It’s about time that I actually hold myself accountable somewhat for saying that I’m working on creative projects, rather than actually doing them. As such, the obvious route is to post about them on a blog nobody except for a small number of people who are literally paid to read my other posts. I digress. These posts should happen every couple of weeks to document the progress or lack therof in writing the tabletop rpg I started in 2018. Three years ago.
In may of 2018 I had the wise idea of writing my own tabletop rpg in order to satiate my desire for a grounded zombie survival game to play with my mates and a set of dice. Humble beginnings of course, invariably lead to uncontrollable ideacrafting and runaway creative trains. As such, the project spiralled for the last two and a half years until I trashed 100% of the lore and 95% of the game mechanics, leaving me with an action rpg where the player characters were either mercenaries or slaves in a corporate-industrial hellscape built atop the ruins of Australia, levelled in a mysterious incident known colloquially as “the schism”.
That leaves me in a tough spot, summarised with the question “how the fuck did I even let the project spiral this hard.” The answer’s simple, a lack of accountability. How do I hold myself accountable? Logging my progress in plain sight, on this blog. Why here, isn’t this a folio site? Isn’t this primarily for university? Because this is my writing. I need to put it somewhere it can be seen, at least hypothetically, so it doesn’t just rot on my harddrive. Also, saves me writing this in a journal I suppose.
A setting, and some core mechanics. By some, I of course mean a stupifying amount of almost esoteric gameplay mechanics ranging from duelling to determining just which dice to use, and how.
The year is 2150.
The world is in ruin. Suffering and subjugation run rampant as corporations and governments fight amongst themselves for the scraps of unpolluted, arable land. The climate passed the tipping point a century ago. The ice-caps are a distant memory, bordering on myth. The ocean is an acidic soup of waste and refuse. The air is bitter and toxic. You are a serf in all but name. Scrounging what you can in order to rent stale bread and catch the latest movie. You’re medicated, either of your own volition or by that of a professional. Regardless, you struggle to afford it. One day you make the mistake of stepping out of line. Political dissidence, petty thievery, murder. Your crime is irrelevant, the punishment is the same, a fine greater than anything you could earn in ten lifetimes and a one-way ticket to hell on earth. You are sent in chains to live and die the new world, to The Red Sands.
There’s a little more, but I’m not showing my full hand on the first post.
In short, the rpg is set on the continent of Australia 135 years after a mysterious cataclysmic event completely obliterates Melbourne, Sydney, and a great portion of the land between, rendering it all nigh uninhabitable. What happened? Irrelevant, what’s done is done and that was done a long time ago. All that remains in the south-east of the continent are the ruins of the old world and the promise of riches. Riches? you ask. A weird side effect of this cataclysm was the emergence of a super-fuel. Sanguine red, viscous, and nausiating, this mystery goo is 1000x more energy rich than its weight in uranium, so rich that it allows people who infuse their blood with it to cast pseudo-magic. So energy rich that it’s highly saught after by every major nation and corporate interest, who all see it as a cure to their woes. Everyone’s trying to get their slice of the cake and they’re all sending their goons, mercenaries, and soldiers to fight for that slice and everyone else’s slices. You can either be a wrench or the gears. But what is this fuel really? Maybe it’s a way off this rock, maybe mass-migration to mars is viable with this stuff, maybe it’s actually the blood of an old forgotten god buried beneath the wastes that is slowly waking up as humanity draws from its veins like leeches. Who knows for sure really. Wait, I said short. Here’s the shortest answer. It’s a colonialism metaphor intertangled with an environmentalism metaphor where you can juggle mall cops with a sword.
Until next update,
Thomas B