While Remnant waits for that proper dose of inspiration I find myself considering another setting of mine that could be a lot of fun as an Apocalypse World hack: Dungeonauts. It’s a mash up of Buck Rogers, Mega Man Legends, The Warriors, and the perils of opening a small business. Along with Remnant and You Can’t Take It With You, Dungeonauts helps form a trilogy of settings that are all about money, debt and barely scraping by; each of them is a depiction of my 20s and early 30s. While it sounds kind of desperate on the face of it, the setting is largely a comedy but with some character drama about ambition and knowing one’s self (again my 20s). I can see some of the potential books already, things like Planet Hacker, The Indestructable, Boot Day Survivor, The Red Suit, The Sharp Talent, The Boss, The Legend, and The Talking Robot.
So intrigued!
William Nichols I think this is up your alley
Anything about personal finance is basically my alley.
Wow, thanks for the interest guys. A friend and I are already noodling at a card/board game of this, but I keep coming back to the notion that it would make for a great comedy/drama hack. Maybe of World of Adventure when it’s finished baking. If anyone has any questions I’m sure It’ll be about stuff I haven’t considered so please ask away.
How do you make the fictional money in the game? That is, what is the chief economic activity?
The main commerce of the game comes in the form of taking jobs and gigs, and deploying your employees to the relevant locations on the Dungeon Planets. The most generic job is looting tchotchkis for resale, so there’s a crawler portion to it. There’s also xenoarcheologist escorts, SQRbot production hotzones to clear, rescues of stranded teams (for a fee), repair jobs to keep floors functional, sabatoge missions to keep them broken, puzzle floors to unlock mega-haul vaults, double booked jobs to compete for, and attacks by pirates and goblins (people who have gone native on the planets) who are generally assholes.
The crawler portion is a combo of the Planet Hacker (or an NPC) manipulating the planet’s assembly systems to build new floors and warn about incoming dangers, and the Dungeonauts exploring. The Dungeonauts down planet side have to scrounge for excess loot, fight the murderous SQRbots, and try to keep ahead of the security bot that the dungeonaut community collectively named The BEAST.
The expenditure of funds, business deals, medical bills, pay checks, and new job opportunities happen back on earth, a space station or on the company ship via video phone. Your business is often not in good shape, and you owe a lot in debt each month. Collecting enough to pay that debt off is complicated by shady business deals going sour, unexpected bills, officials demanding bribes, better business bureau investigations, old friends in need of loans, L&I claims, direct competition from competing salvage companies, fuel/equipment cost hikes, and the unpredictability of the Dungeon Planet’s themselves.
The end objective would likely be to get your company solvent and built up to a name brand level of recognition. Once there you can either become an enduring name, like a Sears or IBM, or position yourself for a buyout.
I spent a bit of time last night writing up some broad flavor strokes of the potential playbooks that have come to mind so far:
The Planet Hacker – This brilliant and flexible systems specialists can manipulate the layout and structure of a Dungeon Planet on the fly. They do their best to guide a dungeonaut team toward their goals, but are forced to work under a strict power budget. If they blow a fuse, or break something critical then the whole floor goes dark and the SQRbots come out of the woodwork. Luckily they have a selection of homebrewed flash hacks that can help seriously turn the tide.
Abilities –
Flash Hacks –
The Indestructable – A rare class of Dungeonaut that can take a serious beating but just doesn’t seem to go down. They’re not a heavy hitter, or particularly smart, but they can walk into a sea of SQRbots, or a hallway of lethal traps and come out the otherside relatively intact. Maybe a few pints lighter. Be careful though, these hires really rack up the medical bills, tend to attract labor watchdogs and spontaneously generate L&I claims.
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Typical Gear –
The Boot Day Survivor – Most of those who were at ground zero on Boot Day were scientists, archeologists, xeonobiologists, and easy prey for the suddenly activated SQRbots. Anyone who survived that massacre quickly found new employ as bottle openers and change collectors. The few still functional enough to hold down a job in the salvage industry are valuable sources of knowledge regarding the functioning of the Dungeon Planets, know some crafty tricks to open up back doors, and probably have a few bottles of high proof booze in their kit.
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Typical Gear –
The Red Suit – As the freshest face on the salvage team the Red Suit doesn’t know a whole lot about anything, but they do know how to lug heavy things which is why they’re assigned very deep bag to carry a whole lot of shit. A Red Suit is also a bit of a rabbit’s foot for the team, where things that could go wrong around them sometimes just magically don’t. If course when things do to wrong it’s REALLY bad. They had better hope that luck holds because they have the least health and weakest insurance coverage of the team.
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The Sharp Talent – There’s always that one employee that’s got some serious chops and can do one thing amazingly well; we’re talking rock star levels of just-deal-with-it talent. Unfortunatly these primadonas are frankly all thumbs on anything else, yet still labor under the delusion that their one degree of savanthood applies to everything they do. These guys are going to want to be the star of any show as often as possible, even when the task at hand is outside of their wheel house. Also better be ready to throw out that operating budget, because they make more requests for raises than any other hire.
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The Hired Goon – If you need some serious muscle capable of lifting a gun the size of a small car over their head, or possessing the strength to lug massive hauls at speed, you can’t go wrong signing on a no-questions-asked meat neck. Of course they aren’t worth much outside of their cantaloupe smuggling bicepts, meaning forget asking them to operate a complex piece of gear, prep a terminal for a hack, or decipher a wall of alien petroglyphs. They also tend to come with some strings attached so he prepared to hear from the mob or debt collectors or the FBI on occasion.
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The Boss – The owner, CEO and president of any small time salvage company will tend to wear a lot of hats, and sometimes that means crawling though a lightless alien tomb world because Steve called in sick. The presence of the boss in a team will encourage the men to cut the b.s. and work extra hard, of course it also means the management is there to watch the employees screw up in real time. There’s a good chance of some diciplinary writes ups being made. It also means the Boss isn’t minding the shop, so there’s no way of knowing if the interns have set the office ablaze in their absence.
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The Legend – You hear stories about these guys and the impossible feats of heroism they’ve accomplished. It’s all bunk though. These conartists have figured out a few tricks that, with a bit of clever story telling, have elevated their names to whispers made in hushed reverence. Can they shutdown a room filled with SQRbots single handedly? Open sealed vaults with a whisper? Or carry an entire unconscious team to safety? Sure, but no one can be watching when they do, and other teammates are likely to get a little lazy in their presence as they expect the golden hire to solve every problem for them.
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The Human Resources – No business functions autonimously, and people are the gears upon which the salvage industry generates it’s quarterly profits. The head of an HR department is the one who reads resumes and fills the vacencys. This means they’ve always got a couple of fresh faces running around with them, excited to receive the on the job gunfire that comes with an exciting, lucrative, and ultimately short life in the dungeon salvage industry. HR is The embodiment of churn though, so expect to pay out a lot of untimely severance packages, and field a lot of lawsuits regarding the hellish working conditions that their policies put in place.
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The Talking Robot – No dungeon salvage operation would be complete without their own repurposed SQRbot on staff, wobbling about and screeching out of a speaker that’s seen just a bit too much use. A talking robot is a boon on a Dungeon Planet seeing as wild robots tend to ignore them, they’re able to easily interface with the most complex of systems, and aren’t limited by the dungeon layout allowing them to roam anywhere. The downsides however is that they can’t be treated by a medic, they require specilized tools to patch them up, and any system and weapon upgrades they receive are heart palpatatingly expensive. Their gear also can’t be hotswapped while on a mission, so these machines aren’t exactly swiss army bots.
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The Undergrad – Summer intern, working for credit to get through medical school. Being completely level they probably aren’t ever going to be a great doctor. Probably won’t ever be a doctor for that matter. However with them backing a team you can expect your crew’s survival rate, and the bills from actual medical practitioners, in real hospitals that they’re going to have to spend a week in, to go up. Sharply.
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Subsidy Bill – A vet that’s been on about fifteen tours of frontline combat too many over the course of the long war against the Reichen. They know how to bark orders, field strip an NVic Sulard in twenty seconds, and has hands that shake like a jack russell terrier, but hey, he came with some amazing tax breaks!
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Ralph Mazza have you seen this?
have not…