Our dieselpunk roleplaying game Tomorrow City is out this month! Read on for the first entry in our blog series from the author, this week all about the game's unique setting...
Imagine a world where zeppelins deliver goods between distant outposts that dot a ruined landscape; where two-fisted detectives in fedoras interrogate intelligent automatons; where mad scientists plot in hidden laboratories while their terrifying experiments stalk the shadows; where one last great city shines as a shimmering hope for all mankind. This is the world your characters will inhabit in the dieselpunk roleplaying game, Tomorrow City.
Tomorrow City is my game of dieselpunk adventure, action, and intrigue. It is set in a world that might have been our own, should just a few changes in our history have happened along the way. It is dark and gritty, but also filled with wondrous science and the promise of a better future. It is a sandbox setting, with hints, advice, and plenty of ideas to spark your own imagination, giving you enough space to play the kinds of dieselpunk stories you are interested in. In today’s blog I am going to introduce you to the world of Tomorrow City and the people, places, and events you might encounter there.
First, Let’s Talk About Dieselpunk
If you’re not familiar with the term, dieselpunk is a science fiction subgenre that typically takes place in a setting akin to our own interwar period (the 1920–30s), but with marvellous technology, gritty themes of war, mass-industrialisation, and a strong dose of retro-futurism. While a relatively new genre, it draws on the science fiction of the early 20th Century and imagines what might have been, had the visions of H.G. Wells (Things to Come), Fritz Lang (Metropolis), George Orwell (1984), and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) come to pass. As you might have guessed, there are ties to other sci-fi subgenres, and many view dieselpunk as sitting on a continuum between the typically optimistic steampunk and the crushingly pessimistic cyberpunk. Authoritarian control, the devastation of war, and a love affair with science and industrialisation are common themes in dieselpunk. You see these elements in contemporary media that is often identified as examples of dieselpunk: the super-science and amazing war-machines of films such as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Rocketeer, and Captain America: The First Avenger; the aftermath of war in the graphic novel Broken Gargoyles, Mortal Engines, or the Mad Max films; the control of sinister or authoritarian governments such as those depicted in Dark City, Bioshock, and The Man in the High Castle. From these examples, you might begin to see that dieselpunk is quite a broad genre and can cover a range of stories. That’s one of the great things about it! In dieselpunk novels, films, and video games you are just as likely to encounter hardboiled detectives and killer robots as you are gasmask-wearing sky pirates, monstrous experiments, and femme fatales in flapper dresses!
And so it was with 100 years of inspiration and a freshly sharpened pencil that I began to fashion the world of Tomorrow City!
SOME OF MY INSPIRATIONS!
A Future History
The turn of the 20th Century had held the promise of a bright future, heralded most prominently by the development of the so-called “cities of the future” – mighty metropolises that represented the triumph of man and science over the natural world. But man’s nature cannot be held in check for long, and soon the flames of war ignited, plunging the world into ruin. In Tomorrow City’s imagined background, World War I, known as The Long War, lasted decades. Automaton soldiers stomped across muddy battlefields. Massive war-machines crushed villages and towns beneath their giant tracks. Fallen soldiers were patched up with crude mechanical limbs and sent back into action supported by a concoction of dangerous but powerful combat drugs. The devastating power of Pattern energy was unlocked by brilliant metaphysicians… and weaponised. Every country, every continent, was embroiled in the conflict. Years of war turned into decades of brutal stalemate. Countries were laid waste, only to be replaced by new regimes, new warlords, and new threats. The war ground on until all momentum was lost and the remnants of once-great nations retreated into themselves. By 1984 – when the game is set – the world is a smoking ruin of poisoned battlefields, pocked by a few city states and desperate settlements.
This is the backdrop to your stories. The Long War has collapsed into an uneasy truce and veterans, refugees, and the desperate have flocked to the last of the great cities of the future – Tomorrow City. This technological marvel, sitting above the ruins of California, is a living metropolis that literally moves around the citizens as they go about their daily lives. Shaped like a massive spinning top, the conical base of the city drives deep into the earth, while the city itself is some fifty stories above the fetid swamps, canals, and ruins of “Old Cali”.
Divided into districts that sit in concentric circles about The Spindle, Tomorrow City is a place of contrasts. The shining skyscrapers of chrome and glass glint in the midday sun, while the deep shadows of its labyrinthine streets and alleys hide a cacophony of crime and desperation. The wealthy of the Inner City spend their days in pristine offices and luxurious apartments and their evenings at elegant parties, oblivious to the suffering of those in the tenements of Rimside. The middle class of Midtown live in relative comfort, if they can avoid the attention of the gangs of hood scum, or the Badges who are charged with keeping the peace and dealing out justice as they see fit. Beneath the city’s streets is the Great Factory, where legions of drones toil in the heat and fumes of the unknowable machinery that keeps the city running. While theirs is a life of thinly veiled servitude, it is nothing to the poverty and danger of the outcasts who must make their home in Underside, the hanging slums of rusting gantries and tin shacks suspended beneath the city.
The corrupt city council and the monolithic bureaucracies of the Ministries oversee the running of every aspect of the city. They control and manipulate the lives of citizens, twisting their thoughts and desires through the pervasive propaganda of the Ministry of Truth, and ensuring compliance with threats from the Ministry of Peace and their menacing Peace Officers. Behind the scenes, Mother, the great thinking machine, ensures the city itself continues to turn as it should, controlling the machinery of the Great Factory, and the actions of her strange automaton servants.
Room to Play
When writing Tomorrow City, I wanted to provide lots of opportunities for players and Game Masters to put their own stamp on the setting. It doesn’t matter whether you want pulp action, gritty post-war vibes, or tales of scientific horror – there is room for it all. The city is an amalgamation of many different influences that all went into the mix before being distilled into a high-octane fuel for my creative engine (okay, my brain). The setting is broad enough for you to play all kinds of different dieselpunk-inspired games. Poverty, tyranny, and danger are everywhere in Tomorrow City, and while that is bad for the people who live there, it is great for finding interesting stories to tell! While most citizens are just trying to eke out a life after the horrors and deprivations of the Long War, there are many ready to take what they want, use who they can, and do what they must to improve their own position. Gangsters and hood scum, sky pirates, religious fanatics, horrors of science, and the Ministries themselves all threaten the prosperity of the city. Onto the scene enter the Revs – troubleshooters, mercenaries, vigilantes, and occasional troublemakers. These are your player characters who might get involved in all manner of missions or mysteries. Will you search for the kidnapped victims of renegade scientists, or subvert the propaganda of the Ministry of Truth? Maybe you will do battle over the city in aircraft or aboard zeppelin, or perhaps you’ll face the mind-bending horrors of Pattern aberrations. You could focus your time and attention on a single neighbourhood, protecting and improving the lot of a small community, or set out beyond the city and into the wastelands of Old Cali and the ruined Grave Lands beyond. The dangers are numerous, the opportunities limitless. Now the war is over and what happens next is up to you and your imagination!
There’s lots more to the setting than I have touched upon. There’s the strange metaphysical power of the Pattern and the Pattern Weavers who manipulate it; the dangerous but powerful serums that grant super-human abilities; the cults and religious sects that divide the community and threaten peace; and the dangerous automatons that have lost their connection to Mother and now menace the population. I had so much fun imagining this dieselpunk world, and then creating spaces for players to add and build in it. Hopefully you will find plenty of inspiration to inspire your games, but also lots of room to make it your own and explore the types of dieselpunk stories you are interested in. I cannot wait for you to see the game, read the background, and dive into the world with your own characters. In the meantime, I will be sharing more about the game in future blog posts.
Tomorrow City is out 25th January in the UK and 27th February in the US.
Next week, we'll have another blog diving into the game's mechanics...
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