Casting Shadows

This week’s seed is for The Morrow Project  by Timeline Ltd.  As spring and cherry blossom fever grips the South Korean nation and CNN merrily goes about its business of selling fear about its northern neighbor, I feel a little post apocalyptic adventuring might be in order.

My Saturday Seeds also reappear on Ancient Scroll on random Saturdays~

The seed

The seed presents a situation which a team might encounter on their own, or hear about in rumors.

Planting the seed

The seed can be planted at any time and place that the team is interacting with new people. It relies on visual recognition of a face, so it can either be a team member spotting a person who looks like them or one of their team, a towns-person mistaking the team member for someone they know, or another project team commenting on the marked similarity between the character and someone they have met in their surveys.

The Details

As surprising as this should be for the characters, this does not seem to come as much of a surprise to the towns-people. Without a doubt, the two people are like identical twins, apart from whatever differences circumstance would have on hair, general health, and apparent age. The sound alike, and seem to have similar outlooks and basic personalities.

Tests, should any be done, reveal a moderate probability of a familial relationship. The problem is that the tests, if thorough enough, also reveal that the gene sequence was engineered. Observation of the town or interaction with the people will also lead to this postulation as apparently the family line nearly always produces males that look like that in each generation, sometimes more than one or two.

With this revelation, the rest of the family begins to stand out to the eyes of the team as they see the same face reflected or sometimes perfectly reproduced in the faces and eyes of many in the town. All ages, from babe to death-bed bear a touch of that specific gene sequence.

What’s going on

The mystery into how and when such a strange solution to the problems facing a world heading for nuclear war may have come about may serve as a mere oddity for your players, or it may lead them on quests to see if there are other projects out there, not unlike their own, or at least other agendas from the dark days before the war that have only now come to light in a post-apocalyptic glow.

Did someone really engineer a family so resistant to change that it almost breeds the same person true, generation after generation? Why would they do that? More importantly how? Even more importantly, how did they get the character’s genes in the first place?

Enjoy~