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I'm looking at the possibility of merging elements of After the Bomb into Splicers. I'm considering two options:

1. “Dumb” Mutant Animals as War Mounts. Kind of like the Mutant Riding Insects found in Mutants Down Under, the idea is to adapt the Mutant Animal creation rules to set up a “basic frame” for a War Mount, which then gets further customized and ruggedized by Splicer Bio-Enhancements: basically, Biotics with animal intelligence and more or less animal form. (For this purpose, Engineers are unlikely to bother with Human Features, but will jack up the Size into the double digits, of not already there, to make them ridable. Alternately, non-ridable “dumb animals” could be Engineered to give the Packmasters alternatives to the Gorehounds.)

2. Smart Mutant Animals as player characters. This would splice steps 2 and 4 from After the Bomb into the Splicer character creation sequence, between steps 1 and 2 and between steps 4 and 5, respectively. Alternately, AtB character creation could be used as is to represent the bulk of the population of the planet outside of the Great Houses. Given that AtB tends to be built mostly around a pre-industrial setting, the inability to safely touch metal isn't nearly as much of a problem for them as it would be for modern Earth.

I haven't checked to see if the Bio-E costs in the two games are compatible. I hope that they are; but I doubt it. If they are, my thought is to combine the Bio-E pools from the OCC and the animal form, and let the player choose how to spend it. As well, I'd probably just ban Animal Psionics; Splicers makes a point of saying that the supernatural elements common in other Palladium games are out of place here. And it simplifies things, in that you don't need to consider the implications of Natural Mechanical Genius or Techno-Mind.

Among the Mutant Animal Powers, two would be game changers for the Splicers setting: Flight would greatly expand the Great Houses' aerial options, and Digging/Tunneling/Excavation would open up avenues for dealing with the Machine that as written, it's not equipped to deal with. Most of the others already have superior Splicer counterparts.

There probably wouldn't be an Empire of Humanity in this combined setting, per se: the Machine takes its place as the “big bad”. And besides, the inability to touch metal would cripple the EoH's industrial base and eliminate their robots and power armor; what would be left would be little different from the various animal kingdoms. The various animal kingdoms, on the other hand, would likely double as Great Houses. Assuming you could put up with the silliness of New Kennel and N'Yak.

Thoughts?

The "Empire of Humanity" could be a widespread faction of domestic terrorists looking to return to a purely human genome, even as they're being hunted by the machines.

Humans often do self-destructive things, and a bunch of human genome supremacists meeting in secret and plotting to firebomb the gene pools feels about right.

I think this is a solid idea, and have some potentially relevant work on the idea I'll dig up. I'll poke around the couple of Splicers products eventually, but have a couple of thoughts for until I do, since I don't recall the answers.

Are animals even affected by the nanomachine plague? If not I could see a place for sentient uplifts whom don't cross whatever threshold of human DNA required to initiate a response.

Second, is there a rule somewhere about quadrupeds having an increased carrying capacity? I might be carrying that over from D&D3e, but found it a concern when I was working on a Biotic model shaped as an unmodified horse, whose main body concealed a conversion organ for refueling items in the field. I didn't want to allocate the points for Supernatural Strength, but without it the sucka couldn't reasonably drag a cart or carry an unarmored rider.

Going with the intent of Spicers, I'd say that any Mutant Animal with sufficient intelligence to be a suitable player character would be subject to the Nanotech Plague. The ones being used as War Mounts might be exempt; but maybe not, as Splicers seems to assume that even Host Armor ends up carrying organic weapons, implying that if a guy in Host Armor picked up a sword or a gun, it would trigger the Plague response. Though maybe not; I don't know. I'll just stick with the overall idea that unless you're a Technojacker, you don't get to use anything metal based, even second-hand. It's too easy of a loophole. (Then again, the fact that plastics, ceramics, and other non-organic and nonmetallic materials exist opens this same loophole: a human can't handle a sword with his bare hands; but why can't he wield it wearing plastic gauntlets?)

As far as I can tell, there's nothing about quadrupeds having increased carrying capacity. AtB does provide “Brute Strength” and “Beastly Strength” (and “Crushing Strength”, which is explicitly equivalent to supernatural strength) as part of the Enhanced P.S. Mutant Animal Power: Brute Strength is 20x/50x, and Beastly Strength is 100x/200x. You generally find these in the write-ups for pack animals.

at least some kinds of animals don't trigger the nanoplague. in particular, animals that are more likely to be associated with humans are more likely to trigger a response.

having said that, the machine is not mindless and the nanoplague is not some ancient lost technique that cannot be adjusted. if a bunch of sapient animals start showing up and taking advantage of not triggering the nanoplague, the nanoplague will be modified to include them as targets. you might get a brief period of time where the mutant animals are safe from the nanoplague, but that's about it.

having said that... to be honest, for most combat uses splicers biotech is not inferior to the machine's technology anyways. or at least, not the technology the machine mass-produces anyways. even in the areas that technology would be superior, it is debatable whether the resistance would be able to take advantage of it... for example, the machine is likely far more capable of, say, deploying near-endless volleys of missiles by reloading a single launcher than the biotech equivalent. however, it isn't like the resistance has the ability to mass-produce missiles even if they could use missile launchers, so organic rockets are probably not much worse of an option for them anyways even if they are something that can only be fired from a specific launcher every so often.

on the other hand, being able to use a computer could be a very valuable ability... though it isn't like there aren't technojackers who can do that already.

(note: where it might be particularly nice is in other areas... the resistance likely pours a lot more resources into enhancing their weapons, armour, warmounts, etc than they do into areas like entertainment or luxury goods. in the shadowrun setting, there are machines that start off with soy products as a base and a bunch of additives and can produce a huge variety of recipes to suit anyone's tastes, for example, but I would suspect that a lot of the food in the splicers setting is more towards the efficient end of things than towards producing a great variety of tastes, textures, and such. being able to use such a machine may not be of great importance to the players, but it is entirely possible that most people in the splicers universe - including their characters - have far less variety in their daily diets and may be excited just to have something they haven't before, and even more so if it is simulating luxury foods or foods that they don't get to eat on a regular basis. just remember, eventually the nanoplague will start working to them and they'll lose their luxury meals eventually... just another reason to seek revenge on the machine! ).