British publisher Modiphius Entertainment gives a more optimistic spin on the post-apocalypse Dreams and machines, a new tabletop role-playing game. Pre-orders for the starter set begin today ahead of its official release at Gen Con in August.
“I wanted to create something that feels good because the world is a grim place and there are plenty of grim games out there,” said Chris Birch, Founder and CEO of Modiphius.
Birch is no stranger to subverting genres, having brought meaty World War II action to Lovecraftian horror Achung! Cthulhua game partly inspired by the Great Patriotic War Museum in Minsk and the stories it tells of heroes who saw war against the Nazis as nearly impossible but still wanted to go down. Dreams and machines is set hundreds of years after a war against a rogue AI known as the Builder devastated Evera Prime’s futuristic society. It explores how humanity has found ways to survive and thrive in the face of the constant threat of mutated wildlife, technocultists and long-dormant mechs brought back to life.
Modiphius recruited a diverse group of freelance writers, including Logan Bose, Mary Tokuda, and Jen Kretchmer to work on the book’s playable factions. The Dreamers are inspired in part by the cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo people in Mesa Verde, Coloradoand avoid using electricity and mechanical engineering instead of focusing on biology and chemistry.
“They’re like Ewoks on acid,” Birch said. “They know how to build traps for mechs. They are very good at non-advanced technology.”
Image: Modiphius Entertainment
Rivers—people who use their boats to carry supplies and news to isolated settlements—draw from modern day truck drivers, Louisiana Bayou culture, and Western naval hierarchy. Spears pass down their titular weapons from generation to generation, never leaving anyone behind, developing complex prosthetics to help those affected by growing up in radioactive zones.
Players can use the starter set to build a character by choosing cards that represent their origins in one of these groups, along with an archetype (a job as a mediator or guardian) and their temperament, such as wary or manipulative. Together they provide everything needed to navigate the simplified version of Modiphius’ 2d20 system, including starting gear and a tech level, which limits what type of gear the character can use.
As in other Modiphius games, players and the gamemaster alternate between using momentum and threat to change the circumstances of a scene and introduce new truths or complications to fit the story. But instead of each character having separate tracks for stress and fortune, the two are merged into a ghost, which serves as both a resource for players to use to pursue their goals and what to draw from to avoid injury or from to be beaten to the fight. The starter set contains tokens that can be used to represent all of the game’s resources, as well as cards for equipment the players find.
A character’s temperament not only provides hints for roleplaying, but also determines how they regain courage and what happens to them when they run out. The exhausted character will automatically fail checks related to any of the four main attributes because they are physically tired or have given in to despair.
The box also contains a reference book with rules plus cards for the players and the game master, a quick tutorial scenario to introduce the mechanics and a larger adventure book. It shows off the new setting, with players visiting New Mossgrove, a settlement built near a buried mecha whose head is used as a scenic point for couples in love. Handouts, cards, and location cards provide a way to further immerse players in the world of the game. Some of these represent bits of knowledge that can also grant in-game rewards if taken to the correct non-player character.
“If you put 50 pages in the book, people aren’t going to read it, but we break it into fragments,” Birch said. “Archivists will pay dearly for knowledge of the ancient world.”
If players can save New Mossgrove from its troubles, a conflict involving dealing with giant centipedes and a nanotech dragon, they’ll be offered a ramshackle house to use as a base of operations. Numerous plot hooks are presented at the end of the adventure booklet, but future Dreams and machines releases will also continue the story.
Additional products are planned for dreams & machines, including a player guide, game master’s guide, campaign guide and game master’s toolkit. The game supports long-running stories where characters can achieve their goals and retire, paving the way for players to try out a new character concept while still enjoying some of the benefits of the old.
“If you’re the first person to give up their character for death or retirement, you get to unlock all the shiny stuff,” said Birch. “I tried to build in the concept that people going through death and retiring is not a bad thing. We want people to develop their story.”
All books are full of sketches, notes and even images of pressed flowers or bird feathers. They are meant for Kari, a young girl who found a mech that doesn’t seem to want to hurt anyone. She drew a smiley on the machine and named him Abe. Their adventures will be chronicled in an ongoing novel and woven into the game’s lore.
“Imagine a 12-year-old girl getting our hands on our rule book and commenting,” Birch said. “It’s this scary, dangerous future with these machines trying to kill everyone and destroying cities, yet it has a wonderfully childish approach to it.”
The Dreams and machines Starter set is available for pre-order on the Modiphius web store for $35, with first deliveries in August. There will also be a quantity for sale at Gen Con.