From: peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: Assorted Thoughts on a "Furry" World Setting
Organization: NeoSoft Communications Services -- (713) 684-5900
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1992 15:05:04 GMT

When I was running a furry RPG, I never explained the background, but the
basic schema was (cribbed from "Androids"):

	Ecodisaster threatening, and pundits are saying that the only
	species remaining will be humans and domesticated animals. A
	cult starts up where people volunteer to have endangered species
	genomes implanted in them, like a cross between viruses and
	organelles. Oh sure, there are CDROMs (by this time, an old
	fashioned but known-reliable technology) full of gene sequences,
	and frozen fertilized eggs, and so on, but what if things
	get really bad? Who's going to save the genetic diversity of
	Earth?

	Well, things don't get as bad as they thought, but it turns
	out that civilization was a little less robust than expected.
	A few generations later these implanted genomes start expressing
	themselves. It's also discovered that they're contagious... not
	very, but with a generations-long effective incubation period
	pretty much everyone on Earth is infected.
	
	There's a lot of pain and suffering, since most recombinations
	aren't viable, but a dramatic effort by the last high-techs (in
	orbit) averts total disaster, and the new races are stabilised.
	Some core (human) genes are inhibited, some exogenes are similarly
	cut out. The toughest problem turned out to be resolving allergies,
	rather than physical differences, and some unhappy individuals are
	allergic to other races.

	The high-techs settle the asteroid belt, but quarantine the Earth:
	they don't want to go through this sort of thing in their fragile
	ecosystems. Anything the Belters interpret as high level technology 
	gets blasted from orbit. There *is* quite a bit of tech left, but
	it's all hidden from remote observation *and* belt spies (volunteers
	who can never go home again, and old fashioned traitors).

	Biology: like mitochondria, virtually all the exogenes are from
	the mother, so crosses are always of the mother's race. Interbreeding
	is fairly rare since different races frequently have different
	sets of core genes inhibited, but it is possible so they *are*
	races, not species. Allergies are a problem, as I mentioned before.
	The new races tend to be longer lived than present day humans,
	and stronger, but autoimmune diseases and immune system failures
	are one of the main causes of death.

	Magic: a side effect of the whole process is the ability to tap
	the fifth force (insert psychobabble here). Belters don't know much
	about this, and of course they can't reproduce it.

The breakdown was long enough ago, and things were messed up enough, that
most people don't know the details. There are competing religions with
competing stories about the creation of the races: that they were toys,
slaves, fashion statements, and so on. Who knows, the events that led to
the breakdown may have been caused by some of this. One of the stranger
says that the theriomorphs are the root stock and the Belters were a
race created by them for space exploration: more efficient cooling
system, more generalized, designed to operate in spacesuits and an
environment where a variety of body forms would be a dangerous luxury.
-- 
Peter da Silva.  <peter@sugar.neosoft.com>.
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