In the vein of the Takeshi Kovacs/Richard K. Morgan novels (or the Netflix adaptation), I'm thinking of a darkish but funky (a dash of Cowboy Bebop anyone?) transhumanist game, set in some faraway human-colonised worlds. War is a business, and a booming one at that. Big evil government in bed with the corporations, squashing dissent everywhere. No aliens, but cybernetics and uplifting and DNA engineering make up for it it bizarreness. Body-hopping mercenaries, revolutionaries, all sorts of rogues.

I guess Cyberpunk Red or Alien would be the obvious choices mechanics-wise, but I'd like to keep it simple and friendlier to newcomers, so I'm considering using the (extremely lean) 2400 system.

Sound good? Any takers? I'm a big fan of detailed worldbuilding, but I'd rather not bore everyone here with thousands of words' worth of it before I know anyone is interested, so lemme know :)

How do you feel about minor hindrances such as lack of knowledge about Altered Carbon and/or the 2400 system?  Would the game be newbie-friendly?  :)
This message was last edited by the user at 14:07, Mon 16 May 2022.

In reply to OakMaster (msg # 2):

Total newbie = totally welcome :)

As for the setting, I mean "inspired by" the Kovacs novels, not "set in the same world", etc. I can give you a little intro, and introduce elements little by little, no need to learn tons of lore before we play.

As for the 2400 ruleset (if you wanna call it that, it's more like a skeleton framework, literally fits in *one* double page spread), I'm a newbie myself, so goes without saying.

Sounds interesting and would love to give it a try. Also a newbie to the system.

I'm intrigued.

I'll double down on OakMaster's and HEarlPendelfield's previous comments. Your concept sounds intriguing (and a lot of fun), but I would also be an absolute newbie, both to the novels and the rules (although the 2400 system sounds extremely rules-lite).

FWIW, most of my RPoL games these days are D&D5e. I've been looking for a rules-lite, newbie friendly sci-fi game here on RPoL for quite some time. :)

I've no knowledge of the 2400 system, and very little knowledge of Altered Carbon.

How would you explain AC to a complete newb?

I tend to avoid spoilers in case I ever want to read the book, but reading just the first section ("Premise") of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon gave me some slight clue...  :)

In reply to OakMaster (msg # 8):

Very neat.  Reminds me a bit (as far as people being able to import/export their ego [the process of 'resleeving' in Altered Carbon]) of Eclipse Phase.

As a real live Quellist, I'd be up for this even though I've never even heard of 2400.