New Flesh takes place in an undetermined time, about thirty years in the future. It is influenced by William S. Burroughs' works such as Naked Lunch, the Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket that Exploded), William Gibson's Sprawl and Bridge trilogies, most of David Cronenberg's films, and Clive Barker's Hellbound Heart and The Scarlet Gospels. There are some references to other authors, such as Paul Auster and Kurt Vonnegut, but they weren't major sources of inspiration.