Category: The Sprawl: Design

News from the rifts!

I’m deep in the middle of the first draft of rules for Touched and one of the things I’m most excited to try out is the high Touch setting I’m working on. See, I’m building the game so it can be played with varying levels of magic; specifically low, mid and high. The low is basically Lovecraftian horror cyberpunk, Mid is a fairly standard magic/scifi dirty Seattle style and high is a crazy trans-humanist scifi fantasy with dragons, immortals and spaceships; oh my. 

I’m probably most excited to play a game set to high.. here’s the basic description from the introduction of the book.

High Touch – The rifts opened millennia ago and the worlds been flooded with Touch for so long basically everything is based on technology built to harness it. This is a Mystical Trans-humanist setting. Thanks to the Touch you can swap shells on a whim, manipulate matter and with enough money obtain effective immortality. The worlds ruled by Great Houses and they hire out to agents to get their dirty work done. No house wants to be caught dirty so they hire only the most discreet and professional of agents. The world is filled with magic, kin, robots, flying cars, spaceships, dragons, beasts from other dimensions and every other good thing you could want!

I have been working on Touched today and figured I would post a quick update.

The way it works is you get a certain pool of touch to spend on advantages and buying off disadvantages (all advantages will give you a disadvantage)

Currently I have around 30 advantages built! There will be a nice catalog of them and corresponding disadvantages! If you don’t use your touch during character creation you can use it to put rolls over during the game.

Another thing I am playtesting, that I haven’t come up with a name for yet, is a di that the gm can throw into a players roll. The di is considered negative and whatever is rolled on it is subtracted from the rest of the roll. It’s another way for the GM to use hard moves to increase the difficulty of a situation.

Anyway I will post some other updates throughout the next few months.