Nerding Day: Otherverse America – Part 1🌭

Quick: name the person you’d most like to see write a near-future sci-fi roleplaying game about a second Civil War sparked by a bloody conflict over reproductive rights.

Everyone said Chris Field, the guy who wrote the hentai RPG where you shit yourself to get plus five to AC, right? Good. Awesome. Let’s talk about Otherverse America.

Where were you when the historic “Ogalada [sic] Souix [sic]” abortion clinic was wiped off the map by a post-human terrorist codenamed Life Tank? Were you in a Malibu comic from 1993? It doesn’t matter. Otherverse America doesn’t actually take place during the Second American Civil War. That would be too easy. No, it’s set decades after the Treaty of Boston ended it. Who won? Well, which side had access to gay pagan wizards and metahuman technology?

Those poor, non-rainbow magic-having pro-life idiots didn’t stand a chance. And if you were expecting a gritty, down-to-earth depiction of a nation torn asunder by religious conflict, well, yes, Otherverse America is kind of that, just like Black Tokyo was kind of about the horrors of demonic sexual violence. But maybe it’s also about cartoon superheroes and gene mods and technowarriors? It’s hard to tell. Otherverse America has no table of contents, and I would describe its formatting and organizational choices as: not applicable.

Stats bleed into fictional history, tables and sidebars pop up out of nowhere, and early 3D imagery sits alongside crude hand-drawn depictions of transhuman anti-abortion cyberdocs sitting coquettishly in front of actual prenatal ultrasounds.

It’s a lot. And keep in mind Chris Field wrote this well before the advent of generative AI. If nothing else, he’s dedicated. Not dedicated enough to arrange a book in any kind of useful way, maybe, but dedicated enough to come up with all kinds of genetic modifications that the theoretical players of a game set in this world can select, which, I think you’ll agree, are all totally normal.

Ok, fine. That’s something that people probably would do if it were possible! At times like this, you can tell that Chris is trying to take his setting seriously. He’s following his premise to its natural conclusion and arriving at the kind of social commentary which would be at home in any number of dystopian YA books from the early 2010s. And then there’s stuff that, well, isn’t.

“It’s part of the setting!” Chris screams. “Everyone puts titty milk in their cereal in the future because there’s no factory farming anymore! Luxury milk! From the human cow!” Sure, Chris. Now, which collapsed institution of industrial civilization explains this one?

See, uh, grocery stores don’t exist in the 22nd century, so people have to grow their own clits.

God, there are so many of these — gene mods, I mean, not clits — and while a few of them are useful for battle and adventure, a lot of them are about sex. The generous angle here would be that it’s realistic that people would use genetic engineering for getting freaky and that including more than just combat abilities makes for a more well-rounded roleplaying experience. Counterpoint: the guy who wrote this also invented a dragon who breathes aerosolized semen. Keep that in mind as you’re trying to decide whether “Hivelove” is a flavorful, interesting sci-fi premise or the feverish invention of a brain that is 99% loose jizz sloshing around in a human skull.

This could be the whole article. We could just talk about the gene mods and cyber-implants that give women prostates so they can enjoy anal sex more, that make everyone squirt, that let you lay eggs instead of carrying a baby to term. There’s one called “Moe Facesculpt!” That’s “moe” as in “anime child,” not The Simpsons or The Three Stooges, for anyone who is normal.

There are some neat ideas here, like hackers and criminals inventing ways to fuck with genetically modified people, but again, this is Chris A. Field we’re talking about. You know it’s not going to stop with gene-hacking politicians to give them heart attacks.

In the grim darkness of the future, there are only cum-spewing cyberdragons. How did we get here?

Long story short, gay rights groups, pro-choice organizations, and AIDS activists joined forces to form the Covenant of the Goddess Universal. They were all early adopters of gene mods that gave women more control over reproduction and allowed gay couples to have kids without needing a third person in the mix. STDs were eliminated and everyone lived in a cum-soaked paradise, but Evangelicals weren’t happy about it, so they started doing (more) domestic terrorism. In response, the Covenant created a gay pagan strike force codenamed RAINBOW Liberty. And then aliens showed up? Maybe? They’re called the Lifechain, and I think they’re explained in another book. There are Half Grey people and that’s why some people have superpowers? I don’t fucking know, man.

Anyway, if you read my article on Black Tokyo you might remember that Chris has other distinctive qualities besides crippling horniness and a complete inability to organize his thoughts. He also fucking loves peppering his work with unrelated quotes in an effort to add an air of sophistication, or perhaps a humorous juxtaposition.

So here he is using a quote from The Devil Wears Prada to introduce the liberal microstate, which I’d assumed was fully half of the US but in fact is a loose assortment of neighborhoods strung throughout the country that are constantly fucking and wield advanced cybermagic. Or maybe there are full-on Choicer cities and states? Chris says they have a constitutional monarchy, but it also seems like he’s describing a world where the Choicer and Lifer nations exist within the greater United States.

To me, this implies that in addition to the many-clitted egg-laying technowitches of the Choicer nation and the cyborg death commandos of the Lifer state, there are also just normal Americans walking around. And honestly? I kind of like that. It reminds me of Omegaverse fanfiction where the vast majority of the population is just the normal human Betas who are trying to maintain civilization while Alphas and Omegas are trying to fuck it apart all the time. So here’s a high-level look at the Choicer society.

Wow, that seems pretty gr— ah. Hm. Thirteen to fifteen, huh? You’re going to see more and more of this, but Chris definitely paints the Choicers as the “good guys” in this brave new world. So maybe he’s just trying to paint them as a culture that goes too far in its pursuit of sexual freedoms? Or maybe it’s insane to give the benefit of the doubt to a guy who, just a few pages earlier, was jacking off to the idea of drinking titty milk.

We get a lot of details about the Choicer nation and its organization, and Chris points out that they’re just as religious as the Lifers. It’s a matrilineal theocracy run by the Neo-Witch Church that rules from an artificial island in the San Francisco Bay sometimes called Aradia and sometimes called Araida and which is protected by force fields and lasers. Even when he’s not explicitly writing anime bullshit, Chris is writing anime bullshit and — lest we forget — drawing it.

One detail here might surprise you: gay people have “fallen out of fashion” in the liberal utopia of the future. Most people have bisexuality genetically programmed by their parents at birth, but there’s a faction of young people who rebel against their omnisexual society by being full-on gay or hetero. Good for them. But beware, rebel gays and straights, of the Apollo Psi-Field!

These things just look like stereo equipment and are commercially available at Sacred Feminine Radio Shack, so in this world you could go over to a neighbor’s housewarming party without knowing they’ve got the Field That Makes You Bi set up. And speaking of stupid names for things, this:

Improbably, Lady Sylvia Moondark is not the dumbest name for a character in Otherverse America. That honor goes to LORD CHARLES STARSPIRAL, whose name is so fucking idiotic that it causes a buffer overflow and wraps around to being sick as hell.

Chris opens the next section on Choicer celebrities and sports with a quote from I Love Bees, a sequence of words that means nothing to anybody under 35 years old. He says that Choicer culture is basically the dominant culture on the planet, and even in Lifer territories they bootleg Choicer “mesh dramas” and sneak into Choicer neighborhoods to watch light, fairly frivolous adventures as well as distorted, highly fictionalized accounts of Phallus Space.

That’s basically the only mention of “Phallus Space” in the book, by the way. Sloppy writing? Perhaps. Or maybe it’s keen worldbuilding, the type that raises questions in the reader rather than rushing to fill out every blank space on the map. What could Phallus Space possibly be? What could the movies be getting wrong about it? Are there people who have been to Phallus Space, if it is indeed a physical location in the cosmos, who are furious about future gay witch Hollywood’s misrepresentation of it? Chris has prompted us to wonder about so much with this throwaway sentence. And isn’t that the mark of a true shaper of the fantastic? I wonder how Chris is going to characterize the defeated Lifer pseudo-nation.

Sure, they’re a military dictatorship whose citizens are undereducated, poor felons, but you do have to hand it to them in one particular respect: they don’t fuck kids. There’s a whole section on pedophilia and age of consent laws, and Chris treats this subject with all of the care it demands: by putting it next to a picture of Catholic battle cyborg.

I got distracted by the dope robot for a second, but uh oh! I’m breaking the glass labeled “in case of Chris A. Field talking about child pornography.” What’s inside? Why, it’s something called “catminding!” This should be fun.

Oh. It’s not fun. I’m breaking the second, different glass labeled “Chris A. Field is still, improbably, talking about childlike sex slaves.” And good news! It’s not a sex thing this time.

It’s a guy I can only describe as fanart of a non-existent Deus Ex mod where everyone only ever talks about stopping abortions in the same way that everyone in Pokémon games only ever talks about Pokémon.

Pages and pages of text tell us that the Lifers are bitter, ugly morons whose love of graphic depictions of mutilated fetuses is only equaled by their adoration of SMG-wielding, heavily-pregnant paramilitaries.

This stuff overshoots satire and — I can’t believe I’m saying this — ends up actually feeling kind of mean-spirited. Like, we know that the right-wing Evangelical movement is essentially evil. But Chris has created less of a plausible-sounding world where embattled bigots fester in hatred of their genetically superior lib conquerors than a version of Captain Planet where instead of polluting for no real reason, the bad guys are barely-literate jazz-loving necrophiliacs.

Sorry, I’m just re-reading that and it looks like I wrote “jazz-loving necrophiliacs.” That can’t be right.

Hey, wasn’t this supposed to be a roleplaying game? We haven’t had any stats or powers in a while. The Choicers got all kinds of cool gene mods. What advantages might a Lifer character have? How about being someone who almost got aborted, but then wasn’t?

I want you to do something for me. Guess what kind of powers being a “survivor of abortion” might give your RPG character. Some kind of healing factor? Perhaps the ability to manipulate fate? Really mull it over, then come back and see how wrong you were.

You get better at arguing that people shouldn’t do abortions. And if you make a successful Bluff against someone who is pro-choice, you get an action point which you could spend, just theoretically, on using your cum breath attack once. Remember to do it after you recover from the emotional exhaustion of trauma dumping, but before you go to bed, otherwise you’re leaving cum on the proverbial table.

We are now barely 100 pages into Otherverse America. This is a 320 page book. God help us all.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: David Shull, who is a full force advocate of titty milk in your cereal. The future is now!