IT IS THE YEAR 2017

The US is ruled by a cabal of kleptocratic war criminals selling the American dream piece by piece to the Metacorporations — a new breed of sovereign corporate entities. The ice caps are melting. The seas are rising. The skies are choked with pollution. The cities are overrun with violence. The countryside is a wasteland of dying towns and vast agrihulks.

And yet life on the ground is strangely familiar. People wake up in the morning. They raise families. They go to work.

Sure, there are more overturned cars on fire on the side of the road in 2017 than you’d ever see in good old 1987. But riots are just a fact of modern life. Anyway, don’t worry, the radiophone jacked to your skull is linked to NavSTAR so your commute to work is automatically rerouted around blockaded streets. Don’t these rioters know they’re working against their own self-interests? Just like the holonews says: If they want to change society so badly they should do it through legal means — by becoming millionaires to earn the right to vote!

NEW EDITION FOR A NEW CENTURY

The original FUTURESHOCK 2017 game was written, designed, and self-published by by "Radical Ray" Quinn way back in 1987. And then promptly forgotten as bigger, flashier titles like Cyberpunk and Shadowrun took off instead.

But a copy fell into my hands in 1989. I was eleven years old, it completely rewired my brain, and I never stopped thinking about it. Finally, in 2020, desperate to find something other than the pandemic to think about, I started hunting down the notoriously reclusive "Radical Ray" Quinn to find out what the hell had become of him and why he never made another game.

Five years later we have collaborated on a brand new edition using modern streamlined OSR mechanics to bring Quinn's vision of a bleakly familiar future dystopia to a new audience.

• Combine six Archetypes with six Hardware suites to create your very own elite cybernetic mercenary to carry out illegal jobs for violent  and/or corporate psychopaths!
• Thirty-one cybernetic Augmentations to choose from!
• Hackers totally do not work just like spellcasters (yes they do)!
• Downtime systems allow your group to discover the city and plant the seeds of their own exploits by creating locations and NPCs, running hustles for cash, and making friends (or enemies)!
• Forty-four sample Enemies with simple mechanics for making tons more!
• Explore a grim vision of the 21st century that is, in some really bleak ways, less grim than the one you actually lived through!

MINIMALIST TTRPG JAM 3

A proud participant in Minimalist TTRPG Jam 3 by Binary Games. This version is just 140-ish pages of text. Future editions will feature things like art and layout. Maybe some playtesting. Don't feel bad about grabbing this version for free. We'll run a Kickstarter or something for the full spec (in-game lingo) version and you can throw money at us then. Don't worry about it.