Sunday 25 January 2009

Robot World - Preview

For a while now one of my back-burner projects has been a game and setting called Robot World. It was all inspired by the thought that a robot wearing a cowboy hat and riding a horse is a great image. Think less this...

And more this...

I'm clearly not the only one with a love for clearly mechanical robots in human clothes, so this is a sound basis for any game. I'm going to talk about designing the game in later posts but you can expect the following influences and features to crop up.

  • Dealing with extremely varied characters from humanoids to self-aware tanks
  • Avoiding permanent death through backups
  • How much setting info do you give when the setting is Earth?
  • Unifying experience, wealth and character points to one resource
  • Breaking a setting down into smaller settings with tighter focuses (WoD?)
  • The importance of memorable races (in this case, factions), each with their own appeal and balanced claim to being superior


On the topic of factions I've managed to fit in a few of my favourite robot schticks as individual factions, so hopefully everyone's favourite type of robot is present and playable.

  • The "Brain in a Jar" equivalent, only the jar is a mechanical body
  • The previously mentioned human-mimicking clothed robots
  • Your purpose-built type that might resemble an intelligent bulldozer or roaming security camera on wheels
  • Robots built by robots. When you remove the need for utility and have robots for robots sake suddenly so many of the Futurama robots make sense
  • Creepy flesh-growing robots longing to become the next stage of organic life


Specific info and eventually playtest rules to come soon. In the mean time who's going to help me out with some inspirational robots?


2 comments:

  1. I have long wanted a setting / etc that is all mechanical. I do tend to often write short fiction inspired that way. best of luck

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