1KM1KT Free RPG Community

As I posted to , I'm starting on my 24 hour RPG challenge now.

I've chosen Geodesic Gnomes as my theme. And quite possibly the actual final name for the game too.

My goal is to match the original 24 hour challenge - 24 pages in 24 hours. I’ll be putting it together using Open Office and will release the entire game under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.

As the day goes by I will be adding material to this thread and to my blog to document my efforts, trials and tribulations.

1. Geodesic Gnomes has me immediately thinking of little people living in the walls of geodesic domes. So I’m thinking of a game in a cyberpunk style where the players take on the roles of these mutated waifs living in the walls of arcology cities.

2. Writing this with my girlfriend’s cat attached to me is difficult. She keeps trying to take over my attention by alternating her attacks between myself and my keyboard.

Alright, with the theme firmly in mind (Geodesic Gnomes - Redefining the High Tech Low Life), it's time to start designing. Instead of starting with writing, I'm going straight into layout so I'll have somewhere to put all the text I'll hopefully write, as well as a look and feel to work around when I make the character sheet for the game.

A quick hunt through stock photo websites for geodesic domes and an even quicker abortive hunt through DaFont for some cool fonts, and I've got a cover concept. I also think I'm going to use a digest format for the book - half of a letter page per page, so I can print it out and saddle-stitch it myself. And here's a quick draft of the cover:

Now I'm going to settle in and write up a bunch of background information about the game setting before I start working on rules and so on.

Man, I wish I could draw. It would get the picture across so much better if I could just add an illustration of a gnome-mutant human with all kinds of salvaged gear standing beside a "typical" sci-fi human in a security outfit or something. Sigh.

Keep ploughing on Dyson, it's a big challenge, just get stuck in!

Of Gnomes & Domes

As a response to global temperature extremes, heavy weather and extreme damage to the ozone layer, by 2280 the cities of Terra were in the same state as those established on Luna and Mars. The entire Terran Hegemony lived their lives inside the geodesic domes that maintain their atmosphere as well as acted as a protective shield against the hostilities of the universe and even of other cities. Even with heavy industries set up outside the domes, many domes became polluted; their atmospheres thick, toxic and incredibly terratogenic. “Dome children” became depressingly common, mutated and deformed by the effects of their toxic environments.

Societal pressures moved the urban homeless and poor out of the domed buildings and the city streets. Given the option of moving outside the domes (a death sentence), they instead moved into the one place left – the dome superstructure itself. While the cities worked to clean up the toxic environments they had generated, little attention was given to the non-living environments of the dome superstructure. Now, four generations later (or more in some of the Earthside domes like Paris and San Diego), the domes have become the hereditary homes of a subrace of malnourished mutated humans known as the gnomes. Meanwhile, the cities contained within the domes have cleaned up their acts and are finally mostly clear of the toxins that created the gnomes in the first place – as long as you stay out of the dome superstructure. While deformations are still frighteningly common among natural childbirths, 98% of all children born within the cities are selected for their genetics and designed in vitro instead of in vivo.

In a world that is perpetually 'plugged in' and where beauty and perfect genetics can be bought the gnomes are particular oddities. They live within the domes but are not part of the dome citizenry. They are “off the grid”, having neither identification, nor access to conventional health care or education. They scavenge what they need, and build what they can't scavenge. Theyoe are tinkerers, rebuilders, salvagers and recyclers. They are nomads, tunnel-rats, urban guerrilas, and even a pipeline for people, hardware and information in and out of the dome cities. They are the new underground – little people with dirty skin and dirtier genes who do what it takes to survive.

I've settled on an interior layout and font choice I think I can live with and am hammering through the background material for the game before I really start on the mechanics. I want to be sure I've got the concepts firmly pounded into my brain before I start writing up stats and skills and stuff that don't end up meshing with the proposed setting. I wish I could draw so I could illustrate some of my ideas to really get the feeling across. Further, lacking illustrations means I have to be more creative with the layout to break up the text so it doesn't just turn into a giant block of text to grind through when reading the game.

So here's the sample of the interior layout.

Gah! Grey is going to be a killer for the printers! Can you change it to white, sir?

Maybe once I'm done. I figure I'll do two editions - one for printer one for on-screen. The primary one though, the one I'm working on for the competition, is style-oriented and I'm sticking to the grey. One I've finished it and uploaded it, I'll go through and change the background to white as well as try to set the pagination properly for printing it as a digest-style booklet for people who are printing it at home. But that'll be outside the 24 hour period of the competition.

I'm having a great time working up the background for this game, but I'm getting more and more afraid of tackling the game design proper - I haven't put any thought into the system whatsoever, and it's starting to loom up as something I'm going to have to tackle, and tackle HARD, before I'm a third done if I want to include a sample adventure and character sheet in the final product.