It is #MCGoctopiWeek here at Monte Cook Games! Octopi are intelligent, adaptable, and resilient creatures. Just reading their description on Wikipedia can inspire all sorts of adventure ideas for a roleplaying game. Our new glimmer, The Octopi of the Ninth World takes that current-Earth baseline and advances it through a billion years of evolution, resulting in creatures at least as smart as humans, with telepathy and an underwater empire that covers most of the planet.
With their complex brains and organizational skills, the octopi of the Ninth World have mastered impressive technology, manipulated and bred other creatures to be food and servants, and created a society greater than anything in human memory. They remain aloof from lesser creatures and all but ignore the surface world, much as a typical human ignores the idea of settlements on the moon—possible, but irrelevant to their lives and goals.
You can even use this supplement outside of the Ninth World, such as having a recursion in The Strange where octopi are the dominant race (and perhaps requiring the player characters to translate into octopus bodies), a science-fiction Cypher System campaign where the octopi are aggressive aliens, or a superhero campaign where a hyper-evolved octopus is the primary villain.
To celebrate the release of The Octopi of the Ninth World, we’ve been posting fun an interesting octopus-related things on social media, like photos of octopi at the Seattle Aquarium, an octopus who grabbed a diver’s camera to take a selfie video, and a recipe for a blueberry octo-pie, with more to follow over the next few days.
There are two ways you can participate in #MCGoctopiWeek.
- Post a photo of yourself with your favorite octopus (a real one, toy, t-shirt, drawing, etc.), tag us on Facebook or Twitter and use #MCGoctopiWeek, and at the end of the week we’ll pick our favorite.
- Webster’s New World College Dictionary and The Oxford English Dictionary list “octopi,” “octopodes,” and “octopuses” as valid plurals of “octopus,” but we’d like to know your preference! Tag us with your reply and we’ll post the results at the end of the week.
