Wretched New Flesh: Postcards from Avalidad

Wretched New Flesh: Postcards from Avalidad

Vendor
Red Room
Regular price
£11.99
Sale price
£11.99
Tax included.

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,

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. Though this setting deals with technological achievements in genetics, biotechnology, cybernetics and augmented reality, the author doesn't keep up with science and technology and will be happy to stay as ignorant as he is.

This is mainly a surreal and body horror game set in the future, but definitely not hard sci-fi. Most of the technological breakthroughs made by Takeda Technologies and its parent company, Kobayashi Corporation, were not accomplished because of regular scientific research but through dealings with demonic entities for which time and space
can be bent. Not that they can travel through time and space quite at will – they aren't that powerful – but they can, sometimes, access parallel universes.

It was from one of our own possible futures the prototypes available for researchers were taken.

I am not delving into technobabble in Postcards from Avalidad. How this future technology works will remain mostly unexplained. The most important things here are
the relationships between characters and all the intrigue that ensues. The technical aspects can, and will, be overlooked.