Science Fiction

Submissions related to the science fiction genre. If you would like us to post your science fiction submission, please send it to use using our submission form!

Joy Division is a near-future role playing game of technological horror. Characters are agents of the Joy Division, a small but well-funded transnational espionage agency concerned with advanced, destabilizing technologies. Its mission is to neutralize major threats that might arise from transformative technologies, including planetary-scale biocide, genocide and related crimes against humanity, nonconsensual alterations of the human genome, and, where necessary, consensual but radical transformations of human identity. Characters will use a range of quasi-legal and illegal means - targeted investments, blackmail, commercial espionage, misinformation campaigns, kidnappings — to neutralize or limit technological threats.

The Change

In 1924 the writer Virginia Woolf noted that “on or about December 191 human character changed.” ** She was at least a century premature. With apologies to Ms. Woolf, who chose that date due to a provocative modernist art exhibit and expansion of the suffrage, you haven”t experienced change in character until your only daughter has her brain pulped and her personality embedded in an AI platform. Your values aren”t tested until you and your kind are viewed as expendable animals by a hypercaste of fantastically enhanced and ferociously careless hybrid machine-humans. And you can”t fully appreciate post-impressionist painting until you see the blue of the eastern horizon ripped to a congealing mass of doughy gray by invisible chains of poorly-programmed nanobots feasting on atmospheric gases, perforating the sky like termites crossbred with neutron bombs. I can”t tell you exactly when this change will come ? February 229 or June 238 or thereabouts ? because when it does there will be no one left to care, at least nothing that will concern itself with calendars or human character… Which is why we have to stop it.

By the late 2th century a number of futurists projected that accelerating technological developments would converge in the not too distant future in a Singularity ? an exponential, explosive transformation of machines, society, and human nature. *** Some celebrated the possibility that artificial intelligences and related transhumanist innovations would free mankind from the limits of human biology. Others doubted that these predictions were anything more than wishful thinking or science fiction ? techno-optimism run amok. Meanwhile a subset of the world”s business, scientific, and political elites grew concerned. They noted trends in robotics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology and related fields, that, while intriguing and potentially profitable in the short term, were socially problematic when extrapolated along a curve of accelerating innovation.

Doubting that nation states or intergovernmental organizations were willing or able to track and regulate the coming singularity/transhumanist revolution, in 211 a group of the concerned convened a session on “Transformative Technologies” on the sidelines of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland. Participants drafted a declaration calling for a balance between innovation and regulation. They chartered a new organization, the Coalition on the Responsible use of Transformative Technologies (CRTT), to carry out public education, research and advocacy. Behind the scenes, conference organizers consulted with several highly-placed sympathizers who were unable or unwilling to sign the declaration. This inner circle provided funding for an Immediate Response Division (IRD). The IRD was designed as the clandestine arm of the CRTT. IRD agents would intervene surreptitiously but aggressively to stop or delay the launch of problematic technologies. And that”s what the IRD did. Although no one inside or out of the CRTT-IRD, except possibly the most unflinching bureaucrat, used that designation… They all called it the Joy Division.

Left Coast - You play a semi-famous science fiction author living in 196s California. You and your peers are all scrabbling for the Big Break, held back by your everyday lives and problems - marriage, children, rent. So they feud with each other, struggle not to go nuts under the strain of their immense creativity and try to determine which of them is really a disguised extra-terrestrial. Left Coast is inspired by reading about Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard. It was written for the October Ronnies and uses the keywords ‘fight’ and ‘cosmos’.

Endless summer evenings in verging-on-seedy suburbs and cities. Your neighbours are off-kilter; some wild, some loose, some going quietly crazy in their own private ways; all living in the vapour trails of Beatnik, Hippy & Me generation revolutions (you can take for granted there are a lot of drugs around).

This is the California of idealised memory - a time that combines the best creative influences of the 195s, 6s & 7s.

Lost in Smaragdis is a pulp-style science fiction adventure RPG inspired by the lostrace, lost-world type stories of authors like H. Rider Haggard, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A. Merritt and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Smaragdis, the Emerald World, is an alien yet earthlike planet inhabited by a collection of lost tribes and civilizations living in terror of dinosaurs and a tyrannical Conquistador kingdom. Scattered across Smaragdis are the relics of a vanished alien civilization - mysterious mind-gems that can grant strange powers but at the risk of madness, gangly robotic Demons, gigantic flying machines that can rain down lightning on command, and enigmatic monuments of stupendous scale that may hold the secrets of the cosmos. A portal in the Upper Amazon jungle can transport those who wander into it to Smaragdis, but if there are any portals leading back to Earth they have yet to be found.

Play as a member of an ensemble cast on a science-fiction television show. Survive the episode and upstage the other actors! An RPG where you can actually win.

In Scene Stealers, you’re playing a member of an ensemble cast of a science fiction action show that’s primarily watched by teenage boys. Teenage boys that belong to the science club. Each game takes place during one episode of the show. During the episode the cast members are not only trying to overcome obstacles, they’re also trying to steal the spotlight from the other cast members.

Each episode is broken up into several ?scenes?. These scenes are basic major chunks of time: The crew breaking into an abandoned space station is a scene, running from a bunch of angry natives is a scene, fighting a bunch of bad guys with zapguns is a scene.

1.2 These Games We Play

The crew is captured by the Gamesters of Omegacron-5 and are forced to fight in a gladiatorial arena. Between battles, they try to convince their fellow slaves to stage a revolt against the Gamesters.

Here’s the section where every role-playing game describes what a role-playing game is. It’s pretty straight forward. It’s a GAME. Where you PLAY a ROLE. Look, just go to http://landfill.thesnakefarm.com/aboutrpgs.php and read a delightful comparison between Our Town and a cyberpunk game.

There’s going to be a group of people sitting around a table or at least in the same room with each other. All of the players (except one) control an actor in a television show. (This character is referred to as either an “actor”, “character”, or “cast member” intermittently throughout these rules. They all mean about the same thing.) The other player controls everyone and everything else as well as describes the settings, determines the results of the cast’s actions, and pretty much knows the whole plot of the episode before the others start to play. As this is a game that is about a television show, we’re tempted to call this player something cute like “the Director” or “the Executive Producer” or “the Gene Roddenberry”, but we’ll call him “the GM” instead. (”The JMS” would work in a pinch.)

All the people that aren’t the GM are referred to as “players”, even though the GM is playing the game with everyone else. Role-playing game terminology is pretty silly that way.

1.3 Set Up

On a botched attempt at rescuing a stranded vessel, the crew is mistaken for pirates. Can they prove their innocence to the system authorities before the third moon rise? Each player chooses a character sheet (or creates his or her own cast member using the incredibly simple actor creation rules that follow). The other characters aren’t used in this episode. Separate the plot cards from the script cards and place both decks face down in the center of the table. You’ll also need a couple six-sided dice and some markers to keep track of how much star power the actor has.

The script deck contains 36 cards, all of which can be used to help your cast member outshine the others or add complications to the plots. Each player gets to draw five of these cards. With a full cast of six people, six of these cards will not be used.

If you have more cast members than six, go ahead and divvy up the cards so everyone has the same amount. For this version of the game, there’s just some squares you can cut out and use as cards. If this was created for something called ?7 Day RPG?, these would be actual cards with artwork and everything.