Hi everyone! I’ve had a hack in the works for a few months now, working on it on and off when I found the time, and this seems like a good place to share what I have.
FUTURE+SHOCK is a game about art communities in the far future, in a world where humanity has broken the chains of mortality, advanced past simple needs like food and drink. Your Art is what matters now, and maintaining the attention of the world around you is a tricky business when billions of other people are competing with you.
The relevant documents can be found here. What I’ve been struggling with the most is the game’s equivalent of the Heist, which I’ve been calling a Show. To that end, it’s hard to say if the game is playable just yet, but I think I’ve got something good cooking here. What do you think?
Seeing as how you can fork and put your persona into different sleeves I’m really curious what character sheets would look like.
Ditto the community sheet, or however you imagine drawing the various relationship maps. That’s a really cool addition, and feels like it fits well into a game about cultivating fans and becoming as famous as possible.
Overall the various mechanics are similar enough to BitD that I mostly understand how it would work. I would suggest putting the Mechanics chapter before the Play chapter since that seems to have a lot of definitions you need to understand the bonuses given by the community and why downtime actions are important.
There’s a few questions I had when reading that I think playing the game would help clear up. For example: do you get synergy if you fail a roll? How long does the bonus from synergy last? Does every sleeve get a sheet, or do the sleeves just augment your ego sheet? Are synergies tied to sleeves or egos? How do you hold on to something lightly but firmly?
I have been prototyping a bit for the character sheet, which I suppose I should probably be in the document somewhere! It’s nowhere near finished, but I can put up my idea for it.
The idea is that the Sleeves will be on cards that you overlay on the sheet itself, which will have their own stats for harm / gear / load and whatnot.
I’ve toyed with a similar idea for a Warframe hack I’ve put in the backburner ! I’d be really interested in how your idea turns out in play, especially in terms of “balance” - how do you handle getting sleeve xp VS ego xp ? When is it more interesting to invest in sleeve, which can be lost, rather than ego which is more permanent ?
Anyway I really like what I’m seeing with your work. Keep it up !
Hi! Glad to hear that you like it. Warframe is definitely an aesthetic inspiration, if nothing else. (As well as one of the sleeve names. )
The current thought re:XP is that it’s just ego-based, for now. Upgrading your Sleeve (whether that’s adding Action dots or new Gear) will probably be handled through the Downtime equivalent. More of a long-term project thing.
Asking, without having read the the actual content yet but VERY interested in the premise: how much would you say this resembles something like, say, a Scum artistic enclave from Eclipse Phase?
This hack started out as an Eclipse Phase hack (originally titled Eclipse Blades) before I realized it turned into something else. The setting of the game is definitely a lot less grim and gritty than EP, more competitive and cutthroat.
That said, something like the Scum (sans the criminal aspect, as centralized law isn’t really a thing in the Grand Design) could definitely be played. One of the eventual Community types will be Pilots, who focus on traveling between different habitats and spaceports of the solar system.
Yeeeesss, more transhuman FitD games! Eager to see how this develops, and I love how you’ve gone about separating bodies from playbooks - it’s great that we’re finding different ways to approach the same things.
I knew from the start that body-swapping was something I wanted to figure heavily in the game. To that end, I wanted it to be quick and easy to do. I’ve been playing and reading more systems in person as of late, and the thought struck me to utilize that physical space a bit more. The cards add a lot of flexibility to what might otherwise be a procedure of record keeping as well as drawing an erasing dots whenever you’re swapping out.
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