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JimGermany2 years ago(+1)

Nekropol has been my favorite sourcebook of the year so far. Tons of style and creativity! 

The first thing I thought when I read through the generators was making a variant in the vein of Eclipse Phase and Altered Carbon. I was just wondering how you find inspiration for all those tables and items while still making them flow. Also, if I were to ever publicly release a sci-fi variant, what sort of permissions/credit would I need to add?

Finally, is there any way to support your work? I feel guilty just being able to download this for free.

Thanks and keep up the awesome job!

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bugbearslug2 years ago (9 edits)

Hi!

I'm all for Sci-Fi Nekropol! Originally, Nekropol was sci-fi rather than science-fantasy. Undead sailed the void between stars, going mad from centuries of isolation. It had reanimated planets and haunted space-stations of bone and enamel. The scope was however too big for a zine and I scaled it down to a city.

Inspiration comes from many sources, there’s a little bit of Electric bastionland, Bonepunk, Goblin Laws of Gaming, Frankenstein, Gideon of the Ninth, Lichjammer, Catacomb Saints, Spaghettibastard, Biomega, Phyrexia, Coco and various speculative/real technologies. As I worked on items I had a number of constraints on to help narrow down and focus creativity.

  • Items grant new abilities, they don’t make you better at things you already could do.
  • Items should have open-ended usage, it should be obvious you could use the item in more ways than one.
  • They do not reference any mechanics.
    • Some items ended up demanding mechanics, such as the Arquebus. Whenever this item gets brought up, the player will have to ask how much damage it deals as attempting to use it as a weapon is first idea someone will have. Something to work on for sure.
  • Skulls and skeletons should combine to create a new unique application area.
    • Not entirely consistent with this one.
  • Low character limit
    • Requires items that are intuitive enough to explain themselves or have flavour text embedded in the mechanics. I did not have room for both.

I wish I had some better guidelines and words for the Setting generators though, as quite a few of them end up with dry or confusing results. I’ve been considering switching over to 2D6 tables instead of 3D6 as those tables usually yield far more consistent results.

 

If you or someone else wants to use Nekropol in their own work I’m fine with it given the following caveats.

  • They abide by the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license. ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
  • It’s not used in a way that harm real people or push agendas that do.
  • If they want to use the art, ask Spaghettibastard as it’s their intellectual property. I was generously allowed to use it, it’s not mine. 😊
  • (optional) Share it with me! (You can post it here or contact me on discord BaaL#9896)

The best way to support my work is to use it, remix it, break it apart, slap it together, do your own thing and share it with others. That is worth more than any money I could hope to get from this. 

Cheers! 

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JimGermany2 years ago(+1)

Awesome!

I personally enjoyed the more contradictory or odd results as making them work is part of the fun. 

Those constraints you mentioned are one of the great things about this zine. Just enough detail to get some sparks going without the crunch. Just enough world built to have a unique setting while still giving room for players to make it their own.

Coco as a touchstone is unexpected but pretty great. I can definitely see it!

From a design standpoint, how interchangeable are Skulls intended to be? I like the idea of X + Y character types as tools but am hitting a block on reflavoring that particular component. For my draft I'm currently using Sleeve + Overhaul (A sort of permanent full-body system) but it just doesn't feel as intuitive or defined as Skulls. There's also quite a bit of overlap there with  grafts/cyberware that's been tough to reconcile. 

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bugbearslug2 years ago (2 edits)

A few skulls have visual features that communicate what they can do, or are components of its powers. Each skull and skeleton is also designed to allow its bearer to be described in a new way, a different variant of Nekroborg. But these are constraints you do not need to abide by and if you don’t they can be  changed or re-flavoured.

One option could be re-flavouring your skeleton as Internal augments and Skulls as External augments. (Grafts as auxilliary augments maybe?)

  • Internal augments determine the silhouette/skeleton of your body. You have disturbingly thin stilt legs and a cubical abdomen. etc.
  • External augments is what your internal augments are wreathed in. Synthetic musculature clad in reactive-camouflage chrome etc.


No matter how you do it, I don't think it'd be possible to do a 1-1 conversion, you'd need to change quite a bit of things that come out awkward. Finally, if you’re doing anything vaguely transhuman SF I would recommend looking into using Eclipse Phase art as they have a very generous license for it.

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