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).
The current system I’m running - using the Cy_Borg setting and a set of rules inspired by Mausritter.
I’ve had a ton of fun so far with this campaign, particularly around world building between sessions. This has mostly taken the form of news headlines, adverts, and social media feeds.
You can find the rules here: Cyberpunk Ruleset.
And a character building app here.
I also made this groovy mocked up live stream for one of the headlines in game.
mothership rpgs review
Our cyberpunk campaign has reached a season finale and as such needs the full group present for the next session, this meant that we ended up having enough players to play but not enough for cyberpunk.
review books
Written by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin (CoR) is an evolutionary sci fi novel set in a star system that humans had just begun terraforming before an almost complete technological collapse destroyed human civilization. It is a sequel to Children of Time but picks up some time after with a new cast of characters.
rpgs homebrew journal
In my previous post I’d started a campaign journal for a post apocalyptic setting. The first session went great, the players enjoyed it and then…
rpgs homebrew journal
The other week I ran the first session of a post apocalyptic hex crawl TRPG I’m calling, for lack of a better name, Dominion of the Sword. I transplanted some of the lore I’d written for a post apocalyptic wargame to come up with the seed for a setting and then fleshed out the local area and set the players loose.
osr rpgs review
Mausritter is probably the cutest TRPG I’ve ever encountered, players take on the role of mouse adventurers on a quest for treasure in the giant and dangerous world. I picked up a copy of the boxed set, primarily because I thought it would fit with some of players wishes for a more light hearted and fantastical game. However, once I’d read through the rules I realised that this is one of the best written systems I’ve ever read and played.