Mutant Chronicles

For the film based on this role-playing game, see Mutant Chronicles (film).

Mutant Chronicles

Mutant Chronicles cover
Designer(s)	Nils Gullikson, Michael Stenmark, Henrik Strandberg, Magnus Seter, Jerker Sojdelius, Stefan Thulin, Fredrik Malmberg
Publisher(s)	Target Games
Publication date	February 1993
Genre(s)	Techno-fantasy, thriller
System(s)	Custom

Mutant Chronicles is a pen-and-paper role-playing game set in a post-apocalyptic world, originally published in 1993. It has spawned a franchise of collectible card games, miniature wargames, video games, novels, comic books, and a film of the same title based on the game world.

Mutant Chronicles was developed by the Swedish company Target Games as a successor of their earlier Mutant RPG series. The rights to the game are now owned by Paradox Entertainment.^[1]

Story

The game takes place in a distant future where the Earth has long since been depleted of natural resources and abandoned. Humanity has spread to the worlds of Venus, Mars, Mercury, Luna (the first settlement following the exodus from Earth), and the Asteroid Belt.

Since the exodus from Earth the traditional nation-states of the world have merged into five huge megacorporations: Bauhaus, styled after the culture of continental Europe, the American-influenced Capitol, the Japanese-themed Mishima, the British-inspired Imperial, and the ultra-secretive ambiguous Cybertronic, all of whom use private military forces to fight for resources. Luna (the Moon) itself is considered to be neutral ground and is home to the massive city-state known as Luna City. The other major power of this universe is the Brotherhood, a fanatical religious organization formed to meet the threat of the Dark Legion, an ancient evil comprising five "Dark Apostles" and their horde of hideous mutants.

The reign of the Dark Legion began as mankind set foot on Nero, a fictional tenth planet beyond the orbit of Pluto, where they discovered a citadel. As they entered, the Imperial Conquistadors – a group of interplanetary explorers – accidentally broke the First Seal Of Repulsion, a thin ring of salt spread around the citadel. Inside, a mysterious iron plate was found, and as it was touched, the Dark Legion was brought to our dimension, and along with it, the Dark Symmetry.

The Dark Symmetry prevents computers and other electronic devices from functioning reliably, if at all, and initially caused complete chaos, and then a forced adaptation of the technology used by mankind. The Dark Legion is capable of faster than light-travel, utilizing certain points in space, much like wormholes.

The Dark Legion is the enemy of all mankind and commands the most powerful armies of the solar system, including Legionnaires, resurrected corpses of fallen Megacorp heroes; Necromutants, hideously modified humanoids; Centurions, the lethal lieutenants of the Dark Legion; and Nepharites, fearsome, towering behemoths of unimaginable power.

New edition

Between 2006 and 2009, a Swedish game company COG Games held the license rights to publish a new edition of the role-playing game.^[2] In September 2009, COG's failure to deliver any results resulted in their license being revoked.^[3]

Spin-offs

• Doomtrooper, a collectible card game where the players commands warriors, magic and resources against their opponents.
• Dark Eden, a second collectible card game designed by Bryan Winter based on the tribes remaining on planet Earth. Genesis, an expansion set, was never released.^[4]
• Warzone, a miniature wargame much like Warhammer 40,000. A Warzone real-time strategy video game was in the process of being made but never published.
• The Doom Troopers video game was released for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis systems.
• A trilogy of three novels set in this universe were published by Penguin Books to boost the franchise and widen the perspective of the role-players.
• The Siege of the Citadel is a board game where players fight their way through a citadel filled with monsters from the Dark Legion.
• Fury of the Clansmen and Blood Berets are two-player board games where players (or teams of players) could recreate battles between Imperial troops and the Dark Legion.
• Acclaim Comics published a set of five Golgotha comics in 1996. Issue #5 was a source book with minimal info about some of the characters from the comics. Each of the comics came packaged with one of four promotional cards for the Doomtrooper CCG.
• Fantasy Flight Games published a collectible miniatures game set in the Mutant Chronicles universe and was released in August 2008.
• Mutant Chronicles is the basis for an independent film Mutant Chronicles, directed by Simon Hunter.

See also

• Kult

References

1. ^ Pressmeddelande Stockholm at the Wayback Machine (archived May 15, 2001) (Swedish)
2. ^ "Delayed release". COG Games. http://coggames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5479&highlight=#5479. Retrieved June 17, 2008. 
3. ^ "Closing statement". COG Games. http://www.coggames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=879. Retrieved September 17, 2009. 
4. ^ Winter, Bryan. "Welcome to Dark Eden Central". thewinternet.com. http://www.thewinternet.com/doomtrooper/darkeden/index.html. Retrieved January 25, 2007.