I run my fingers over the mark of the Cybrine God, feeling the etchings in the metal. The canister hisses in my hand as it does its work.
It goes quiet.
One fluid arc. My arm, my hand, the capsule, the blasphemers. It cuts through the space like a spearhead piercing a sternum.
Thunder.
I grab the haft of my axe and mantle the rubble. My companions look at me with awe, like I was the Cybrine God itself. The sacred draught runs through my veins, but I am a mere man.
The blasphemers have thunder of their own. It fills the space with black smoke.
But the shots cannot drown out the screams of their injured.
The lead rattles against my breastplate. I do not fear. I feel my leg erupt, but I hardly stagger. The Cybrine God knits me together again.
They would run if they had anywhere left to go.

 Announcing Cybrine Dreams

What is Cybrine Dreams? 

Well, besides being a new project for the Better Soulslike Tabletop Jam, the working tagline is that it's a "future-prim gothic roleplaying" game.

How humanity came to live inside the Cybrine God is a mystery. It isn't talking, and they don't remember.

Things have gone a long way down. The Cybrine God demands absolute fealty, but it is an absent ruler. Its attention is focused on the Spectrals, humans so far removed from their blood-brethren that they're more akin to it in their machined perfection.

But the Spectrals rely on the prims, the humans stuck down in the guts and the warrens of the Cybrine God. They dig through scrap, cultivate the fungal groves, and otherwise muck about in their filth.

The blasphemers are always a threat. Those who reject the Cybrine God's sovereignty over technology, they ply their arts in unsanctioned and dangerous ways, bringing down the wrath of both Spectrals and the Cybrine God itself.

The Mechanics

Cybrine Dreams uses a card-based system.

The four attributes are linked to suits. Using a card from a different suit doesn't incur a penalty, but you get a bonus for a card from a matching suit.

The mathematical function is fairly simple: add your Attribute, any Skills you have, and the card value. Get a high enough number, and you succeed.

Tests

When you want to attempt a one-off action, simply draw a card. If your result exceeds the Difficulty, you succeed.

Encounters

When actions link together in a scene with a clear opposing force, you have an Encounter.

At the start of an Encounter, players draw a hand of five cards. Any of the numbered cards are kept, while face cards are discarded.

Part of the Soulslike inspiration of Cybrine Dreams is requiring characters to make risk-reward calculations and sacrifices. Deciding how to use the resources in their hand is important.

All Encounters have initiative. NPCs have a fixed Initiative value (though they may have Initiative bonuses in certain Encounter types, such as Combat or Face Challenges). Player characters must put a card down to play for initiative.

Flourishes

As an option, characters may attempt a flourish. These are special effects based on the context of an encounter (e.g. a weapon may grant a combat flourish, while a token from the Cybrine God may permit a social flourish). While a flourish itself has difficulty and doesn't do the "normal" effect for an Encounter, it is also possible to score a flourish by succeeding on a standard action with a low-value card (the flourish threshold is determined by the object that grants the flourish).

Cybrine Dreams Update 1

Let's go over some basics of Cybrine Dreams. It's a card-based game, though generally players will draw single cards with multiple cards reserved for an Encounter, which is something like combat, complex social situations, or expeditions into unknown territory.

First, let's go over the attributes.

Each is associated with one of the suits of cards.

Stalwart represents physical power, but also will. It is represented by the suit of spades. ♠

Reactive represents speed, awareness, and animal cunning. It is reprsented by the suit of clubs. ♣

Faith represents devotion to the Cybrine God, charisma, arts, and luck. It is represented by the suit of hearts. ♥

Blasphemy represents intellect,  deceptive capacity, and non-artistic creativity. It is represented by the suit of Diamonds ♦

You get a minor bonus (+2) whenever your card matches the attribute you're using, but you always test against it. So if I'm making a Faith Test, but I draw a 4 of spades, I just treat it as a 4.

Because a low card can be desirable in some circumstances, this bonus applies to your result, not the value of the card, when using the Skilled Flourish mechanic.

Character creation in Cybrine Dreams is based on a lite-path system. It's a quick and simple way to build a character, but also ties them into the world.

There are basically three parts to this: the life stages, the attribute process, and the final gear purchase.

Life Stages

The life stages in Cybrine Dreams represent a character's upbringing in a narrative format, letting them get a feel for how their character belongs to the world. Each life stage gives one or two attributes (with the exception of Boon). Conception through Becoming grant Boon Options, which offer the choice of several starting items to the character.

Mother is self-explanatory. The character's mother can be anyone from a well-off noble maiden to a scavenger. This is half-intended to be an introduction to the social roles of the world.

 Conception represents the story of how the character was born. It can be the father (if the father is an interesting figure, such as one of the superhuman Spectrals), or it can represent the role that the character played in his family (e.g. Shame, Blessing, Rejected, Foundling).

Youth represents an early childhood talent for the character.

Becoming is the character's formal training or apprenticeship. They may have been a member of the Cybrine Order, or they may have been a scavenger, outlaw, trader.

Calling is the character's class. It's unique among the other options because instead of granting boon options it grants a free item and three skills to give the characters an edge.

Draught explains how the character got their draught, which is a quasi-magical elixir that makes them into a nigh-immortal superhuman.

Boon is a special boost that a character can take (represented by an item, talent, or other benefit). In true Soulslike fashion, a player can choose to take nothing at this step, and there is also an option that does literally nothing.

Other than the boon, none of the stages are dependent on choices from previous stages. There are about a dozen boons, and the number of options for each stage vary from the 14 callings to the 4 ways of acquiring the draught. This should give enough combinations that even coming out of the initial process the characters should feel unique.

The Attribute Process

Once a character has the finished character from the Life Stages, they go and modify their attributes (the game term for this is Dilution, which is a process that happens after taking the Draught in-universe).

Any attribute over 4 must be decreased. This grants 1 Skill Point and 1 Talent. Skills cannot go above a rating of 2 from dilution (or 3, if improving a Calling-granted skill).

If a character has built perfectly balanced, they may have a 3-4-4-4 spread, but they can still voluntarily decrease Attributes to buy Skill Points and Talents.

Attributes cannot be increased during play, and the resource pools depend on Attributes, so dilution is a double-edged sword.

Gear

There's not much to talk about here, especially because I haven't really finished this bit. Players get to choose from weapons and armor with an amount of drachs determined by their Faith (which represents both the favor of the Cybrine God and their social skills). There's also a Boon that boosts this, though it's associated with Faith so if you really suck at it you're stuck with not very much stuff.

Cybrine Dreams Update 2

Been making steady progress, though a lot of it is going to be redundant with the stuff in the previous update so I'll just hit the new highlights.

The World of Cybrine Dreams

The Cybrine God is a massive entity, both a superstructure and a character. Its body is large enough to serve as the focal point for all the action in Cybrine Dreams.

There are generally six sorts of regions that the players might encounter.

A Spectral nexus is one of the most magical parts of the setting from the player characters' perspectives. The Spectrals are superhumans like great heroes out of mythology, and their association with the Cybrine God makes them nearly deific in renown and stature. They are alien to the primitive humans, which they call prims (the name has come to be adopted by the prims themselves out of reverence for the Spectrals without realizing its origin) due to their extreme age, but use them to gather resources from the surrounding territories without risking the exposure to technology or radiation that could corrupt them.

Each nexus is built at a hub that looks out at the distant sun, and the area surrounding this hub has massive honeycomb-like structures that are the body of the Cybrine God. These are referred to as the godlands, and host enclaves of the Cybrine Cult. The Spectrals come here often, and they are as close to a land of milk and honey as anyone could expect. The cost is having to be perfect in the eyes of the cult, since any interlopers are quickly banished or executed.

The outlands are established as a quasi-feudal patchwork of territories with networks of merchants who carry information. The Cybrine Cult sends preachers to indoctrinate the outlanders in the teachings of their belief system, and also appoint the dukes who rule over the territories. Most of the outlanders are farmers or herders, though some artisans, mines, and pre-industry is scattered throughout in hamlets. Unlike the feudal system, most dukes hire mercenaries from the Cybrine Cult's militant orders instead of fielding their own personal armies.

The dim is the area past the outlands where farming becomes difficult. People still live out here, but settlements are smaller. The Cybrine Cult may send preachers by, and their doctrines are still well-known, but they compete with bandits and blasphemers. Most of the dim is unsettled, and many places are either too hot and bright or too cold and dark to be comfortable for travelers.

Fractures are beyond prim habitation. There may still be humans out here, but they're disconnected from the light of the Cybrine Cult. Out in the fractures, the soil of the earth gives way to nothing but the bones of the Cybrine God. In places these plunge hazardously like cliffs, giving the regions their name. Warped and terrible creatures live out here, as well as tribes of cannibals and hostile peoples with strange languages and traditions. Even the exiles don't go this far from civilization, but some scavengers and pilgrims do.

The scrapheaps are mixed in with the dim and the fractures. They have vast seas of discarded or destroyed artifacts, with dunes of alloy cresting over poisoned water and layers of sediment filth. The scavengers who live out here are brave or stubborn, but a good find can set them up for life if they negotiate the right price. The Cybrine Cult forbids blasphemous technology, so it must receive consecration before being brought into the outlands, making for thriving business and a surprisingly heavy presence of the cult in the settlements. Ancient machines lurk in the shadows, but they are usually little threat.

The Player Characters

All of the PCs in Cybrine Dreams are draughtlings, meaning that they have consumed the nectar of the Cybrine God and will enjoy extended lifespans and functional immortality as a result.

They still are going to die, though there are rumors of ways out of this, including a pathway that results in them becoming a Spectral, one of the favored agents of the Cybrine God.

They're also able to gain some powerful special abilities as a result of dilution, the process of remaking that the draught brings on. While it will ultimately kill them, they don't have to worry about that unless they die quite a bit (the fastest speed-run-to-permadeath setup is two unrecoverable bodies, which admittedly can happen fairly easily). A lot of these special abilities make them even more durable, which is helpful for preventing character loss if a player is really averse to it.

Combat is brutal, with damage equal to the attacker's relative success over the defender. PC hit point pools start out around 30, which sounds high until you realize that an undefended hit can do 10-25 damage even from relatively weak attackers. A sword-and-board armored combatant can typically soak 10 damage or so, but might wind up taking a lot of hits they don't want to take.

One mechanic that represents social hierarchy is a Status rank. For all PCs this starts at 4, because those who drink the draught are automatically considered the chosen of the Cybrine God. Some NPCs have a higher Status, such as dukes and high-ranking members of the Cybrine Cult, and PCs can boost or reduce their Status during play. This is important, because the Cybrine Synod can lead to exile or death for a character while also opening doors to influence in a world where the PCs are often far from their usual connections and few people have much knowledge of the world beyond their local settlement.

Cybrine Dreams Update 3

Been a while because I've mostly been working on setting stuff. Cybrine Dreams is now to a point where the setting is 80-90% done. Given my rate of progress, now it's just constant grinding away on the gameplay elements until they're all good. Though, with that said, I'm really evaluating how to present lore.

The actual lore section of Cybrine Dreams is about 10k words long, which might sound like a lot but will probably work out to 10-15 pages. This is somewhat at odds with the found world narrative of Soulslikes, but I needed a foundation for the GM and players to base their campaigns on.

Right now I have one short flash-fiction piece to introduce the setting, but I plan to do at least two more, probably more like four.

One part of the worldbuilding is having a life-stage system for character creation. It lets you get a better feel for how characters fit into their societies, even though it all gets leveled out in the end because the draughtlings have a special social role. The next is having all sorts of items.

One of the cool things about items is that each can have a little snippet of flavor. A microstory, a colorful description, or a history tacked on to a simple gameplay stat is incredibly effective.

The main problem will be execution. I'm burning on two projects right now (Cybrine Dreams and Kenoma), and I intend to get Cybrine Dreams out some time early next month so that I can focus on Kenoma to have it ready for some form of access by the end of March. I also have another project planned for the weekend, though I don't think it'll take more than a few days by nature of what it is (plus it will be a nice vacation from my darker themes in Kenoma and Cybrine Dreams).

Tech Levels

One thing that's always difficult is talking about tech levels in games like this. Faith is explicitly not intelligence, but it's used for consecrated technology. One way to think about this is that it could be the sort of warm talking linguistic intelligence versus the cold calculating mathematical intelligence you get with Blasphemy. It could also be a gameplay convention and we don't pay any more heed to it, or it could simply be that the Cybrine Cult is so standardized with how their tech gets used that once you figure it out it all shares the same manual of arms and your Faith definitely represents how much (positive) contact with the cult your character has had.

Likewise, the tech level is absolutely crazy. The Cybrine God is a dyson sphere and a hyperintelligent AI. There's probably some Numenera style thing going on, where the current civilization is not the first to exist even on the Cybrine God, and the relics in the junk heaps can actually go back before even that.

The important thing is that the prims are called that because they're primitive. They're pre-industrial at best, and sort of mediocre scavengers at worst. When they learn about technology, they learn what it does and how it's put together, not how it works. The important skills get passed down word-of-mouth, so they're not totally inept.

There's something from Jung where he theorized that the ancients just plain had a different view of the world, and I'm leaning heavily into that. Machines have wills and personas in the eyes of prims, and while they don't have deified status (with the exception perhaps of actual AIs, which definitely exist in universe), they definitely get a weird reverence from the prims (if for no other reason than the simple fact that they're mysterious and often powerful).

Likewise, advanced metallurgy and synthetic materials are not something the prims can do anything with. They're aware of them, of course, since they can tell the difference between various plastics and alloys, but they can't tell you how they're made, even if the Spectrals have the ability to produce them.

This gives some opportunity for storytelling as well, since the GM doesn't have to worry about consistency with real-world materials. If super-advanced technology needs to do something, it can be made of whatever material is best suited for the task and any really weird properties can be hand-waved away.

The Cybrine God is sufficiently advanced that it is indistinguishable from magic.

The Synod

One of the things that is a major part of Cybrine Dreams is the encounter system. We'll have full rules for combat, exploration, and synods as example types of encounters, and GMs are welcome to use a general format and add to it as they see fit.

The Synod is a special kind of social conflict that is about using the dogma and rituals of the Cybrine Cult. It may not come up in all campaigns, and there will be a clear note about this, but it is a special format.

It's something of a parliamentary procedure, if we wanted to draw an analogy to modern things, but since the cult is theocratic rather than democratic there's more of a focus on adherence to tradition and the rituals involved.

The Synod has an introduce-question-resolve flow, where someone will introduce a proposition, be questioned, and then make a closing case. Because of this, it involves burning through a lot of cards, and a character cannot draw more cards during a Synod!

To compensate for this, characters can bring in Doctrines. Doctrines are like gear for the Synod, and they reflect the mastery of a particular part of the Lex Cybrine that governs the Cybrine Cult. They are purchased with money, because the legal training needed to use them in a Synod is quite expensive, but they are worth their weight in gold.

The initial goal is to introduce a proposition. This must always be a Doctrine. Some characters start with Doctrines, like Aid or Ostracism. These typically all use Faith, though there may be some others that get introduced.

This is what you're requesting at the Synod. The GM can also have an NPC do a proposition, if the players are attempting to block an action at a Synod (for instance, shooting down an inquisitor's attempt to execute someone for blasphemy). 

This involves taking a card and setting it down to represent an application of the Doctrine.  Much like weapons or armor, Doctrines can have flourish values, which impose an effect on the proposition in question rather than any particular character. Typically this is done with Faith, though there are special variants of Doctrines that involve other attributes.

Then there are rhetorical tactics. These are simple. Reactive involves spinning a quick explanation to justify a faux pas, Faith involves using Cybrine Lore to get a good presentation, and Blasphemy involves using cunning to trick another speaker into an error.

These come up during the questioning phase. You can expend as many cards as you want in order (there is initiative in questioning) until everyone is satisfied. Typically the NPCs/GM will simply raise flat challenges that need to be overcome.

It is possible to alter the proposition by introducing a different Doctrine. This is easier with a simple shift (e.g. from exile to execution), but can still involve anything. This uses Stalwart, reflecting the force of will necessary to derail the conversation, though some Doctrines can be special configurations that use other attributes.

Once all is done, it is necessary to make a final test during the resolve phase, which simply governs how effective the Synod's effects will be. If the resolve phase is weak, the PCs may receive the opportunity to do what they want while providing their own resources, while a strong resolution involves active help from the participants in the Synod and their underlings.