I am creating Lysithera, a role-playing game with a scifi-fantasy, sword and planet vibe. Much of what I have learned from Violence Spells Gods and Politics is going into this game.

Premise

The angels saved your people, and all the people living on Lysithera - or so they say. They say they created the city, this city in a bubble, floating on those poisonous clouds. All your life you have toiled at menial jobs inside the bubble, keeping it running, keeping it sealed, keeping it safe. Until now. Now you are free, and if you wish to remain so, you need to acquire wealth. Out there is treasure for the taking. Return with riches from an adventure outside and your position in the city improves. Fail and you return to a life of toil.

Treasure hunting is dangerous so you work with others, but every adventure is complicated by your desire for personal advancement. Advancing your stats is achieved through meeting the conditions of your personal goals. You pick one personal goal when you start, and acquire more as your wealth increases.

Character Sheet

Sketches



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What?

I am making a game. It is a role-playing game for playing with pen and paper and dice on a tabletop, but chat software over the internet should work too. I am calling it Lysithera because that is the name for the game's setting, an imaginary planet I made up. Reading plans for colonizing venus and imagining hothouse tomatoes with their clouds of white flies much much bigger were some of the inspiration for the setting. I am also riffing on pulpy scifi fantasy, sword and planet fiction and comics from nearly 100 years ago, stuff like Flash Gordon, Princess of Mars, and At the Earth's Core, and later stuff like Dying Earth. Childhood's End might make an appearance, and probably some of Nine Princes in Amber acid trip scenery too.

The setting and rules for this game will work together, and when they are written, I intend to publish them in a book as an adventure to play with rules ready to go, character creation at the start, and an adventure and toolkit for making your own in the back. If you prefer to play the adventure without my precious rules, some variant of D&D should work. You could call this OSR if you want. I intend to help you play using the world's most popular roleplaying-game by including a crib sheet for translating from my precious rules.

My prior game, Violence Spells Gods and Politics, has been fun to play. I am playing it now with both friends and strangers. But it is a complex game. It needs a lot of work. A lot of content. So I don't know when or if I will ever publish it. But I have learned a lot from VSGP, and the rules I made for it seem to work well. So I am adapting them for Lysithera. This is currently a work in progress while I make more stuff up. If you are interested in seeing more of this stuff I am making up, you can wait for me to make posts sharing this stuff here.