Jesse Harlin has their first DriveThuRPG credit with an icecore TTRPG. The quickstart is out now and free to download while the core Arrhenius rules are expected in 2025.
“Icecore” is Jesse’s term. Would “frostpunk” work? I’ve seen that before.
The Arrhenius quickstart is 70 pages long. That’s generous and enough for an introduction that includes safety tools, pre-generated characters, and rules for skill checks and combat.
In the game, skill checks are made by rolling a d20, adding skills and trying to get 21 or over. Combat is similar, but the target number is the attack/defence role of the opponent.
There are a few lines about the setting on the DTRPG shelf and a little more from within the free quide. Here’s a wee sample;
Over 100,000 years of human history have passed. This is Arrhenius, a tabletop roleplaying game set in the far-future ruins of the next Ice Age. Glaciers cover the surface of the world. Beneath the ice lie the ruins of once-futuristic utopias now destroyed by the relentless glaciers. Technology that the 21st Century would view as nothing short of magic lies buried in frozen junkheaps beneath the fallen skysabers of the old megametropolises. Time travel, teleportation, intelligent alien life, deep space exploration it’s all old news. No one lef6 on the ice much cares about any of that stuff if it can’t keep you warm.
Unfortunately, all that treasure and technology shares the ice with the results of thousands of years of genetic experiments and scientific catastrophes. When the artists finally got their hands on the tools behind gene sequencing, eventually every dream and nightmare humanity ever had was brought to life.
Humanity itself has fractured and diversified, primarily due to how they’ve each chosen to deal with the ever-present ice. There are subterranean humans hiding from the glaciers in high-tech oases they’ve blasted out of the bedrock. There are synthetic humans in bodies made of living bioplast polymers. There are nomads, mutants, scavengers, feral AI, and more.
The bulk of the 70-page Arrhenius quickstart is the Dream Factory introductory adventure. It lets players and the Dungeonteller experience the world and rules.
I also noticed that Jesse has a Dungeonteller shop on Redbubble that shows of some of the game’s human-generated art. I’ve added it to the publishers with merch list.
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