Science Fiction and DCC RPG

(NOTE: I’m spitballing here. Letting my frustrations out)

I had been puttering away on my own fantasy setting for DCC RPG, it was going to be THE GREATEST FANTASY SETTING EVER!!!

Of course, after making a lot of progress, one of my players said they are tired of fantasy games and want to play science fiction. Others echoed that sentiment.

Damn.

So, fantasy setting is on the backburner for the time being.

I still want to play DCC, though. What am I to do?

I did some research, that’s what I did.

I bought the Crawling Under a Broken Moon companion, the Umerican Survival Guide, Mutant Crawl Classics, and Hubris (for some reason I thought Hubris was a post-apocalyptic setting).

  • The Umerican Survival Guide has some great stuff, but I greatly dislike the Cyborg class. It could be used for a Road Hogs style After the Bomb setting.
  • MCC is disappointing in that virtually none of it is useful to me. The AI Patrons, and animal and plant mutants are interesting.
  • The Murder Machine in Hubris is pretty cool, but the rest of the book isn’t geared for what I’m looking for. No fault of it’s own.

All have good ideas that I can use. But none of them are really what I’m looking for. I need something else.

So I thought about what I want in a sci-fi game.

  • Energy weapons
  • force fields
  • mecha/giant robots
  • vehicles
  • cybernetics/bionics
  • mutations
  • evil sorcerer/wizard bad guys
  • Influences: Borderlands, Rifts Earth, Mad Max, Turbo Kid, Wizards, The Dying Earth, The Invisibles, After the Bomb
I also thought about what I don’t want
  • Fantasy races (dwarves, elves, halflings)
  • Magic in the hands of the player characters. 
So what I’m thinking is having two classes; Warrior and Thief.
As they adventure and loot, they can get cooler and more powerful gear. They can also mutate. They can acquire cybernetic implants and body parts to replace those lost or permanently damaged. 
If I include magic at all, I want to combine the Cleric and Wizard spells and abilities. My idea for that is that a character can learn Patron Bond and attempt to use it. 
  • The character can cast patron spells and use Invoke Patron for its effects. 
  • The character can not learn other spells on their own; they aren’t wizards after all.
  • Multiple patrons can be bonded with, determined by character level plus Personality modifier, minimum of one.
  • Only one Patron can be invoked at a time; the effects of the Invoking that patron must expire before another Patron can be invoked. 
  • Patrons are represented as idols/fetishes that the character carries on their physical person. Perhaps these can be used the same as holy symbols.
  • Spell failure works as a Cleric, with Disapproval (but from the Patron)
I like the idea that anyone can use magic, but no one can understand it, and it is very dangerous and unpredictable. 
But the more I think about it, the more difficult it is for me to pin down what, exactly I want, and how to include it. 
Thinking of the Invisibles, I like the idea that otherwise normal people can and do use magic on a daily basis, but don’t even realize it. Or that a street kid who is more interested in doing drugs and burning his school is a master magician and an anarchic soldier is his guide into other forms of consciousness. 
Thinking of the Borderlands video game series, mutants abound and millions of gun types are available, each with variations in features and drawbacks. 
Rifts and The Dying Earth treat magic almost as a science, with the world being a shattered and bizarre future version of our own. 
As I sit here and write all this, I’m just getting more frustrated at my inability to focus.
If I could easily adapt After the Bomb to DCC, I would probably be happy with that…

Author: everloss

I'm a dude that writes about stuff on the internet.