Creature Feature


Creature Feature Attributes

Level: 4
Laws: Magic, Mad Science
Playable Races: Human
Foci: Conducts Weird Science, Entertains, Is Licensed to Carry, Leads, Looks For Trouble, Operates Undercover, Solves Mysteries, Wields Two Weapons At Once, Works the System
Skills:
Connection to the Strange: Various Gates.
Connection to Earth: Various Gates.
Age and Size: Developed Recursion
Spark: 25%
Trait: Lucky


What A Recursor Knows About Creature Feature

  • Magic and Mad Science both work here, but they aren't a common part of day-to-day life.
  • Creature Feature is a pleasant and bustling world very much like the America of the 1950s.
  • It's a world of progress, in which society is a bit more formal (and chauvinistic) than that of modern Earth. But it has its share of seedy bars, rusty old freighters, and dingy labs as well.


The monster movie is a concept nearly as old as cinema itself, but the genre hit its stride in the 1930s and arguably reached its peak of popularity in the 1950s. At least, movies of that era are the source of fictional leakage that produced the Creature Feature recursion.

At a glance, Creature Feature might be indistinguishable from an Earth of the 1950s–albeit an Earth almost entirely lacking in color. While it isn’t a truly black-and-white world, brilliant colors are non-existent; almost everything is painted in desaturated shades of near-gray. Dense fog or the darkness of night, often more common than it seems it should be, sometimes conceal this oddity from newly-arrived recursors.

The inhabitants of Creature Feature dress, speak, and follow the cultural norms of ’50s. More accurately, they follow the norms of American society in that era–in non-American regions, cultures generally reflect a 1950s Hollywood version of themselves. Although the geography of Creature Feature is greatly condensed, its inhabitants generally believe they live on Earth.

Creature Feature is ruled by the laws of Magic and Mad Science, though in a very low-key manner–so much so that their presence isn’t generally obvious. Indeed, while a researcher might labor away at a device that harnesses the power of a brain in a jar, or a creature of the night (or a lab escapee) might terrorize those it comes across, most inhabitants of Creature Feature find such occurrences as astonishing as Earth’s inhabitants would. 99.9% of day-to-day activity is completely compatible with standard physics.

While the majority of Creature Feature’s inhabitants live what appears to be mundane lives, there are always expeditions setting out to black lagoons, skull islands, or the center of the Earth. There are creatures being irradiated in Pacific waters or the desert Southwest, and rogue scientists building teleportation machines gone awry or attaching disembodied arms to jar-enclosed brains. And the night is prone to the predations of both old-world wolfmen and vampires, along with new generations of slime from space or horribly large spiders. Almost invariably, the people of Creature Feature who find themselves face-to-face with these dangers start out completely ignorant of the threat.