10 MILLION A.D.

It’s been ten million years since the humans left this Earth. Polluted, exhausted, spent they left it. Runaway greenhouse gases, acidic oceans, pits and scars and mountains of waste. 
While the humans floated through the ether, held in stasis in their hermetic capsules, frozen in time, the Earth has endured. She has lived on, transformed, evolved. And in ten million years we have evolved – the Sapiens, the new masters of this old planet.
We are as diverse as we are intelligent. We are resourceful and adaptive. This Earth is not one the humans would recognize, but it is our home. And now, we must defend it.
After ten million years, the humans have returned.
They have come to make a new home on a new Earth, to settle and expand and consume.
But we cannot let them.

OVERVIEW
 
10 Million A.D. is a “Powered By The Apocalypse” role playing game for a GM and 3-6 players or so. 

CHARACTER CREATION

In 10 Million A.D., players take the role of the Sapiens – the new inhabitants of Earth, the product of 10 million years of evolution after the human exodus. 
Sapiens take innumerable forms. They can be mammals, cephalopods, insects, even a sentient colony of single-celled organisms acting as one mind, or a creature given intelligence by a parasitic brain fungus.
	Each player creates a character which is a member of a particular species of Sapien by following these steps:

1.	Pick Descriptors
Descriptors are brief statements (they can even be just one word) that describe your Sapien. Are they warm-blooded? Arboreal? Do they have fine manipulators, or an electro-chemical sensory organ? Maybe they communicate via chromatophores, or have a well-developed social structure. 
Descriptors can take nearly any form you can think of!
The descriptors will serve as your Sapien’s defining traits. When you perform an action, consult your descriptors to determine if you deserve a bonus. Do you have echolocation? Give yourself a bonus when using your Sensory System in the dark!
Typically a character will have three to five Descriptors. More or fewer are possible. 

2.	Describe Your Appearance
The next step is to describe to the other players what you look like. So you’ve decided you can brachiate. Do you have long, articulated arms like an orangutan, or do you swing from tree to tree using barbed tentacles? 
Is your skin covered in a thin layer of mucous or a fine coat of hair? How many limbs do you have? How many eyes? It’s completely up to you!

3.	Pick Nicknames
Not all Sapiens communicate in the same way. Some use vocalizations, some may use gesture or visual signaling or even chemical excretions. Communicating can sometimes be difficult.
While you may have a name given to you by your people, it may prove difficult (or impossible!) for other Sapiens to articulate. Some Sapiens may not have a name at all! 
Use this time to pick appropriate nicknames for each other. Try descriptive nicknames that capture your fellow Sapiens’ defining characteristics, like 8-eyes, mouth-beak, or leaf-nose.

Example: Annie, Bill, and Carly are playing.   Annie’s character is Chibbbr, an member of an aquatic mammalian species, something like a cross between a beaver and an armadillo. She picks the Descriptors armored, aquatic, knack for engineering, big incisors, and big claws. Chibbbr normally travels on all fours, but has surprisingly dextrous forepaws and some really awesome thumbs. She’s about four feet long, round and fat, with bony armor plates along her back, a wide, flat beaver tail, and squinty little eyes.   Bill is playing Skrik the Sloth-Hawk. Sloth-Hawks are avians who are too lazy to fly without a very good reason to. They spend most of their time in trees napping, occasionally climbing around through the branches looking for insects to eat. Asleep with their wings folded around their bodies they look like dry, inedible seed pods. Bill picks sharp talons, broad wings, keen sense of smell, keen sense of hearing, and natural camoflauge. Most of the Sloth-Hawks are ignoring the humans, but Skrik has come to understand the magnitude of the threat they pose to the world. Skrik is large for a Sloth-Hawk, with a 5 foot wingspan, dark brown plumage streaked with black, and one bright red feather on his head that just will not lay flat.   Carly is playing Juffo-Wup, a hive-mind collection of sentient fungus living mostly underground over an area of tens of thousands of square kilometers. A few bits of Juffo-Wup reach up above the surface here and there, including prehensile tendrils, sensory stalks allowing Juffo-Wup to observe the surface world, and nodules that can vibrate against each other to produce sounds, allowing Juffo-Wup to communicate with other Sapiens. Carly picks the Descriptors vast, subterranean, hive mind, and really weird. Juffo-Wup tissue is mostly orange or beige in color, fuzzy or slimy, though it varies greatly in appearance depending on purpose.

Annie, Bill, and Carly go back and forth trying to decide what they call each other. Annie figures the Beaverdillos sometimes run across Juffo-Wup when digging their warrens; there is a complicated treaty in place to establish how big a detour the excavations must take versus how much Juffo-Wup can be eaten, so Chibbbr calls Juffo-Wup “lawyer-root”. In turn, Juffo-Wup usually refers to Beaverdillos somewhat patronizingly as “little infestations”.  Skrik calls Chibbr “shell-back”, and, rather unimaginatively, Chibbr calls Skrik “lazy wings”.   
Chibbbr refers to Juffo

THE PEOPLE
Each player character is a representative of a People, a particular species of Sapien. Before the return of the humans, the various Peoples had their own interrelationships.   Go around the table. Each player should describe something their People recently did. The player to their right then says what effect that action had on their own People, and what kind of relationship exists between the People as a consequence.
 For example, Annie describes how her industrious Beaverdillo people recently built an enormous log dam to flood the Glom River Valley, giving them an enormous reservoir to and lots of lakefront property. She asks Bill about the Sloth-hawks’ reaction to this development, and it turns out they felt rather put out by having to relocate as their part of the forest was flooded. 

Notes: I feel like politics among the various Sapiens should be a big part of the game, but I can’t decide what, if any, mechanics should be used to push it.    LEADERSHIP POINTS The relationship between a Sapien character and their People is measured with Leadership points. A character starts with one Leadership point. 

When your actions help your People in a significant way — like if a human settlement is removed from the Peoples’ territory — you gain a Leadership point.   Between scenes, you can spend 1 Leadership point to ask your People for some goods or services. For example, you could recruit a small team (say, 3-5) of your People to assist you in building a wall around a village, or you could ask for some food to share with a neighboring People. 
The GM can call for additional Leadership points to be spent if the request goes against the existing relationships among Peoples. If the Beaverdillos need the Sloth-hawks services as aerial scouts, Bill may have to spend 2 Leadership points to get them to do it.  
THE SYSTEM
The system of 10 Million AD is built upon a few basic principles: always move forward, be descriptive, and give the players agency.

Always Move Forward: every action has a consequence. There should never be a time when a character succeeds or fails and then nothing happens. If a character succeeds, they may find themselves in a new situation, dealing with new challenges! If they fail, there will be a consequence. Maybe they cause their fellow Sapiens to become endangered, or inadvertently trigger a new problem altogether.

Be Descriptive: what happens in the game world is created by you, so be descriptive! 

Give the Players Agency: Unlike many other games, the Game Master does not roll dice or dictate when players act. It’s up to the players to decide what they will do, when they will do it, and to make all their rolls themselves. It’s up to the GM to decide what the consequences of their actions will be and to move the story forward.

There are no turns; players simply decide what they want to do, and then do so.

The core mechanic of 10 Million AD is simple. To perform an action, just roll 2D6, and compare the result to this chart:

10+: Great Success! You accomplish what you set out to accomplish.
7-9: Marginal Success. You accomplish your goal, but at some cost, or with a complication.
6-: Failure. You fail to accomplish your goal, but you receive a mutagen.

If you feel you have a Descriptor that is relevant to the challenge at hand, suggest to the GM that you should get a bonus. If the GM agrees, you can roll an extra die. Roll 3D6 and use the sum of the two highest dice.

ACTIONS
The following moves are available to all player characters.

Aggression
Aggression is used for fighting, damaging, or overcoming with violence. You can also use Aggression for posturing or to intimidate.
Typical effects of Aggression:

10+: you damage your opponent!
7-9: you damage your opponent, but there’s a complication. A typical complication is that you also take damage from your opponent, but other effects are possible (up to the GM).
6-: you take damage and gain a mutagen.

Recognition

When you encounter something unfamiliar — an artifact, phenomenon, or condition — and attempt to understand it, make a roll. On 10+, you get both; on 7-9, you get one, of the following.
	•	You get the answer immediately (otherwise, you get the information after end of the current scene)
	•	You get complete and definite information (otherwise you learn what the the thing resembles, or what it definitely is not). 
On 6-, you fail to recognize the thing and you gain a mutagen.

Sensory System
Your Sensory System is used to detect things and people and to take stock of your surroundings. 

Understanding
Understanding is your ability to relate to other intelligent beings, including other Sapiens and humans.

Persuasion
Persuasion is your ability to convince other intelligent beings to do what you want. If you have some way of influencing a person, whether with logic or threat or bribery, describe what you want them to do and how you convince them.

Then, whoever’s running the subject of the persuasion (GM or another player) decides if it’s possible for them to be so persuaded. In either case, make a roll and consult the following: 
If persuasion is possible:
On 10+, the subject is completely persuaded to do what you want. 
On 7-9, the subject is persuaded to do what you want, but will demand something concrete in exchange.
On 6-, the subject is unconvinced, and you gain a mutagen.

If persuasion is not possible, then make a roll.
On 10+, the subject does something concrete to benefit you, but not what you asked for. 
On 7-9, the subject doesn’t immediately act against you. 
On 6-, the subject is likely hostile, and you gain a mutagen.

Survival Instinct
Your Survival Instinct keeps you alive. Use it to avoid danger, defend yourself, or even keep others from harm.
 When you find yourself in danger, describe how your Survival Instinct manifests itself and make a roll.

On 10+, you can choose 2; on 7-9, choose one, of the following:
	•	You turn the threat to your own advantage
	•	You get yourself out of danger
	•	You get someone else out of danger
On a 6-, you suffer the full effect of the threat and gain a mutagen.

VIOLENCE
Damage is measured in lines, which are descriptions of the damage. Potential lines could include gash, broken bone, burn, or poison. Stress is a special type of damage line that can be recovered easily, through short rest.
A Sapien typically can only take 5 lines of damage before they become incapacitated. If they take another line of damage after that, without healing, they die!

Natural attacks (attacking with the limbs, beak, mouth, claws, etc) deal 1 line of stress. Simple attacks (attacking with a spear, bow, knife, etc) deal 1 line of damage. Energy attacks (attacking with a human energy weapon) can deal either 1 line of damage and 1 line of stress or 3 lines of stress.

MUTAGENS
When Sapiens come into contact with humans and their technology, they can be altered in unpredictable ways. Humans have harnessed exotic forms of energy and generate a lot of potentially mutagenic waste. 
Whenever you fail at a task, you may take a mutagen. You can use pennies, gems, or any other tokens you have on hand to represent the mutagen.

Mutagens can be spent to grant yourself a bonus die, as with Descriptors, or for other effects. You may not spend more than 1 mutagen at a time in this way.  However, if you collect 5 mutagens, you may trade them in and become Altered, becoming fundamentally changed and taking an additional Descriptor.