As I mentioned before, I’m writing an RPG. I don’t plan on having it finished within 40 days, that would be crazy, but I think I can get a darn good start on a draft, at least. If nothing else, it’ll get the ball rolling.

The game I’m working on, tentatively titled Dystropolis, is a transhumanist-themed FATE game. The idea for it was inspired by this passage from Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom:

It was the second year of my undergrad, taking a double-major in not making trouble for my profs and keeping my mouth shut. It was the early days of Bitchun, and most of us were still a little unclear on the concept.

Not all of us, though: a group of campus shit-disturbers, grad students in the Sociology Department, were on the bleeding edge of the revolution, and they knew what they wanted: control of the Department, oustering of the tyrannical, stodgy profs, a bully pulpit from which to preach the Bitchun gospel to a generation of impressionable undergrads who were too cowed by their workloads to realize what a load of shit they were being fed by the University.

At least, that’s what the intense, heavyset woman who seized the mic at my Soc 200 course said, that sleepy morning mid-semester at Convocation Hall. Nineteen hundred students filled the hall, a capacity crowd of bleary, coffee-sipping time-markers, and they woke up in a hurry when the woman’s strident harangue burst over their heads.

I saw it happen from the very start. The prof was down there on the stage, a speck with a tie-mic, droning over his slides, and then there was a blur as half a dozen grad students rushed the stage. They were dressed in University poverty-chic, wrinkled slacks and tattered sports coats, and five of them formed a human wall in front of the prof while the sixth, the heavyset one with the dark hair and the prominent mole on her cheek, unclipped his mic and clipped it to her lapel.

“Wakey wakey!” she called, and the reality of the moment hit home for me: this wasn’t on the lesson-plan.

“Come on, heads up! This is not a drill. The University of Toronto Department of Sociology is under new management. If you’ll set your handhelds to ‘receive,’ we’ll be beaming out new lesson-plans momentarily. If you’ve forgotten your handhelds, you can download the plans later on. I’m going to run it down for you right now, anyway.

“Before I start though, I have a prepared statement for you. You’ll probably hear this a couple times more today, in your other classes. It’s worth repeating. Here goes:

“We reject the stodgy, tyrannical rule of the profs at this Department. We demand bully pulpits from which to preach the Bitchun gospel. Effective immediately, the University of Toronto Ad-Hoc Sociology Department is in charge. We promise high-relevance curriculum with an emphasis on reputation economies, post-scarcity social dynamics, and the social theory of infinite life-extension. No more Durkheim, kids, just deadheading! This will be fun.”

The world is changing, and you are one of the few people who understand why. You are a member of one of the many transhuman Tribes; ad-hoc meritocracies whose goals are to usher in a new world for Posthumanity. Through knowledge and hacking and black-market deals, you’ve managed to make yourself into something more than you were born to be.

The Powers that Be, though, have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Their business models are tied up in it. Their governments are constructed around it. They teach it in their schools. They view your kind as simple dissidents. They are no longer worthy of the power and control they possess.

It is up to you and your Tribemates to take the world from them. For the good of all.

That’s kind of a rough idea of the concept. It needs to be fleshed out and made, well, better.

So, what do you do in this game? The plan is to put the players on the other side of the world domination game. Usually, RPG plots center around people who are fighting against overwhelming odds to keep some monolithic evil from taking over the world. In this case, I wanted to explore the idea of having the players be proactive in taking the world away from those who have either misused it, or have simply ground progress down to a standstill. I thought it might be fun to have the players be the “bad guys,” in the sense that they are out for world domination, at least.

Mechanically, I plan on stealing liberally from most of the published FATE games, especially the Dresden Files RPG and Diaspora. My current thought is to give the Dystropolis campaign a framework based on Diaspora’s social conflict system. I’ll post more on that when I get a chance to playtest it.