RPGaDay 2023, Day 6

Something New ...

I love this question. Favourite game you never get to play.

I have to split the vote here, between three games from the same publisher. Not Lightspress Media this time, but Frostbyte Books.

M-Space is The Design Mechanism’s Mythras In Space. A d100 game engine lifted from Mythras, itself a clone of the engine of Chaosium’s BRP Roleplaying, M-Space is in the same kind of place as Mongoose Publishing’s Legend, the predecessor to Mythras.

M-Space is simplified, and beautiful. Like everything Lightspress Media have ever come up with, I want to run with the M-Space ball, to create worlds Ursula K LeGuin would recognise - The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed in particular.

I’ve also created a basic outline of a world based on John Wyndham’s The Trouble With Lichen, where the women scientists of the world discover an anagathic compound secrete by a rare lichen. Consuming that compound makes the consumer immortal … but only women and non-binary /agender / genderqueer / genderfluid women. Cis men, the immortality drug will not touch.

I want to create so many stories within this framework. Do you want to create a setting based on Roger Price’s The Tomorrow People or Quatermass? Do you fancy creating a setting like Farscape or an episodic anthology of one-shot episodes a la The Twilight Zone? M-Space can give you all of these, without the baggage of Traveller.

Imagine a 1920s in a very different universe, where humanity reaches for the stars, discovers artefacts left behind by an alien species, and discover too late that there is a disease which is now spreading throughout this corner of the universe, which drives its victims mad before it destroys them.

Welcome to Odd Soot, where human protagonists combine the body horror of Quatermass with the weirdness of a Swedish TV police procedural show and the pulp of Buck Rogers. Set on Doggerland, a land which does not exist in this reality, Odd Soot is part medical drama, part Scandinavian police drama, part existential horror, part pulp, and it all blends seamlessly into a wonderfully atmospheric environment which can welcome odd characters straight out of Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John if you like.

Yeah, I love this game, with its flawed characters and its weird premise, but hell if I can ever get to play it.

Then there’s this one, which is one of the most minimalist games I have ever seen. Comae Engine is the simplest form of d100 roleplaying you can ever conceive of. It is as weird as it appears on the cover.

There is no setting for this book, similar to M-Space above. You have to create your own, and it can be any setting you like, really - even an AU where we, in 2023, never heard of covid-19, and watched all our chancer governments of fascist corruption across the world get to experience the inside of a wicker man.

I mean, look at this art.

Oh! Bonus game I have never played …

This game. I seriously need to play a visitor to the island of al-Amarja.