Lunch Time at the RPG Cafe

Welcome to Blue Shift, an RPG set in a strange far-away future. The game itself is meant to be played in short episodes of an hour or less, and it is both comic and absurd. Think Heavy Metal meets Futurama.

Setting: City X

A vast semi-organized collection of stuff stretches from one end of this old, rundown universe to the other, and semi-organized, semi-sentient things live all along the way, from hive minds of dust mites to humans, more or less, to mounds of waste suddenly become aware. Everything is coming together in a beautiful blue shift, blue being the the background color of our universe on its way to becoming the next singularity, the next Big Bang, the next universe. This is City X, the largest sprawl that ever was, ever will be. 

Where Characters Come From

Perhaps you were born in this manner: a female took information from the universe, sometimes the old-fashioned way, in the form of semen, but sometimes much more postmodern, such as a meme, and sometimes really old-fashioned, such as a virus, added it to her own information, grew you in a nutrient sac in her body, and then when you were just too damned big, expelled you in a scream of bloody torment. 

Or perhaps you simply emerged from the terminal ooze and muck of a decrepit, waste-filled universe. 

That the second is possible points to a huge difference between the far, far future and now. A trillion years in the future, everything in the universe has been used and reused by intelligent beings, by great interstellar empires whose technology verged on the magical, who had mastered the art of assembling and reassembling matter. When these empires fell apart, as all empires do, some of their technology, rather than fall apart, went feral. The beautiful bacteria that turned toxic oils into flowers might have overrun a planet where those “toxic oils” were actually an important part of the ecosystem. And sometimes, the feral tech met other feral tech, and even stranger things happened. Another society might have genetically engineered some of its people to accept certain bacterial changes to their DNA to allow them to better accept medical treatments. Those genetic changes were never undone, and some of their descendants might one day sprout flowers due to the mix of the two techs.

Thus in the garbage mound that is the far future, accountant Stanmek Lobacum, might be reborn as something strange and twisted. The original Stan had come from a great hyperspatial empire that had encoded his genetic structure and skills on to a few pieces of light, and that little bit of Stan met a nano-computer that could read anything, including stray light waves encoded with enough data to build a person, and then some --DNA Plus. The nano-computer, desperate to be useful again, finds the detritus of a society that used autonomous birth sacs as weapons of war. These sacs grow super-soldiers, and are supported and fed by anything organic. The sentient AI miniature computer activates such a sac. It is tiny at first, devouring insects and plants and discarded food and such. And then as it gets bigger, it attaches to a tree or an animal or even a person. And thus, a copy of Stanmek Lobacum’s genes and skills grows inside it, and, if it is successful, he comes out fully formed, an accountant super-soldier. 

But it doesn’t end there. Other societies created memes, drugs, and more insidious methods of control. Stanmek, upon being born, might hear a jingle that invades his brain and tells him what he must do: Become a talk show host. That is his destiny. And if the jingle has affected a few more people, the local TV station (or its equivalent) might even accept him. On the other hand, he might wander the universe in vain, seeking but never finding his destined role as a talk show host, taking jobs as a merc company’s accountant, holding court during breaks where he asks his fellow mercs to talk about their dysfunctional lives. 

Character Creation

Unless you and your fellow players decide otherwise, your characters are powerful or skilled  (but not both), mortal, more or less, and often a bit foolish or unwise. To create your character, your group must first decide on its premise. Is your group a mercenary company, smugglers, an artists’ colony, a family of nitwits? Make sure everyone agrees on the premise, and then you decide on the following for your character:

●	A name
●	A general descriptor that provides an umbrella of skills or powers and contacts
●	A couple of specific descriptors, which could be powers or additional skills or allies
●	A secret that your character keeps from the other characters but which you must tell your fellow players
●	An emotional need that your character has
●	A tangible goal that your character has that reflects that need
●	An enemy (not a fellow PC)

Doing Stuff

To do something, announce your action. Your gamemaster (GM) will assign a difficulty of 2 to 8. You roll 1d6 +2 if your character sheet mentions anything that is relevant to the situation; otherwise, roll 1d6. If you are in an advantageous position, you roll 2d6 and drop the lowest; similarly, if you are at a disadvantage, you roll 2d6 and drop the highest. Your GM will tell you the consequence of your success or failure.

Death and Defeat

Death and defeat are not necessarily the same states. Let us deal with defeat first. Keep track of the number of times your character has failed at a task. Once your character has failed 4 times, it is defeated. All further rolls are at disadvantage until your character has a meaningful success (as determined by the GM). 

Death is not so dire. In this universe, death is often a transformative experience rather than an absolute ending. If your character dies, you may either bow out, create a revised version of your old character, taking into account the manner of death and the means of resurrection, or find a creative way to explain why you didn’t die at all. 

Optional Rule: If your character dies while it is defeated, your character stays dead.

Note to the next designers: The character creation rules are mostly from Over the Edge, with a dash of Hillfolk.