Well, yeah, sorry, I somehow forgot about the "super-psychic-shared-consciousness" part of the scenario -- and that was rather important to the plot.
That was also a critical part of my "Superior City" campaign's meta-story explanation (and hence critical to the evil-villainous plan that the PCs had reason to thwart, before the secret cabal went all Evangelion on us and did the equivalent of turning everyone into orange Tang as part of their path to techno-godhood ;) ). That is, a bit of hand-wavy mumbo-jumbo about human brains possessing some tiny bit of psychic power, such that if you got MILLIONS -- maybe even BILLIONS (we avoided exact numbers) of them -- logged into a shared VR experience at once then ... a dash of Jungean Collective Unconscious becomes Collective CONSCIOUS, and presto-change-o! REALITY-BENDING!
The way quantum mechanics gets reported in popular culture (e.g., Schroedinger's Cat treated as if it's supposed to be a SERIOUS model of quantum mechanics, the anthropic principle of human observation CHANGING reality, toying with multiverses and such philosophical toys as "Quantum Immortality") and it starts to sound like some sort of magical witch's brew that, if you DID toss in a few billion psyches, maybe it's not so far-fetched to imagine it WOULD start rending reality on a quantum level. ;D (I have my doubts.)
Anyway, "Avatars" provided some fun thought experiments (as well as a bit of existentialist horror on the side).
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That was also a critical part of my "Superior City" campaign's meta-story explanation (and hence critical to the evil-villainous plan that the PCs had reason to thwart, before the secret cabal went all Evangelion on us and did the equivalent of turning everyone into orange Tang as part of their path to techno-godhood ;) ). That is, a bit of hand-wavy mumbo-jumbo about human brains possessing some tiny bit of psychic power, such that if you got MILLIONS -- maybe even BILLIONS (we avoided exact numbers) of them -- logged into a shared VR experience at once then ... a dash of Jungean Collective Unconscious becomes Collective CONSCIOUS, and presto-change-o! REALITY-BENDING!
The way quantum mechanics gets reported in popular culture (e.g., Schroedinger's Cat treated as if it's supposed to be a SERIOUS model of quantum mechanics, the anthropic principle of human observation CHANGING reality, toying with multiverses and such philosophical toys as "Quantum Immortality") and it starts to sound like some sort of magical witch's brew that, if you DID toss in a few billion psyches, maybe it's not so far-fetched to imagine it WOULD start rending reality on a quantum level. ;D (I have my doubts.)
Anyway, "Avatars" provided some fun thought experiments (as well as a bit of existentialist horror on the side).