My friend wants to run a game set in a virtual digital world of the late 90s and early 2000s, kind of a group of rebels taking down the bad guys from the inside type situation. Like, reboot, cyberchace, megaman, Digimon sortof dealio. Any recs?
THEME: Virtual Worlds & Fighting Evil
Hello there! I don’t know if I have anything that matches exactly, but I have some ideas of how to play in digital world settings! Rebellion might need to be imported separately.
CAMPAIGN.FRAME, by Me!
Protect your city; dive into adventure; discover who you are. CAMPAIGN.FRAME is a campaign outline casts players as members of a software program that ensures that video games run properly on a console. Your role is to embody various characters in video game worlds, fending off the attempts of the user to break the system, while also trying to retain the pieces of yourself that make you… you. Each video game is a potential invader that threatens to render parts of your city null – unless you can figure out how the game works.
Inspired by the Canadian television series REBOOT, CAMPAIGN.FRAME is designed for online play in a forum or Discord server, but can also be used for an in-person gaming group. It allows you to catalogue both multiplayer and solo games. CAMPAIGN.FRAME isn’t so much a game as it is a way to place a number of different kinds of games into a larger framework, restructuring the premise to allow you to play in an over-arching story while going through a lot of the games in your extensive TTRPG library. Your base character stays the same, but they jump into different ‘skins’ with each game you play, allowing the GM to create pre-gens that speed up game prep, while also giving players agency over who their character is and what they want to do.
The Neverending Dungeons of Chaos, by Chubby Crow Games.
TNDC, once one of the most popular MMORPGs on the market, is dying. A blend of roguelike elements kept this game at the top of everyone's radar, but a lack of development has led to its eventual downfall. Perhaps you are one of the game's most dedicated players, sticking it through 'til the end. Or maybe you've only stumbled across the game in its final days.
No matter how you got here, you're one of the few players still logging in to explore-
The Neverending Dungeons of Chaos!
TNDC is combat-heavy, but not crunch-heavy. Built on Caltrop Core, it uses pools of d4s and uses only the highest result to determine how (or how well) you succeed. Most of your character abilities will focus on giving you an advantage in battle, and the dungeons you explore are randomly determined using a deck of regular playing cards. The game doesn’t have a committed bestiary, but just gives you some simple enemy stats. This means you can import enemy descriptions from other games, or play with the setting. I don’t think there’s really anything in this game that requires you to play in a fantasy dungeon, so you can probably re-skin it if you like!
Arcana Punk, by AndrasDarkmist.
Sybill is a city of many things. A city of opportunities and dreams, a city of despair and oppresion. A city torn apart by the constant power struggle of corporations over the last trade center in the wasteland after the war and by the gang fights in the city street. A city where death is as mundane as an office job, and where people's lives seem as ephemeral as a candle's flame.
But most importantly for us, it's a city that hides a secret world just underneath its surface. A world that you can access only if only you are brave, resolved or strong willed enough to be chosen by one of the Fortune-Tellers. Only if you are willing to turn that feeble candle flame that's your life in a raging inferno that'll consume everything around you.
Only then, can you enter in the world of the Arcana.
The world of Arcana Punk is inhabited by mysterious beings called Fortune0tellers, omniscient creatures that cannot interact with the physical world. Your characters have the ability to awaken these Fortune Tellers, whose iconography is intimately tied to the Major Arcana of a Tarot Deck.
Your characters are arcana summoners, using powers gifted to them by a tarot card. Your character steps into the story with a history already behind them; the story covers who they are and what they do after being blessed by a Fortune-Teller. Your powers, and the place they come from, hint at a world just beyond our physical senses, although I’d argue this feels a little less like Digimon and a little more like the setup for a magical girl story. This game is also mostly a quick-start, so there’s a lot that isn’t in the preliminary game document: I’m curious if a full game would have more lore about the world and the world-within-the-world. However, since it’s cyberpunk, rebellion is in its bones!
Isekai, by The Silent Mage.
You are trapped into a pixel art MMO. You can't log out. Something's missing. Find your way out or fight to rule the world!
Isekai is a simple yet deep game inspired by Isekai style media such as Ultimate Online, Sword Art Online and video games like The Elder Scrolls. The gameplay is fast and versatile, based on the Breathless SRD by Fari RPGs.
You can't log out, that's the assumption. Whether you are wandering as a lone wolf or a group of gamers, your Avatars are all you have to investigate the reasons of your imprisonment! The Game Master is both an in world and in real entity, providing world events, clues and threats, because it's obvious: you are not supposed to leave!
I can see the possibility for rebellion in this game, since your characters are trapped in the world, similar to the premise of Sword Art Online. Your adventure revolves around figuring out what has got you trapped, and then doing what you can to break the forces that keep you here. The system encourages a cyclical style of play, with action sequences followed up by downtime, which gives the Game Master a chance to ratchet up the tension for the following action scenes.
.dungeon Remastered, by snow.
Welcome to the ruins of Annwn. The once populated hills of this massively multiplayer online game are now void. They call it a Dead MMO. A polygonal mess of PS1-era graphics, empty plains, and dungeons that grow and grow and grow from the inside of the planet's wounds. Up above, the eye of the sad god glares its chromatic light down upon the remaining players, while its tormented hand contorts into magical shapes, rarely crossing paths in their messy orbit. When they do, the shadow magic that powers the game explodes with its ancient might.
.dungeon//remastered is the second edition of the award-winning TTRPG, .dungeon, released in 2021. The game wears the aesthetics of gamefaqs walkthroughs, player screenshots, and cryptic dev notes, meant to evoke the sense that this book is the culmination of a community delving into the mysteries of this dead mmo to pry out anything of use.
What I understand about .dungeon is that it’s a way to play through various fantasy TTRPG adventures, but re-imagining them as video game levels. I haven’t played this myself, but I’ve read the original version of the game, and I’ve thought about trying to use it with various OSR settings. This is a great option if you love the gritty, low-fantasy dungeon crawl, but want to mix it with the feeling of moving through a dying digital space.
Netcrawl, by James A. Poznel Jr..
YOU ARE COHERENT DATA TRAVELLING AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT, A DIGITAL AVATAR SEARCHING FOR COMPUTERIZED INFORMATION. THERE IS SOMETHING HIDDEN IN THE VIRTUAL REALMS, AND YOU SHALL HACK IT. You’ve left your meat suit A gray light surrounds you, entering your body from all directions. For a moment you feel detached from all realities, hanging as a recently cut marionette. In a flash you materialize into your digital form. The struggle against oppression and their computer systems must continue.
Netcrawl is a TTRPG about adventuring inside a computer system. everyone goes in, seconds pass in the meatspace as players spend hours conquering a cyber-dungeon - together.
The world of Netcrawl is the WorldNet, a cyberspace managed by Artificial Intelligence, and monitored by ICE - Intrusion Countermeasure Entities. The ‘real world’ is of so little importance, the game doesn’t spend time describing it. Everything that is interesting happens digitally. As for the kind of game this is: Netcrawl runs on Dungeon Crawl Classics. This means: roll for ability scores, dice change in size to represent bonuses or penalties, d20-based, roll to overcome DCs.
f this game looks interesting to you, you can also pick up Arcologies, by the same author. It’s designed for Netcrawl, but the designer claims you can use much of the system-agnostic tools within for other rules systems as well.
You Can Also Check Out…
My Alternate Worlds Recommendation Post.
A Requiem For Horizon Prophecy Online, by Tintenseher is a solo game that’s about the last four hours of a dying MMORPG.
Cain, by Tom Bloom.
If you like what I do and want to leave a tip, you can always stop by my Ko-Fi page.
