Reposting my old AtB1 conclusions for my convenience

[glitterboy2098]

nice. frankly, the only real thing i'd argue against myself is the conclusion about horses. lack of a horsemanship skill doesn't mean lack of unmutant horses. it just means lack of the skill. just like how in RIFTS, there is no blacksmithing skill...but it's obvious you have people using that skill in the setting.

one could presume that since wild horses are fairly rare in the settings we have info on (east coast, west coast, mexico, england, and austrialia), there isn't much call for a horsemanship skill, since there would be few unmutated horses present there, and odds are those would attract notice from groups opposed to their domestication.

once we get a book on the great plains, i'm sure we'd learn the fate of unmutated horses.

[glitterboy2098]

you probably were right about ATB1. if from nothing else, by defualt due ot their never mentioning it either way. though reading the sourcebooks i had, i got the impression there were still some unmutated animals left, mainly due to the fact that the ecosystems obviously hadn't collapsed, nor were the enviroments of the world described too much differently than they are today. (the low population numbers didn't hurt that impression too.)

the mutagen plpanet things was an interesting idea, and personally i'd say its not impossible for ATB2 to go a similar route. the core reasons would change of course. in ATB1, it was radiation and weird chemicals. in ATB2, it's retroviral gene-modding. so an ATB2 version would have to suppose that some strains of retroviral stuff are still out there, latent or dormant. the biggest issue is that it would need to be a different retroviral than the one that caused the crash, or at least a major mutation of it, since the wilder changes of mutagen planet don't mesh well with ATB2's method.

[glitterboy2098]

Certainly I wouldn't think the engineered virus responsible for AtB2's setting would change sufficiently to generate a mutagen world within 125 years of AtB.*

technically, it shouldn't have made humanoid animals either. genetics just don't work that way normally. but thats something i'm willing to ignore for a fun setting. but a mutagen world scenario would actually be more likely using ATB2, if we allow for the virus to work as shown. basically, human DNA has a lot of "junk" DNA thats reletively inactive. like all creatures. since the virus was not intended to produce mutants, that means it was a random mixing of human and animal genes at first, probably why so many died, but it produced a strain that generate specific benign mutations, which what created the anthromorphic races. but similar mixing would also generate al ot of other mixes, some of which may show no human traits at all. the result of those "junk bits' in the mix. this is what would produce the giant gila monsters, giant bugs, and so on. personally i think we should have more examples of such "wild mutations" in the game.

but even if the above isn't enough, it doesn't have to be a natural result of the crash. IIRC, in one of the adventures in ATB2 an NPC claims to have "found a solution to the mutant animal problem". the idea being to release thousands of tailored viruses intended to return mutants back to their original states. imagine if the EoH tried that. thousands, millions of mutagenic virus strains, infecting not just the intended targets, but jumping species as well? if the crash was the genetic equivilent to a bomb dropping, this is like firing off the worlds entire nuclear arsenal. no species would be left unchanged on earth. and that just to "correct" a small portion of a percent of the ATB worlds intellegent species.

[glitterboy2098]

i understand perfectly. i just think that the idea of a gene warped planet is viable in both. its just in ATB2, you have to use a bit of reasoned inferance to figure out how, since it's not specifically implied.

by allowing random gene-mixing to produce viable creatures (and not fatal cancers, like it would in real life), combined with the ATB2 canon of "it was just a human DNA strand in a virus" vector that was never intended to mutate people, you get the oppertunity for some very interesting alternative mutations. could it produce a "mutagen planet" in 125 years after release? probably not. its implied the virus stopped effecting things well before the current ATB timeframe. you'd have to either macguffin a return of the virus in stronger form, or macguffin a bunch of simialr viruses for the same effect.
but i do think you could see such a world a few thousand years down the line, as natural selection, radiation, and so on effect the already screwed up ecosystems.

personalyl, i'd like to see some of the stuff fro mthe mutagen planet get stuck into ATB2's normal timeframe as examples of "bizzare mutations" as the result of the crash.