Design Thoughts

I posted a Reddit Thread about my thoughts going into the writing of the Agents of the Machine Court.

Here's most of it:

"Hey Reddit, after years of procrastination and hesitancy I just made my first RPG and released it for PWYW on DriveThruand Itch. It's called Agents of the Machine Court where you are machine-summoning, space cops working for a God-Computer that's in charge of universal justice. If a crazy powerful psychic maniac suddenly rises up and declares himself the Emperor, that's probably fine honestly. If they start running around conquering neighboring systems without a valid permit, then you send in one or a team of Agents to shut them down.

As powerful as they are, however, the universe is full of superscience people and entities with no respect for the final shape of natural law. Much less those things outside the universe.

The system is based on Grant Howitt's ENNIE-nominated Sexy Battle Wizards. Instead of the stats like Sexy, Battle, and Wizard, I used approaches inspired by Gila RPGs' Lumen to convey the wide range of methods they could use to solve a problem. I also added in the ability us Stress as an approach if a character acts in a desperate, panicked, perhaps even cowardly manner.

I intend to add in more standalone games like this but set in the same universe(thus further exploring it from different perspectives) and with compatible systems. I hope you check it out and any insights would be welcome."

"Setting

I have various books that I've been hammering away with for a few years and I've written a fair amount of lore about a place called Vertex. And I always had a great deal of fun writing it because it was just wild. Super-science as it were, with figures that sort of dwarfed universes. And it was just so fun to slice into that lore and extract just a tiny little bit and explore it. And with my future offerings, I would like to slowly reveal more of that setting and the rampant imaginative fun within.

System

Grant Howitt is like one of my favourite people to follow. His free RPGs are masterpieces in rules lite excellence. My friend group tends to like RPG systems without accounting, where you just sort of do things without requiring too much mental overhead. Sexy Battle Wizards, with its stress system instead of health and intuitive stats was an easy sell.

I changed the system a little bit because SBW encouraged you to solve things without violence, and my friends would've just wanted to max Battle as a priority. So to deemphasize a singular fighting stat, I looked at what Gila RPGs did with Lumen. That you take what you have, describe what you attempt, and then figure out what approach you should apply. It allows the player to describe how they do things in a cinematic way if they want, or in a faux tactical way.

Various new games as well allowed stress to be helpful and in a flash of inspiration, I realized I could use the Stress itself as an approach. To encourage these powerful characters, once backed into a corner, to fight tooth and claw to survive."