Over the years I’ve home brewed a lot of systems. Initially these were extremely crude, I didn’t know about game design, or balance, and wasn’t aiming to fit a particular theme. (Un?)fortunately most of these are now lost to the sands of time so a detailed post-mortem of what was wrong with them isn’t really possible.
It’s possible that Lord has copies of a few of these, I did ask about a system I built based off of XCOM Enemy Unknown and they had that still floating around in google docs. When I get time I’ll do a post analysing some of these earlier attempts.
That being said, we had fun in spite of the terrible design of these systems, and if you’re reading this as someone getting started with home brewing just go for it. Listen to your players, focus on the fun and evolve!
The following two are systems I’ve made recently, they haven’t yet received a ton of play testing, but each has been through 5 or so sessions so far. If you do happen to read/play them and have feedback I’d love to hear it!
Both of these are inspired by numerous systems, including but not limited to:
I’ve run 2.5 campaigns in this setting. The current iteration is set during the fall of the Tavarin Empire, whereas previous campaigns have been set a few hundred years after this event.
When designing these rules I probably went a little hard on trying to emulate the in your face art style of Mork Borg, but I had fun.
Designing this has occupied most of my spare brain cycles for the past 3 months. I wanted to get back into playing a sci fi campaign as a few friends wanted to play Destroyer of Worlds, however I’d had some reservations about the Alien system during that particular cinematic scenario. Cue hours of thinking and tinkering.
Around this time I’d also heard that Mothership was a pretty slick sci fi horror RPG and decided to check it out, possibly as an option, but also potentially to take some inspiration from. This turned out to be a really good move as Mothership’s game design is awe inspiring, giving me something to aim for in terms of design for character sheets and rule clarity.
This setting doesn’t really have much lore as of yet, but I might write some soon (tm).
alien rpgs review
Chariot of the Gods is the introductory scenario for Free League’s Alien RPG, it comes as part of the starter set and is a relatively lengthy cinematic scenario that casts the crew in a similar situation to the crew of the Nostromo in the original Alien film. I’ve run this scenario for two different groups and have a few thoughts about what I think it does right and what I think could be improved.
tech
As with all digital services spotify has begun to suffer from enshitification. Outside of price hikes this has come in the form of advertising even on premium plans. Now this isn’t product advertising for other companies, this is spotify pushing notifications about new podcasts that I have expressed no interest in down my throat. This upset me enough to cancel because:
borg rpgs review
Building on the massive success of Mork Borg, Stockholm Kartel released Cy_Borg: A digital neon view of a dystopian hellscape where the world itself is on the brink of apocalypse.
alien rpgs review
Destroyer of Worlds is the second cinematic scenario for the Alien RPG, published by Free League. It’s a three act romp across a war torn moon, with the players taking on the roles of colonial marines thrown into a maelstrom of insurgency, bioweapon development and planetary invasion.
mothership rpgs review
The Haunting of Ypsilon-14 is a tri-fold pamphlet adventure for the Mothership RPG. Set on a mining station, the players are visiting the station when people start disappearing. In classic mothership style they then have to survive, solve or save in the ensuing chaos.