There’s some incredible tabletop RPGs out there, but not many of them are science fiction ones. Fantasy worlds have a few nice simple mechanics and then everything else is ‘magic’, which can be written any way the designer wants. Guided missiles? Powered Armour? Starships, robots, clones, alien biology? Not only does science fiction provide a plethora of complexity, but it is complexity with expec
tations. We all know (or think we know) how a car might work, or a robot, or a space ship. At the tabletop, a science fiction game has to deliver on that premise and traditionally it hasn’t been done well. Too many rules, or the wrong rules, or just pretending certain things don’t exist. Through years of testing (we’re retroactively labelling our collective misspent youth playing games as such) we’ve realised there is no one answer to this question. D&D is great because it can tell almost any fantasy story, but there’s no science fiction equivalent to that. There can’t be. You can’t make a game system that can be used for a time travel story and a space travel story and a genetic splicing story simultaneously. Even if your ruleset contains a full fidelity simulation of temporal mechanics, astral mechanics and theoretical genetics, it’ll be beyond reasonable expectation for a weekend gaming group to learn all that. It’s a game, not a multi-disciplinary master’s degree. So we’re on a path to create a suite of rulesets, each entirely focused on their respective stories, but each similar enough that you don’t need to relearn from scratch. Wireless Soul Transmission is only the beginning, but it really demonstrates the difference between a game system that can be about having a neural uplink, and one that is entirely about having a neural uplink. But don’t take our word for it, try it and see for yourself.
