So, the last two to three months have been super hectic at the day job. I’m still working on Blood and Chrome; I took on a second supposedly smaller, easier personal Cypher project to break up the monotony. At least I was smart enough not to talk about it until now. I’ll talk details when I get it out of its development morass. I promise.
Anyway, the day job really threw a wrench into my design time. When I get home, I’m too mentally drained to do little more than watch TV and fall asleep frequently. So I’ve been looking forward to returning to Blood and Chrome and the other thing.
As frustrating as I find all this incomplete work, my brain drops a new bomb on me. Over the last week or so (despite work not yet settling down), my brain decided this was the perfect time to run amok with inspiration. Sleep is apparently not much of an option right now; the hamster is burning up his wheel. I made some decent progress on the other thing and the related game I plan to run in the coming weeks. Some words were committed to the CypherPunk setting, but I’m still not making the progress I hoped for.
How is this possible?
Boy, I’m glad I asked that question for you. Because none of that is everything my brain wants or seems to need to work on. Over the last two weeks, I have been driven to take fairly extensive notes on not one but two whole (admittedly mini) RPGs. One is an interesting thought experiment utilizing dice pools of mixed dice. At the same time, the other uses a 2d12 mechanism I’ve been thinking about for probably 2 years because a friend said, “If you ever make your own RPG, it should primarily use d12s because they don’t get any love.”
I imagine the d12s got kicked back to the front of my brain because Critical Role is releasing a 2d12 system that is, fortunately, still very different from mine. Anyway, as this ruleset may or may not ever see more than a couple of blog posts, I thought I’d start transferring some of my notes here and see if there was any interest in Marlowe House pursuing this idea.
The Pitch: A post-apocalyptic, mutant-filled ruin crawler with a crunchy-enough cinematic rules-lite system. It’s a little OSR, a little modern, and never exclusionary.
The Setting in Brief: Sometime in the mid to late 21st century, an alien vessel entered the solar system, answering at long last humanity’s question of “Are we alone in the universe?” That would be the only question it answered.
Our visitors surveyed the outer planets for almost two decades, particularly interested in Jupiter. Despite humanity’s best efforts, no contact was made with the aliens. A short eighteen years after the arrival of the alien craft, Jupiter ignited. The aliens, in a period of time thought impossible, turned our solar system into a binary star system. Finally, with their first objective accomplished, the aliens turned their attention to the inner planets. They obliterated the fledgling Martian research station and smashed through numerous satellites and the ISS as if they were meaningless space junk. Mountain-sized and roughly egg-shaped pods descended gently into the earth’s oceans while other super-massive ships hovered over numerous cities across the globe.
What happened next was ecological disasters on undreamt levels. The aliens were busy terraforming Earth. Humanity was of no more concern to them than vermin. Kill the problematic ones and let the others alone while you work. Wildfires, tornados, hurricane superstorms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, new invasive alien flora species and fauna. Somewhere between fifty and a hundred years of fierce, relentless change under silent alien domination, and then, as strangely as it started, most alien pods and ships just departed. For no discernable reason, the architects of this new world vanished.
The alien invasion kicked humanity back into the dark ages and a world no longer ours.
If you like this content, please give it a like and maybe even a share so that I can see if there is any interest in pursuing this in a way other than me scratching an itch I can’t otherwise reach. Check back in the next few days, and I’ll share the draft character sheet and perhaps tease a few of the rules.
GAM3 g33k 