THEME: Player Vs. Environment (Scavenger's Reign)
I received this lovely request from Sam Richardson! I haven't seen Scavenger's Reign, so I did a little bit of a research deep dive, and I came away from my rabbit hole to conclude that what makes Scavenger's Reign involves: - a planet that feels truly alien, - an environment that will change you, - the horror of the unknown, - learning how to use your environment to your advantage, and - the smallness of humans compared to the natural world. This week I'm including recommendations that fit parts and pieces of this, with the hopes that something contains just the right element for you!
This is a long one, so I'm putting info under the cut.
Plasmodics, by will jobst.
In the remnants of the world, play in the smithereens.
Plasmodics is the tabletop roleplaying game of post-apocalyptic, gonzo sci-fi, where (sorta) humans, (kinda) animals, (mostly) robots, and (definitely) aliens join hand-in-mutated-hand.
You play the Plasmodics. The world and its debris are yours to play in. Uncover odd artifacts, wrestle with opposing factions and your cryptic alliances, and see what this weird world has to offer.
The world of Plasmodics is all about getting weirder. The world that you're in has changed you, and will continue to change you, not just in your body, but in your personality. Characters in Plasmodics take on quirks called Nuances, which inform the way they navigate the world. The world isn't completely alien; there are factions that the characters can insult, befriend, negotiate with, and so on, so the world isn't quite so weird that you can't understand it. But if you want a game where change is part of a setting, and the environment around you is still dangerous enough to make you put up a fight, maybe check out Plasmodics. (Good for campaigns too!)
LEVIATHAN, by Menoetian Press.
LEVIATHAN is a biopunk TTRPG, focused on tactical combat, desperate survival, and the construction of a community in a baroque alien megastructure.
Players take on the role of post-human mercenaries operating out of a fledgling settlement in the depths of a vast, hostile wilderness. Survival depends not only on scavenging and foraging the supplies and technology to sustain your people, but seeking out and destroying the threats waiting at the peripheries of the human settlements - predatory flora and fauna, ruthless marauders, and the lethal mechanisms of the megastructure itself.
I think LEVIATHAN might be the game best-suited on this list to confront you with an alien landscape that is also openly hostile and forces your characters to struggle. It takes place in a far-future, in a megastructure too big to escape or even properly navigate. The megastructure itself is also incredibly dangerous. It leaks toxic fluids, the machines that roam it can become erratic, and resources are scarce! Be careful if you die out there as well - you never know what will happen to your corpse.
I think LEVIATHAN is well-suited to campaign play, but I wouldn't be surprised if you had to create a new character every once in a while.
Sol-Siders, by Vivid Pilgrim Games.
After the Giants fell to the Torment, the Survivors created the underground city of Azalon. Generations have passed and the outside world of the Sol-Side now shows signs of life. Brave travelers have begun to venture into the Sol-Side, discover its lost memories and overcome its dangers in an attempts to heal the scars of catastrophe.
Sol-Siders is an outdoor role-playing game for one Guide and one to six Survivors. Players overcome risks by drawing tokens from a bag and spending tokens to change their luck. This game comes in an 8-fold booklet zine for Survivors to reference and an inside spread for the Guide to prep their adventures.
This game is about exploring a place that is both old and new at the same time. It's also a map-making game, one that you draw as you play. Rather than using dice, the game requires you use labelled tokens and a paper clip: the tokens are used for a resolution mechanic, and the paper clip tracks your character's condition as they suffer various consequences. Sol-Siders isn't really a game meant for campaign play, but the feeling of exploration and creation might make it good for an introduction to the setting, helping you generate a landscape that you might feel compelled to explore in another game.
The Eternal Ruins, by Mythworks.
A sprawl of ccorridors, chasms, towers, and gardens, the ruins are a labyrinth without end; a truly limitless space.
The Eternal Ruins RPG is a game of cozy exploration based on the worldbuilding and art of Sam Carr, using the Wild Words engine. Writen by Rob Leigh and Felix Isaacs, it takes inspiration from Hollow Knight, The Legend of Zelda, ICO, and Nausicaä Valley of the Wind.
The Eternal Ruins isn't quite out yet, but I'm familiar with the Wild Words engine, which is a system that feels very open to the idea of exploring a wide, wide world. The creatures you find in Wild Words games typically consist of descriptions, desires, and some niche abilities that can make them interesting or scary. I don't think this game quite meets the horror that is underlying in Scavenger's Reign, although I think the illustrations are attempting to convey the awe and wonder of interacting with the natural world, especially a natural world that feels new and mysterious. Likely great for campaigns.
Intrepid, by Najmah Salam.
Race against time on an unforgiving ice planet and get as many of your crew home as possible.
In this lovingly called decision-sim, you take on the mantle of captain who has to balance resources and the safety of the crew in order to survive.
Here is a game focused solidly on survival, and even happens in the same setting: space! Your crew is stuck on an ice-planet, and your captain is attempting to keep as many people alive as they can, in order to get the ship fixed after a crash landing.
This is a game about tracking resources, weighing decisions, and creating memorials for the people you lose. What exactly you find on the planet is partially determined through random generation, partially determined through collaborative conversation. What's really interesting to me is the card draws that present the Captain with choices, with different outcomes depending on what you prioritize.
Intrepid is more about the experience of survival than the discovery of new & exciting alien life. I don't know if this game can be played in a single session, but it certainly isn't great for a long campaign, either. That being said, the planet is definitely a hostile environment, with a lot of emotional beats if you lean into it.
Curious Taxonomy, by Johnson Ofair.
Curious Taxonomy is a light hearted built on folds cootie catcher game about researching an alien ecology and building the world through prompts on a cootie catcher/ chatterbox.
I wouldn't recommend Curious Taxonomy alone for what you're looking for, since it's basically a solo alien generator. That being said, I think it might be a great tool for slotting the weird and alien into a game system or setting that feels a little too normal or understandable on its own.
For example, maybe you generate a creature that is spiky and endothermic: is it a predator that absorbs other creatures' heat? Are the spikes a defense mechanism against another, larger creature, or are they used for something else? Alternatively, you could generate the creature and put it in front of the players, and have them use their own imagination to reason out how and why this critter acts the way it does.
Curious Taxonomy isn't just for aliens either. You can also use it for Flora & Fungi, landscapes, or a planetary feature.
BlightFall, by Matthew Ayers.
Blightfall is a dark fantasy TTRPG for a GM and 3-5 players. Doomed villagers infected with darkness sacrifice shreds of their humanity for the power to protect their home. A unique system, part collaborative worldbuilding to create your shared civilization and threats, part narrative and combat engine to play inside your creation. But no matter what you do, your characters will eventually become abominations.
The GM plays The Blight, weaving the world, tracking the players' swelling corruption, and offering dark deals to anyone interested in bending or breaking the rules of the game. Players choose between six classes: The Belltower, The Harbor, The Garden, The Bonfire, The Cathedral, and The Mausoleum. Each class offers unique ways to shape the world and bend the narrative with their burgeoning power, like twisting time and communing with extra-dimensional voices.
Blightfall sinks you into a rather hostile world, the core theme of the game being maintaining your humanity in the face of a corrupted infection. Your characters are anchored in a community, but they also suffer a corruption that gives them special powers. They use these powers to benefit their community by going on dangerous missions, typically to protect or resupply the people they live with. The world around you is scary because it changes you; and yet, that change is what gives you the ability to help the people around you.
Blightfall is a great option for a campaign game, although the starkness of the horror may take away from some of the wonder felt in Scavenger's Reign. You can check out Blightfall: The Bleak Edition on Itch.io.
Xenosomnia, by Maddie Elder.
In the dystopian future, whole planets are disposable.
The corporate government's resource harvesting missions leave planet after planet in ruin. Minimalist ethics regulations require at least one human administrator to be present to oversee the largely automated process of stripping a planet down to its raw materials. This time something is different.
The humans don't know it yet, but this planet is not like the others. This one's alive. Psychic energies grant the planet a sentient, collective consciousness. Strange, psychedelic flora and fauna litter the living world and surreal sights are around every turn.
This is a one-page duet game, so it's definitely not a contender for a campaign. However, I think it's got something interesting in that the game explicitly states that the Planet you're exploring is sentient.
One person plays the Administrator, who oversees a legion of robots and drones, all responsible for harvesting resources from the planet. The other plays the Planet, hurt by the destructive practices of the Administrator. The planet will attempt to communicate with, and possibly even change, the Administrator over the course of play. I think there's a resonance between this and the way the planet that the crew of the Demeter finds themselves on slowly changes them over the course of the series.
Pilgrim's Passages, by Monday Cox.
Walk in winding paths o’ pilgrim. Keeper of road, helper of folk both corporeal and not, creator of great works. May the path you blaze be long and meandering. Walk until you find your home. Walk.
Pilgrim's Passages is a rule set, and guide, for playing DIY adventure games about travel. Pilgrim's Passages provide tools to help players create and play as pilgrims, wandering craftsfolk who walk from town-to-town helping the folk and spirits of the archipelago. While providing referees with tools for generating the archipelago, running traveling campaigns, and creating history within the islands.
Hexcrawls allow for the feeling of newness and wonder for everyone at the table, and Pilgrim's Passages uses them quite a bit. There's a few other aspects that stood out to me when I flipped through this game: your pilgrims are rather ordinary people, not necessarily built for fighting. They will likely be motivated to try finding creative solutions to problems rather than simply fighting their way out. The lore also attaches weather to the gods of the world, giving a meta reason for the weather to affect your dice pools. The fact that spirits can embody places can make something that looks like a piece of the landscape an NPC that you have to outsmart or mollify.
The world of Pilgrim's Passages is vibrant, alive, and exciting to explore. Is it alien? No. But it's magical and mysterious, and that might have a charm all its own. (Likely good for campaigns).
The World We Left Behind, by Blinking Birch Games.
The answers to mysteries often lie buried in the past.
In The World We Left Behind, play as astronauts trekking across an alien planet. Learn about the planet’s flora and fauna while uncovering vestiges of the past. What happened to the sapient species that called this planet home? Why do only remnants of their lives remain?
During this casual world-building game, players draw symbols on playing cards to create a planet, populate it with traits, and uncover the mystery of the species that left this world behind. Tell a story of wonder, companionship, and legacy in the midst of a lonely planet.
The exploration of a planet that happens over the course of In The World We Left Behind can take a long time, as your crew will be expected to undertake four journeys to the planet, each of which can have multiple legs. Your crew is looking for core clues to a mystery that involves a species that no longer inhabits this planet. These clues are represented by the aces in your deck, which will be distributed over four different hands. When you draw and play cards, you'll uncover traits of the planet, allowing for slow discovery. Card suits are assigned to four different aspects: creatures, plants, landscapes and vestiges.
I don't think there's much in this game that will force your characters to change: there's observation and struggle for sure, but I don't think your crew will walk away from this planet a tangibly different person - other than emotionally, of course.
Journeys Weird and Winding, by Jack O'Grady.
Journeys Weird and Winding (JWAW) is a weird/gonzo/low-fantasy RPG built on the Troika! rules-light system and taking heavy inspiration from other adventure-focused games like DURF, Into the Odd and MÖRK BORG.
This game aims to instill a sense of wanderlust into the risky and random systems of classic, OSR-inspired games. The Wandering Party is faced with a world where a magical apocalypse has annihilated our connection to reality and asked to make the adventure into it anyway. Pre-built character classes get Players into the action quickly and a strong risk-reward system around engaging with magic keeps them there for countless sessions of wandering that will pretty rapidly spiral into the strange and sinister.
The setting of Journeys Weird and Winding includes something called a Cursed Fog, which causes weirdness to manifest you and other beasts, and allows characters to learn new pieces of magic. Like many OSR games, you are not expected to be able to fight everything that you come up against, and the world is generated as you play, allowing discovery to feel new and novel. The game has dungeons of course, so to some extent I think this is going to feel similar to many other dungeon-delving games. I think there's bits and pieces in here that speak to the feeling of exploring a hostile environment! A great campaign option.
What We Found Beyond the Stars, by StickyHunter.
What We Found Beyond The Stars is a GMless Roleplaying Game about cooperation and discovery on alien worlds. There is no combat, though dangerous situations may arise.
You are a small research crew, sent out to the stars as part of the Studies of Proactive Panspermia of Celestial Bodies for the Cosmic Alliance.
Through unity, we persevere. Through perseverance, we learn.
What We Found Beyond The Stars is a GM-less game that uses both dice and a tarot deck to help you describe your journey through a dangerous world. There's no combat in this game; you are a research crew, using your expertise in field such as medicine, bioscience, robotics and nanotechnology to help you navigate various planets. Certain cards pulled from the deck will introduce dangerous events, and as you play, your characters' own dark truths may push them into fraught situations, both external and personal.
There is struggle and a strange environment here, one that I think is likely going to feel sufficiently strange. I don't know how long a game of this is meant to last; the use of the tarot cards means that you'll have some idea of where the story is going, and there will be a hard cut-off point once your deck runs out, but I don't know how often you're pulling cards, or whether or not you can go out on another expedition after writing a final report.
Planets Unknown, by Cobra Lily Games.
Take on the role of a small group of space explorers traveling to planets unknown, looking to discover new, exciting worlds and the threats that reside on them.
Driven by a simple D6 dice pool system, players will make dynamic characters and ships to adventure out into the universe with.
The booklet also includes tables for quickly generating planets, aliens, and threats for the game master and driving unique stories.
Another one-page game with fairly simple rules. I think I'm mostly including Planets Unknown because of the roll tables. Even if you don't want to use this game for its exploratory mechanics, I think the roll-tables might be a great addition to other games with a longer shelf life. That being said, the galaxy of Planets Unknown is a fairly hostile one, so there's plenty of struggle to be found in this short little game!
Little Colony on the Big Moon, by Jeff Moore.
In a far future, the human species reaches out to the stars. A ship bound for a successful and rapidly growing settlement veers off course and crashes. The survivors of the crash are stranded. The crash site is on a large moon orbiting a gas giant in an uncharted sector of space. The ship is damaged beyond repair. Rescue seems impossible.
The moon's hazy green sky envelops a strange alien landscape. The atmosphere is breathable, but thin. Physical activity is exhausting, but manageable. The ship is salvaged, and its pieces used to create, first shelters, then homes. For better or for worse, you are here to stay.
This game feels like it's about relationships just as much as it is about exploration. It de-emphasizes violence, and encourages you to navigate most scenes through description. When you do encounter a pivotal moment, you roll 2d6 and multiply the results. The dice are differentiated by color, so you can determine whether you get a dark (negative) or light (positive) twist on top of your result.
Your characters in Little Colony on the Big Moon are at least partially defined by the leaders you create for the colony. These leaders have specific values they champion, and provide special resources to the rest of the colony. If you were invested in Sam's leadership role and the way his choices affected the rest of his crew, you might find something resonant in Little Colony on the Big Moon.
Haecceity, by Anna Landin.
An ancient machine wakes to find itself in a world that has turned unfamiliar; the echoes of the past lie like a ghost across a landscape it once knew. A wanderer finds a remnant of the past, its dormant power core still humming faintly, and at their touch it comes awake. Nothing is static To exist is to change What will you build from the ashes of the fires you pass through?
Haecceity is a game about beings - both artificial and organic - building their sense of self out of the experiences they go through.
I'm recommending this one for folks who really liked Levi's story-line in Scavenger's Reign*. At least one person in this game is a machine, newly awaken to a world turned strange. At least one other person is a mortal, who's much more familiar with the world around them, and is curious about this machine and what you might be able to make it do.
As you play, the machine characters will explore echoes and memories, learning how to incorporate these pieces into their sense of self. Mortals will do something similar, but are more likely to search our danger and dreams. The game uses a deck of cards to generate scenes like encountering a dangerous creature, or finding a remnant from the world before this one. You'll also need dice to help you determine the resolution of your actions: roll two die together and look to the highest number to determine the result.
Like most card games, Haeccity is limited in its run due to the limit in the cards presented. It's also probably better enjoyed in a short game, since at some point you'll have answered all of the questions attached to each character. However, I like the themes of discovery attached also to a discovery of the self - at the end of the day, your Machine is likely going to be a new person, of some kind, and your Mortal will have learned something about the power they wield.
Games I've Talked About Before...
Pale Dot is a GM-less game pulling from No Dice, No Masters, about exploring a terrifying and dangerous place that threatens to strip away at your cosmonaut's integrity. Campaign-friendly.
Cloud Empress places you in the psychic wreckage of Earth, and casts you as real people just trying to survive. Campaign-friendly!
Moth-Light takes place on a post-fall world plagued by alien predators, otherwise known as Moths. The Scavengers Pact in particular looks promising. Great for Campaigns.
Across A Thousand Dead Worlds is a space horror & exploration game that sends you out on missions to board alien ships; it doubles as a sci-fi toolbox! Excellent for campaigns!
Space Jellyfish Overhead is a solo journaling game in a world where once in a generation, interstellar (and completely alien) jellyfish visit your world. Not campaign-friendly.
Exquisite Biome is a game of speculative biology that would likely create some incredibly interesting creatures to populate the planet of your choosing. Better as an addition to another game.
Bug World is a post-apocalyptic PbtA game about surviving in a world full of giant bugs! Campaign friendly too!
What I remember from the Ultraviolet Grasslands setting book was pretty weird; although I don't know how much of it is focused on discovery. Great for campaigns though.
Lost Eons is a solarpunk sci-fantasy game about post-humans being re-introduced to a beautiful and horrifying earth, generations after the world that we know passed away. Definitely a campaign game.
Milk Bar is an OSR game in a retro-futuristic post-Soviet Poland, with a supernatural, slightly horrific vibe that gives you the chance to focus on how your environment is changing you. Campaign friendly!
Vaults of Vaarn take place in a psychedelic blue desert, with alien cultures, strange creatures, and plenty of resources framed as generative tables. Perfect for campaigns.
If you like what I do and want to leave a tip, you can check out my Ko-Fi!
