Background
Somatapunk is a Forged in the Dark science-fantasy TTRPG I'm working on.
It originated as a name I suggested for Miziziziz's in-dev biopunk FPS Wrought Flesh (previously titled <span class="md-plain" <thouest="" thee<="" span=""></span>Thouest Thee). If you're familiar with the project, you'll know you customize your stats by switching your organs. Hence, Somatapunk. Somata, plural of soma, as in the corporeal body, and punk as in fuck fascism.
A while later, I booted up a game of RimWorld and with the addition of psychic abilities in the Royalty expansion, I was feeling like making a colony of secluded practitioners of psycasting. When it came time to name them, I thought back to the name I suggested.
I closed the game and signed up for Neocities, (A web-hosting platform, a sort of spiritual successor to Geocities) and began to fumble through HTML, CSS, and Javascript to make a personal website styled like some futuristic DOS command-line that greets you with the words folk-legend Woody Guthrie feverishly painted on his guitar: "This machine kills fascists." That was the birth of the world of Somatapunk.
Shortly thereafter, I decided to make an RPG.
<span class="md-plain" <the="" influences="" i'm="" striving="" to="" incorporate="" are="" the="" videogames="" <="" span="">The influences I'm striving to incorporate are the videogames RimWorld</span>, Caves of Qud, Kenshi, and Fallout; the music of David Bowie and the albums <span class="md-plain" <three="" cheers="" for="" sweet="" revenge<="" span=""></span> Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge and Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys by My Chemical Romance. This list of touchstones will almost certainly grow as the project progresses. Though I'm quite scared of leaning too much into Fallout.
A note on the setting
I haven't included many details about the setting, as in it's current state I have very little of it articulated in my mind. It's sort of an internal moodboard at the moment with very few concrete ideas. Hopefully future devlogs will elaborate more on the setting, since I think that tends to be what really grabs people.
Devlog
Working from a copy of the Blades in the Dark SRD in a Google Doc, I'm currently in the process of "scraping the paint off," renaming things and reading through it all several times over. I've made several notes at the top of the document on things that need to be changed or additions to be made.
Crews and Factions
One set of mechanics I intend to change significantly is the faction and crew system. Something I really want to be possible in the game is the creation of settlements and possibly a sort of broader Grand Strategy/4X-gameplay loop. I want the players to be able to start a revolution in a city, securing an autonomous zone of a few blocks and defending it or expanding outwards to liberate more of the city. (Significantly inspired by the BitD module Steelweaver's Rebellion) From there, I think it would be cool to be able to zoom the game out, bringing that revolution to the doors of other cities, establishing a government. I'm conflicted about this, though. Is it possible to maintain the ease of play of BitD at that scale? Is conquest even theoretically thematically compatible with local revolution? If it is, how can I mechanically incentivize the creation of just societies and communities? Can I make that all fun? At any rate, the crew system will need some reworking to facilitate a more literal expression of land that will allow the players to be a ragtag group of clandestine operators with no place to call home, a group of partisans fighting power, settlers carving out a place of their own, or a combination of all three.
To allow for the first, crew progression cannot be tied to land. Or if it is, an alternate path must be provided. To allow for the second, settlement management has to be engaging even when the vast majority of infrastructure is already in place and still provide motivation, intrinsic or extrinsic. Conversely, to allow for the third, settlement management has to be engaging and non-sloggish even without all the faculties. Such a balancing act will only become more complicated with faction building on a larger scale, which I suppose is another point against having it mechanically instilled at all.
Harm and Stress
Early in the process, I made a note that what BitD calls a Trauma Condition is not really accurate to actual, real-world trauma. I would even go so far as to say it's actively insensitive to actual trauma, particularly in conflating things that are largely negative personality traits (e.g: Vicious, a condition that makes you a cruel sadist) with trauma, something that, to my knowledge, has never caused someone to entirely abandon their morals. During a half-assed late-night read-through of a playtest release for the PbtA and FitD game Haven, by Nate Durell, I noticed they made a simple change in language: They renamed Trauma Conditions to Shocked Conditions. I think this is a vast improvement, and I will most likely steal it, even if I'm not entirely convinced it will be sufficient to make the mechanic foster compassion rather than further stigmatization.
Heat
In reading the zine/guide An Amateur's Guide to Hacking Blades in the Dark by Michael Elliot, I discovered a fascinating quirk of Scum & Villainy, a game I have yet to read myself: Heat is location-dependent. You can be burning up in one area, and cool as a cucumber in another. This is a reasonable change. Scum & Villainy takes place over several sectors of outer-goddamn-space, not one cramped city where word travels fast endowed with a single police force. I will absolutely be stealing this. I can't believe I didn't think of it myself. I'll have to get around to reading Scum & Villainy, if I can get my hands on it, if it has more of these simple but clever changes.
Transhumanism and Body Mods
Sci-fi and cyberpunk without body mods is dumb. Especially when the name of the game a synonym for 'bodies' in it's name. Blades in the Dark doesn't tend to emphasize personal belongings. But to be fair: neither does Apocalypse World, and yet in Monster of the Week I still kept a bullet point list of every single item my character, Ally Bowman (I love this character so much I'll include her whole story at the end of this), owned. And it was fun as fuck! While I think most players, unlike myself, won't be particularly inclined to research the models of sedan available in 1992 and detail the exact components of a Satan-possessed electric guitar, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that players would be all too happy to come up with some cool mods for their character in exchange for a mechanical edge. I'm not sure exactly how this will manifest, what mechanical advantages should be within the jurisdiction of body mods, how conditional the advantages should be, or how pre-defined they should be.
Gear and Load
Blades Against Darkness, a hack that takes BitD to a traditional OSR gameplay format. It divides load into three categories of accessibility: Ready, Slung, and Packed. This is fairly self explanatory, but just in case: Ready items have no penalty, Slung items take a second to get to, and Packed items are pretty much outside of rapid use. I may use this mechanic, but it definitely has the potential to just be boring and annoying.
Resistance
In vanilla Blades in the Dark, a player can resist any consequence at any time. Blades Against Darkness limits that ability somewhat, by giving players a limited pool of resistance dice. This is another mechanic that has the potential to be just annoying, but it could also foster some more consideration for what consequences are worth resisting.
Called Shots and V.A.T.S
A topic of much contention in the TTRPG community, particularly among D&D players, is the concept of called shots. The idea is that a player might say "I try to hack at his ankle with my longsword," and that action in fiction would have a mechanical effect, like lowering their move speed. From what I've seen, the argument against it is that it makes it too easy to stack debuffs on enemies, and any application of the concept against players tends to feel unfair, so it's better to avoid it entirely. And generally, I agree.
But, on the other hand, I think V.A.T.S is really cool. In the Fallout franchise, you can use V.A.T.S, or (IIRC) Virtually Assisted Targeting System, allowing the player to target particular body parts with percent hit-chance dependent on the physical bulk of the targeted part and player skills and stats. I think it's so cool. (Dumb that New Vegas stopped letting you target the eyes, though)
I probably won't include this, or if I do, it'll be very limited. Most likely, an ability for some sort of Sharpshooter playbook. But it's very cool and if anyone knows any really good implementations of called shots I would love to see them.
Conclusion
By the time I'm writing this sentence, I've written almost 2000 words for this devlog. I don't want to give the wrong impression: I have no idea what I'm doing and there is essentially nothing here yet. But if you've gotten this far, you either think I'm a hilarious naïve idiot, or you're intrigued. Either way is cool. We'll see how this goes! I'm excited for this. I'm hoping that even though I will have a lot more responsibilities come the start of the semester with school work and leadership programs, I'll manage to keep a steady, if slow, pace on this project. My track record isn't encouraging, but one can dream.
I'd like to highlight the generosity of Kavita Poduri and Quinn Bleiler, who very generously gave me a copy of their hack, Songs for the Dusk. I have yet to read it, but any contribution to my collection of research material is greatly appreciated.
Extra: My Monster of the Week Character, Ally Bowman
Ally Bowman (Named for Ally Beardsley, who used to be a writer and actor at CollegeHumor and appeared on Critical Role during the Monsterhearts 2 one-shot) grew up in the sleepy town of Gladbrook, Iowa; driving an hour every Sunday morning to attend a service at Sacred Heart Catholic Church (Re-reading this now, I'm pretty sure Catholic churches don't have names like that) a few towns over in Waterloo. She was a prim and proper Catholic schoolgirl, who only read the Holy Bible and classic American literature, and played violin. That is, until her sophomore year of high school, when a friend introduced her to the band Nirvana and their sophomore album Nevermind. She couldn't get enough of the electric riffs and moody vocals. It sounded like every bottled up emotion and impulse she had ever felt. Her friend lent her the tape and Ally rushed home to listen. Not more than a few weeks pass, when Ally comes home from school to all the fury two middle-aged Catholic people can muster. They had found the tape, and were not pleased. She transferred schools immediately to an all-girls Catholic boarding school in Wisconsin. After a while, she began to notice several of the girls in her new classes making gestures at each other, almost like they were communicating through some encoded messaging system. Eventually, a girl made a gesture at her, to which she replied an awkward copy in the somatic equivalent of a "Haha.. yeah." After class, the girl whisked her away to the school basement, a strictly off-limits area. She was informed that the gestures were a form of communication between the girls of the completely illicit and entirely unsanctioned club, The Down-Under Girls. They met in the basement at night to talk away from the prying ears of ruler-wielding nuns, play rock music on shitty instruments they smuggled in, and most likely engage in some casual lesbianism. Ally joined the band immediately as their lead, replacing a girl who graduated. At practice one night, she messed up a simple C-power chord, and let out a whining tritone: the devil in music. Satan appears in a cloud of cigarette smoke, probably menthol, chewing on a toothpick and straightening his stained tweed jacket. "Come on girls, let's hear something," he says, sitting down on an amp. The band plays their signature song: God Can Suck My Dick And My Mom Is Shit. As the final distorted chord rings out, Satan claps and proceeds to offer them a deal with his record label from Hell. Satan bestows on Ally's guitar the ability to destroy angels and disappears in a cloud of menthol-smoke the same as he arrived. Swept up in the moment, The Down-Under Girls got too loud, and a cohort of enraged nuns burst through the door, decrying the girls all as Satanists. Ally grabs her guitar and runs, just barely escaping the pursuit of the nuns. The other girls are caught, and on that day Ally Bowman made a vow to liberate the school with the power of punk rock and Satan.