Brandon Gutowski and Padoga Games just put the scifi deckbuilding RPG Freelancer’s Guide live on Kickstarter.
As you might imagine, Geek Native gets lots of Kickstarter pitches, and some don’t even come up with reasons why gamers should part with their money. This is what I got from Brandon instead;
We’re tired of being taken advantage of in this soul-crushing galaxy. The megacorps get relief funds. We get to work the relief shifts. They report record profits. We report record hours.
Now we are free. Now we will report our own record profits. Right from the coffers of the corps.”
Okay, colour me interested! That feels oddly on-the-nose and so I invited Brandon to share some more of how we get from “now” to, er, such a bleak future!
If you’re already curious, you can grab the Freelancer’s Guide: free version from DriveThruRPG.
Using the real world to inspire our Scifi games
By Brandon Gutowski
In my upcoming game Freelancer’s Guide to a profit focused living, I drew inspiration from the companies in our world, and use some of their terrible practices to build out the galaxy. I just took the corporate climate we have in the world today and accelerated it a few hundred years. Here is what I came up with.
Tramlaw is the first company and “Saving money for easy living” is their motto. If you had not guessed this company by the logo, it’s a satire off Walmart. I used their real-world business practices to create the following piece in my book
“Saving money for easy living” is the garbage Tramlaw shovels down society’s throat. The truth is that they are saving money for themselves. They sell the cheapest things: cheap for you to buy and cheap enough to break after a few uses. They have their fingers in a lot of pies in the galaxy, and they’re always trying to reach into more.
So, what does this all mean for you? Tramlaw is a bully. They strong-arm smaller companies into selling things to them for cheap. That means jobs for you gaining blackmail information for them, stealing rival company secrets, or sabotaging smaller competitors so they must fold to Tramlaw’s demands. Their pockets are deep, and their political reach is wide, so there are always good opportunities to work with Tramlaw.
If you know anything about Walmart’s business practices, you understand where the bully aspect comes in. I use that to inspire the missions in the game, mix in some employee abuse and now we have a great mega-corp to work against.
The next company is Big River, and its real-world inspiration is a bit less obvious. I’ll give the book details first and then maybe you can guess who it is.
Everything flows through the Big River as they say, and honestly, there’s some truth to that. Big River is the largest distribution company in the galaxy, accounting for over 65% of all packages shipped. They have expanded their reach and have been gobbling up small stores on the frontiers so they can sell a wide variety of goods in many locations.
Since they deal in getting packages from one place to another, this means they have a lot of ships. Therefore, they need to protect these shipments. This makes them the galaxy’s fourth largest military, behind Milcom, the Humans, and the Yents. See what I’m getting at?
With Big River, you’ll have similar jobs to Tramlaw: corporate espionage, sabotage, and strong-arming of competitors. They have slightly higher political aspirations than the other companies, and their executives hold status and status symbols highly, so with these two factors you might be doing a few more robberies for expensive goods.
If you need one more hint, think about what the largest river in the world is, the Amazon. So then using this and their public business practices, I started the first Cyberpunk themed campaign of players working their way out of a planet completely controlled by Big River, with a recent problem with gangs, or as Big River brands them, “Unions”.
I do think you can go a bit too on the nose when pulling from current companies for your Sci-fi settings, so maybe just avoid naming your main city Bezosville. Since satire is my favorite style to write in, the game’s companies come out as satire. You do not need to do what I do when making your galaxy or setting, use your experiences to fill your settings.
If this style of RPG interests you or you like deck building RPGs feel free to check out my Kickstarter.
Quick Links
- Kickstarter: Freelancer’s Guide
- DriveThruRPG Freelancer’s Guide: free version
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