itch.io

Thanks for such an in-depth review! We’re a new team, so we’re always looking to improve, we really appreciate it.

The lore and setting of Pantopica are close to our hearts, any future versions or expanded games based on this quickstart are going to be full of it, so we’re glad you like it.

If you’re planning to run it for some players soon, please let us know how it goes!

(And not a criticism of your criticism, but in case you missed it - you don’t combine an action rating and attribute rating to roll like WOD or it’s ilk - you just roll the action rating! Dice pools are comparatively small in forged in the dark systems.)

We've been making homebrews and the like as friends in our gaming group for years now, and we figured a jam would be a great opportunity to start making things that are a bit more presentable and actually legible to people besides ourselves. Hence this being our first published work as a team!

The size of the game mostly comes down to the Forged in the Dark rules format that it's based on, it's a design space we're very comfortable in so we decided to start there; cyberpunk specifically is a genre we've been interested in for a really long time and it fit the theme of this jam excellently, so it all sort of fell into place.

Since the very basic rules were adapted from an SRD and added to with things like the Power system, our new playbooks and our modified harm rules, creating the example session was actually what took most of the work! It helps that we're a three-person team, so the scope could afford to be a lot bigger than a solo project.

Thanks for asking!

A delightfully bleak and depressingly accurate game. The easy restart had me looping upwards of five times, each time thinking about what I could do differently, but of course that never ended up mattering. Each replay was just another roll of the dice, nothing more. All in all a deeply sobering and genuinely relatable experience.

An excellent, really interesting read. Especially enjoyed the flagging of ideas like planned obsolescence and the extrapolation of capitalism's most modern 'innovations' and the way it's effected the world's recent crises into a cyberpunk future setting.