Art from Subversion. Click the image to back the Kickstarter.

Whenever they present themselves, I like to call attention to Kickstarter campaigns and products of special RPG merit or promise. It’s been a while since I’ve done one, not since an announcement was tacked onto Image Compositing for RPGs: Project No 2, in fact.

Frankly, I don’t get to do it often enough, but I never seem to remember how much work goes into one, by the same token – if they started showing up all the time, I might be less eager!

This time around, I have just such a product / campaign to tell you about (and I hope to have another in a month or so!)

There are a number of things that RPGs do poorly, despite many attempts through the years.

Two of these are moral systems and the integration of computer-interface time scales with real-world time. Close behind these two come the integration of technology with magic, and keeping pace with the last (perhaps a half-step ahead or behind) is the integration of different combat styles.

It follows that any serious attempt to better the high-water mark in any of these areas is going to be of interest to a great many players and GMs whether or not the game itself is something they might want to play.

Which brings me to Subversion by Fragging Unicorns Games.

Subversion

Subversion is a new RPG being delivered and enhanced by a Kickstarter fundraising program. As I write this, the campaign has 17 days to go, but by the time you read it, that is likely to be 16 days or less.

This is a fantasy game in a Cybertech environment. The setting is “Neo Babylon”, where the ruling populace are wealthy, powerful, technologically enlightened, corrupt, and self-serving (sounds fairly typical of a Cyberpunk setting, doesn’t it?)

Most characters in such environments are expected to be anarchists opposed to the status quo (which casts them in the role of the downtrodden). While they cooperate out of necessity, they are individualistic, competitive, and prone to go their own way at the drop of a hat somewhere clear across town.

Subversion, on the other hand, has ambitions to establish a different relationship between characters with an altogether more-interesting take on these two classic genres. So, let’s talk about those intractable problems for a moment, and how they shed light on potential interest in this RPG beyond the borders of its actual content.

    Tech and Magic

    PCs in Subversion are representatives of communities striving to survive and prosper in a world subject to rapid change from “powerful magic, pervasive technology, wondrous creatures and Babylonian Gods”.

    All of these save the technology have, for millennia, defined power by proximity to these forces, but now corporations and the technology that empowers them are challenging the old world order.

    Right away, that all ticks the “Tech v Magic” box, then.

    Morality Systems

    Each of the seven major species – Dwarves, Elves, Goblins, Humans, Orcs, Yettin, and Harmaku (winged humanoids) – are envoys of a community of that species, with their own unique ability combination, “determined to protect and advance their communities while remaining true to their own ideals”, to paraphrase the blurb text.

    Art from Subversion, brightened slightly by Mike. Click the image to back the Kickstarter.

    The game is focused on community, direct action, revolution, hope for the future, and commonality of interest, all being confronted by “runaway technology, unchecked power, and dangerous secrets”.Differing social values and the relationships between them are buried beneath the surface but essential driving forces to the game dynamic, especially the confrontation between capitalism and nationalism.

    The PCs are cast as heroes who need to collaborate with the envoys of the other races or be plouwed under. Diversity and relationships are critical to success.

    This takes issues of moral standards out of the province of the individual and places them where they truly belong, elements of the society from which the individuals derive. Each individual has to then interpret the imperatives of their communal behavioral standards into a personal ethos by which to live, and hopefully, prosper – just as it is in real life.

    When PCs act in accordance with their defined values, for good or ill, they are rewarded; when they oppose these values (for convenience, to help a friend, or another reason), they are confronted with consequences and may even have to make amends.

    The Communities that each PC represents are partially created by the GM and partly by the player; giving joint ownership of the results to both; this encourages both to create a community that is interesting and one that the player wants to represent and exemplify. The more creative the player, the more deeply this relationship can extend; we’re talking a package deal in which the player has at least some creative control not only over the individual but the background that drives and defines them.

    This is the element that is predominantly missing in most Cyberpunk campaign concepts, directly responsible for the ‘collection of misfit anarchists’ philosophy common to the genre, so right away, this RPG promises to be something profoundly different.

    Even more significantly, it presents a template for other campaigns to follow to achieve the same result. This directly opposes the conceptual core of “Murder Hobos” without forcing draconian restraints on the characters. It can be argued that this is exactly what D&D and Pathfinder have been missing all their many years!

    Combat Styles

    Subversive is built around what the authors are describing as a “unique paradigm system” that “lets players build tons of customization into their characters, not just in how well PCs can fight”. Paradigms are “like mini-classes that you can dip into as much or as little as you like.”

    The rules system is described as “medium complexity” but “easy to learn”. It’s primary mechanical philosophies orient around two principles: “Make storytelling easy and fun” and “make character advancement meaningful and worthwhile”.

    At the core of the mechanics is the skill test, which is a dice mechanic unlike those of any other RPG I’ve seen. It’s sort of half-way between the Hero System and my own Sixes system, with heavy admixtures of the basic mechanics common to RPGs from the early days of D&D forward.

    With each Community and Species being so individually distinctive, their philosophy and approach to battle will inevitably be equally distinctive. The diversity of challenges that can confront the PCs is such that no one solution to such problems will be universal; tactics will need to evolve to become optimized, and that can only happen if the combat styles mesh in terms of game mechanics.

    This is not stated outright in the materials reviewed, but even the promise of doing so through the mechanics incorporated makes this product of interest to anyone who runs any other genre-mutable campaign or environment – and they are all of that nature to at least some extent.

    D&D / Pathfinder, for example, blends the martial and the magical and sometimes the spiritual. Superhero games blend all of these in even more diverse combinations. Horror games like Call Of Cthulhu blend the spiritual with technological forms of combat (and reserve the traditional martial as a last-ditch option). I could go on, but you get the point.

    Computer Time

    Even less explicitly addressed is this issue. And yet, there are nuggets of information that imply the presence of this issue within the mechanics, and it is – to at least some extent – inherently a part of any cyberpunk system.

    So the game makes no promises, but if the mechanics are not broken in this respect, there is the implication of a solution. For some GMs and genres, this alone might be worth the price of admission!

That all sounds quite promising, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The setting

I’ve already mentioned this but it’s worth pulling in some other descriptive text from the campaign page to expand on the point.

The core of the setting is the city of “Neo Babylon”, and a map of the city is provided along with, presumably, other setting details – organizations, businesses, and the like. That would hold a certain value in some campaigns all on its own.

Cropped excerpt of the map of Neo Babylon from Subversion. Click the image to back the Kickstarter.

But there’s more: “The story of Subversion is set against the rival powers that are currently fighting for control, wealth, and power in Neo Babylon. The old masters, the Ukkim council, hoard magic like secrets and their old money and old magic still has preeminence. But the explosion of cybertech has meant that the power gap between the magical haves and have-nots is closing. Corporations, guilds, and even organized crime lords are now every bit as threatening … as the Arcanist mages.”

The richness and diversity of the stories and campaigns that could be told from this starting point are simply breathtaking. Anything from…

  • …a superhero campaign (modeled, perhaps, more closely upon the Legion Of Superheros, where each character is an exemplar of a particular species, with the abilities that make that species unique are that character’s ‘powers’)…
  • …to a Cthulhu-esque plot in which the ruling overlords summon something they shouldn’t in a bid to regain lost dominance…
  • …or a more general steampunk interpretation…
  • …perhaps even a pulp / sci-fi riff in which the PCs have to uncover the hidden past that not even those old masters know as clearly as they think…
  • …or maybe a “Pirates Of The Caribbean” -inspired riff of corporate commercialization vs the freedom to be an individual.

That’s a lot of diversity. And, of course, they can all blend and run together, nuancing some common thread (the PCs).

One of the stretch goals of the campaign is a separate map of the city. That’s a $60,000 target (presumably USD) – it comes after extra artwork (the primary motive for the Kickstarter campaign), two adventure PDFs, and a fiction anthology. The only one that I would question is the last – I think the separate map might be a more attractive goal than the fiction add-on, myself.

Campaign Status

Art from Subversion’s Kickstarter campaign, layout slightly compressed by Mike. Click the image to back the Kickstarter.

The campaign was 200% funded in 4 hrs, 32 minutes (and 34 seconds). It’s currently sitting at AUD $66,253, which is about $44,850 USD.

Which means that the two adventure PDFs are already funded and the campaign is almost half-way to the fiction anthology add-on. It seems very likely to me that the campaign will achieve that $60,000 level and may even reach the stretch goal beyond it – a third adventure at $75000. I’m not quite so sure that the top tier bonus, a GMs screen at $100K, will be reached.

That still makes this an eminently successful fundraising campaign.

Other Opinions

There’s often not a lot of interest on Kickstarter pages once you get past the Risks section (and that tends to be fairly boilerplate). This time, it’s different – there are excerpts from playtesting feedback and reviews that make for very interesting reading.

I have no doubt that these are at least partially responsible for the success described above. I wanted to include a couple of excerpts from these quotes in this review.

  • “The rules were intuitive and easy to understand.”
  • “The dice mechanic is honestly one of the coolest I’ve seen in a while.”
  • “Every time I climb to a higher rooftop to shout the praises of this setting it just affords [me] a better view of everything it has to offer.”
  • “The game’s focus on community makes it stand out … and intertwines perfectly with the … mechanics and themes in a way I’ve never seen before.”
  • “I … often find myself at odds with the mercenary and criminal elements that are common in the [cyberpunk] setting. Subversion is a breath of fresh air with its focus on community building, humanistic character creation, and central theme of fighting against oppression and corruption.”

One other comment referred to the values-infusion brought to their approach by Fragging Unicorns Games, but I thought I’d close this article by giving them a chance to speak for themselves in the form of one or two more quote from the Kickstarter page:

    “FUG (Fragging Unicorns Games) is trying to make the world a better place, one game at a time.

    “We want to be decent people. We don’t want to step on people on our way up. We want to see things and do things differently.

    “We’ve gathered diverse, inclusive, and good-hearted people to be the best there is at being cool. To everyone. For everyone.”

But it does make me feel old to realize that they are all about half my age….

So, there you have it

There are a lot of reasons to back this Kickstarter, in fact to kick it up to a next level of funding, and not a lot of good reasons not to.

To join what is already a sizable crowd, click on this link, or on any of the illustrations that adorn this article.

And tell ’em that Mike sent you!


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