Owe My Soul to the Company Store, out now on itch.io

 My ZQ project from this year is out in PDF - a 28 page Mothership social adventure in Isotelus Complex, a Jovian colony-in-progress.

Bug offices, forge rumors, assassinate officials, and wrangle competing factions under the shadow of Callisto as the Complex's first wave of colonists approaches, radical ideologies spread among the workers, provocateurs sabotage the colony for political gain, and a months-long takeover scheme finally comes to fruition. It contains:

• 16 major NPCs (and about half a dozen minor), split between baseline humans and "labor bodies" - licensed human minds downloaded into 11-foot-tall cyborg bugs. Each one with their own set of missions, goals, and rewards.
• A 72-room map of the Complex's surface half and orbital space elevator.
• 5 overarching factions, a 7-day timeline of the future, and a set of final moves the Complex's rival owners keep in reserve to throw both at a labor body revolt and each other.
• A whole lot of the color yellow.  

 

Isotelus Complex on Kickstarter

Isotelus Complex, a blogpost written on a whim in response to a GLOGtober prompt, has lightly taken over my life. So, with Zine Quest here, I've decided to "do" "something" about it. 

Owe My Soul to the Company Store is a transhumanist social adventure for Mothership, set on an under-construction habitat on Callisto. Hundreds of people work in orbit - while at the same time, copies of their minds grind away at the surface, loaded into immense chitinous Labor Bodies.

Isotelus is barely half-finished, and already falling apart. The space elevator hits its maximum stress level with every launch. Six ComSec rent-a-cops threw a dockworker out an airlock. Radical pamphlets spread like wildfire - and soon, the first wave of colonists will arrive. 

Down on the surface, the Labor Bodies scheme - some hope to lead a workers' uprising, and free Isotelus from the distant public-private partnership responsible for it. Others simply want to be left alone until their artificially-shortened lifespans tick away. 

Owe My Soul will be a full, printed zine, with graphic design and editing by Sam Sorensen and illustration by Locheil. 

The Kickstarter will run here, for the next two weeks.

Orbiters Local 519 2e, now out on itch.io

Orbiters Local 519 is a sci-fi dungeoncrawler about disassembling derelict starships, made for open tables and one-shots. It has a focus on instability - as the players move through the derelict, it falls apart around them, with walls collapsing, pipes leaking, and entire rooms possibly separating from the core.

Along with natural damage, the players are given tools to change the environment themselves: welding torches, plasma cutters, explosives, and barricades.

The post-Kickstarter version found on itch.io now includes GM advice, an expanded bestiary, and a large ship generator that determines ship type, disaster, room contents, and more.

The image below links you to the game's itch.io page.

Orbiters Local 519 2e, now funding on Kickstarter!

Orbiters Local 519, the sci-fi dungeoncrawler I released last April, is getting an updated release on Kickstarter.

The new edition keeps the streamlined, Event Die-based exploration of the original, while updating the classes to give more interesting choices and expanding the GM's toolkit with derelict generators and an expanded bestiary. 

Additionally, the new edition is built with open tables in mind, supporting that playstyle by, for example, tracking required resources like Oxygen tracked on a derelict-to-derelict basis; on the start of your shift, you get a certain amount. When you're done, whatever's left over is confiscated by the Company. This helps ease the amount of bookkeeping required as players (and the equipment they own) come in and out.

The new edition also includes art by Locheil, of the Nothic's Eye, and layout by kahva, of Anywhither.

Click on the image below to see the Kickstarter page, which includes a more detailed pitch of the new edition.

King of Dust Zine!

 My cyberpunk management game, King of Dust, has finally been released publicly - you can buy it on itch.io here for $4. Thanks for your patience - it's taken a lot longer to release this than I had hoped it would.

King of Dust is Live!

Edit: King of Dust is now released on itch.io - you can buy it here.

The Kickstarter for King of Dust, the secret zine project I talked about in my last post, is live!

King of Dust is a rules-light cyberpunk RPG with a focus on domain-level play - you play as the Board of Directors of a cyberpunk megacorporation, managing your corporation's Resources in an abstracted management phase, before switching to the mission phase, where you control a group of Associates - vatgrown soldiers used for particularly dangerous missions. You can take a look at the campaign by clicking on the image below - there's a free alpha ruleset, some art examples, and a more thorough description.

Posts that actually contain something useful return next week - sorry about all the not that.