The Blob... Could It Be A Terraforming Bioweapon?

 

 

I love old Sci Fi movies. The Blob is a classic 1958 movie I was recently rewatching and besides the catchy theme song you can sing and dance to it occurred to me The Blob has some interesting potentials for Sci Fi based gaming.

In the movie a space rock lands on Earth and hatches. 

It then begins absorbing people and animals getting bigger and bigger. It oozes and blobs over and into everywhere.  

   As I rewatched this classic I began to muse on its origins and purpose. Is it just a creature that has evolved to devour all animal life on a planet and the somehow launches little meteorite eggs into to space to begin the cycle all over again? How smart is it really? Is it a creature designed by an alien species to devour other life forms? Could it serve a bigger purpose? 

I decided The Blob could be a bioengineered lifeform that serves as a biological weapon for an advanced alien culture. All an advanced space faring civilization would have to do is keep the meteorite like eggs in the freezer (they are probably larger eggs on the ship and get smaller as they burn off some of its protective casing on entering the atmosphere during planet fall) and upon discovering another civilization fire a few eggs off to the planet and leave. The Blob eggs hatch and start eating all the animal life, no more potential future rival civilization! The creators of such a creature probably have a built in mechanism for dealing with their creation. 

It then occurred to me The Blob lifeform could serve a secondary purpose as well, terraforming! Imagine an alien civilization finding planets that can support life but not quite to their liking. Such planets could be filled with potentially dangerous wildlife, rival civilizations, perhaps the atmosphere mixture isn’t optimal for their needs, but the climate and gravity are good enough in general. Thus the aliens drop a few baby Blob eggs off. The Blobs eat the animals and their waste products begin changing the atmosphere first not in a noticeable way but as the blobs grow and grow their emissions grow and grow. Soon the planet in but the coldest of locals is consumed by the Blobs till they run out of food and die from starvation. These planet covering blobs by this point have already changed the atmosphere, suffocated land plants by simply covering them, and now their decaying bodies completely change the atmosphere. Any surviving life in the cold climates die because they can not breathe the air and the water ways and oceans become poisoned by the decaying run off of dead Blobs. At a later time the great Ark Terraforming Ships show up and repopulate the planet with new flora and fauna that appeals to the sensibilities of the conquering Alien race. Once the planet is properly seeded with new lifeforms and certified by the Terraforming Authority as safe the Colonization can begin. Why bother with troops, planetary bombardment, expensive bloody wars,  massive expensive terraforming plants when a properly deployed bio weapon will do it all. As a bonus the Alien race might even be able to use the indigenous now extinct race’s infrastructure of buildings and roads when beginning their colonization activities before building architecture structures they prefer. 

The Blob could also be a Terraforming experiment that got away from its creators, propagated (when it was not suppose to), and is now spreading through space like a plague. It may have even consumed its creators!  

The Blob creatures are pretty tough and not effected by much so if you use them in your gaming make them hard to kill... in the movie extreme cold makes them inert but does not kill them, they recoil from cold or cold substances. Make them tough, make them multiply and make them deadly, players need to find that one thing besides a nuclear strike that will kill them. Use them as weapons by evil Aliens or escaped experiments or critters escaped from the zoo... but terrorize the players with oozing blobbing death.

Movie makers and fans of horror RPG in the original movie somewhere in the Arctic they dropped the Blob off, with climate change now timing is right for The Blob Climate Change. 

Happy Gaming!