Just what my title says.

Between certain things I've thought about dealing with Star Wars: "Clone Wars" and plot developments on "Primeval" I've been wondering if moral and civil issues dewaling with cloning could be part of or even the focus of an RPG campaign.

The movie The 6th Day might also be a good inspiration for ideas.

Anyone ever had an RPG character who had clones or was him or herself a clone?

Ever had cloning as a main focus of a campaign ? (or one of them?)


- Ed C.

I remember it being the primary focus of a whole RPG, Paranoia. Where your character was one of a number of clones (essentially allowing you to die lots in the game).

It must have been around 15 years since I played it. I can't really remember doing anything serious within that game, but I remember the concept sticking with me because I thought it had some seriously interesting implications.

One of the PCs in the first Nobilis campaign I ever ran ended up keeping a tank full of her own clones, and simply had her soul transferred to a new body whenever the old one happened to die. Personally, I suspect Rei Ayanami from Neon Genesis Evangelion had quite a bit to do with that.

Zentraedi are the cloned warriors used by the Robotech Masters during the age of their empire as a means of suppressing their subject worlds and standing as a line against the Invid.  They were cheap and disposable slaves.

When the humans of Earth came into the possession of the protoculture cloning technology, it was a complete revolution for medicine and genetics.  It also created the moral quandary of whether clones would be a viable method of restoring the population of Earth and building an effective army for defense.  In the end, full clones were outlawed on moral grounds, but the technology was used for partial cloned replacements of lost limbs and to invent whole new fields of genetic medicine.

Since then, the nature of cloning has become a divisive issue.  Clone technology combined with "memory taping" technology taken from the Robotech Masters could replace dead loved ones or create perfect replicas of people.  For years, the nature of constant war in the Earth and Sentinel World sphers prevented this from becoming a real problem, but after the Invid were defeated and the civilized worlds recovered, a black market for such technology sprang up.

Probably the most infamous illegal uses of cloning technology in the Sentinel Alliance are those of the Luciferian Cult.  The leaders of the cult store themselves by the "memory tape" method and have cloned replacements ready to be loaded as soon as the person dies or is killed.  They regularly use cloned soldiers, and have been known to offer potential followers with "perfected bodies."

The Marduuk are also known to use the cloning technology.  The Amalthean faction has long ago abandoned the practice, except for medical purposes similar to those of the Sentinel Alliance, as against their religious belief system.  However, the Darakian faction has a different set of divergent beliefs.  They use Zentraedi style clones with minimal memory engrams and consciousness and extensive cybernetic modification to the brain.  The Darakian Marduuk do not use cloning and memory taping technology to pursue eternal life, because they have firm beliefs of the souls of Marduuk, and feel that all other creatures in the universe lack this quality.

Finally, there are the Seraphim.  Long ago in their history, the Seraphim were trapped in a war.  The other side used a genetic weapon against the Seraphim.  The result was a virus, passed with pandemic ease between members of the race.  It's effect was to mutate all Seraphim males into a separate animalistic species.  This split the Seraphim race and created a war of the mutated males against the females.  The women drove the men from their homeworld, but the species would die.

The Seraphim solution was intensive research into cloning technology.  At first, this was pursued in an attempt to cure the genetic virus.  When that failed, the research was used to present cloning as a replacement for reproduction.  The trick was introducing enough genetic variation.  The Seraphim were extremely succesful in this regard.

The male mutates also found themselves to be facing a quandary.  They too resorted to some cloning for reproductive purposes.  But their newfound violent natures combined with enhanced breeding compatibility and capability encouraged them to wage a campaign of terror across the galaxy and to embrace a vast slave oriented society.

The exiled forces of the Battle Fortress Independence have begun to once again debate the morality of cloned warriors due to a lack of manpower.  So far, those in military command as well as civilian political positions are strongly against such a move.  However, this is a small civilian movement gaining ground and touting the idea that it would be justified to create warrior clones to serve the military for a period of 5 years and then for such clones surviving the service to be granted full citizenship.  Others feel artificial intelligence drones could take on such a duty without the moral question of whether a warrior clone is a human life bred for slavery.

We ran a homegrown Bladerunner game for years. Clone technology freely available, players ending up finding out they were clones, players investing in clones as insurance. Sadi clones being activated by their enemies etc etc etc
All pretty standard Cyberpunk tropes really.
We also played a 2e D&D game where we were all high level mages who turned out to be 'Clones' of their real selves as per the spell.

Quote from: jibbajibba;304590We also played a 2e D&D game where we were all high level mages who turned out to be 'Clones' of their real selves as per the spell.

In Changeling: The Lost, all PCs have "fetches", nearly indistinguishable duplicates that were left behind to take their place when the poor bastards were stolen away into Faerie. This is why abducted mortals typically don't show up in the official reports about missing persons: as far as the rest of the world is concerned, they were never gone in the first place. Now that you've managed to escape back to Earth, you'll no doubt want to do something about the impostor that's been living your life in the meantime. But... that creature might not even know that it isn't you, that even though your family or friends probably never could tell the difference, it's really conjured out of trash and twigs and a shred of your shadow, animated and disguised by the magic of whatever mad godling claimed you as its own. It could be innocent. It could be a trap. So what's the right thing to do about it?

Yes, in my one day to be finished game Glorianna, cloning is central to the game, but not the PCs - it has to do with political succession. The Queen of GLorianna is a clone of the first Queen, as are all the queens in between. This just means they are identical twins separated by years in their birth, not the same person. Same potential, not same person. I've run two on-line games in Glorianna, and cloning, uplifts, downshifts, bioroids, and their rights or lack of same have been central to both.

-clash

Playing CarWars/Autoduel, there were clones which explained why rich kids survived duels. There was an article in Pyramid I think?

I've never really done the clone thing due to the amount of time taken to grow the damn things..

Aren't memory implants actually more interesting from a moral / ethical stance.

If you can take your memory and personality and transfer it to another body whether that body is a vat grown clone or a normal person.

This was explored in 2000 AD in teh Judge child saga and expanded on in Rogue Trooper where personality could be transfered to bio chips. Of course it also appears in moviens Blade runner is the most obvious but from a roleplay perspective the rather crappy Xchange with Stephen Baldwin is possibly a richer source of material

Quote from: jibbajibba;304710Aren't memory implants actually more interesting from a moral / ethical stance.

If you can take your memory and personality and transfer it to another body whether that body is a vat grown clone or a normal person.

This was explored in 2000 AD in teh Judge child saga and expanded on in Rogue Trooper where personality could be transfered to bio chips. Of course it also appears in moviens Blade runner is the most obvious but from a roleplay perspective the rather crappy Xchange with Stephen Baldwin is possibly a richer source of material

OH yeah! I've been using that in my StarCluster games since before I released it. You can switch bodies, put multiple people in the same body, wipe a personality from a body completely, and lots of other stuff - all guaranteed to get a reaction from the peanut gallery. Some old codger pays a mint to a young, healthy, handsome, but poor father who can advance his child with the money. Someone's kidnapping street urchin kids and brainwiping them as a tabula rasa for mind transfers. Suppressing mind development in clones as a fallback body part replacement resource. The possibilities are endless.

-clash