Red Sky Dead City - Chapter 1

Dear heroes of the stratometaship,

I give you Chapter 1 of Red Sky Dead City, the doom sandbox of the murder of the greatest city in the world, Ebét of the Hundred Gates. Or, as the humans of that world would say,

The greatest city of all, Ebét, far away across the Seas of Moonbeams and Fog and Poison, beyond the farthest reaches of the limber golems and the swooning maidens of the liberties, has fallen. The mystical ra- tionalist army of Iks has brought down the corpse-fat empire of Ebét and now the timeless sands of its necropolis are ripe for plunder. The offerings and sacrifices and jewels of millennia await.

RSDC could be set in the same world as the Ultraviolet Grasslands, but whether it is the same time, or long ago, or far from then, that's unclear—and I leave it entirely up to you to decide. Many similar concepts repeat themselves: humans, artificial humans, random tables, and more.

There are also differences. RSDC is set at the scale of a city, rather than a continent, so the time frames are shorter: hours rather than weeks. It is also the aftermath of a brutal conquest, so the tensions of that are much more clear in the text. Finally, I'm using RSDC to finally present how I use flow-charts of dungeons and locations to run games.

Contents of Chapter 1:

• The Assumed Game System - where I outline how I conceive the game.
• 120 different character backgrounds for heroes in the game.
• Short breakdown of how to run neighborhoods and locations and the elemnts of time, scene, encounter, and treasure.
• The first two neighborhoods: The Gash (port, priests, and refugees) and the Maintainer Warehouses (golems, maintainers, and spiders).
• The first installment of the appendices, where I am listing every item, creature, spell, disease, and more as I write RSDC.

Enjoy!

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7th October Poll Results

I also held a poll with everyone at the Hero and Metahero tier to decide where to take the stratometaship next. Now, I did thumb the scales a bit by presenting the choice as RSBS (now RSDC) or something else, still 85% voted for RSBS (now RSDC), so here we are. However, on the other options, the results were also interesting. I suggested the following:

1. older dungeons - 2 votes - that's a loser.
2. the stratometaship - 6 votes, +1 comment - not bad
3. longwinter - 8 votes, +3 comments - this is clearly something people would like to see. Longwinter is a white winter horror-survival home game I ran twice, and I could turn it into a usable adventure/mini-setting. Think Witchburner, but expanded to 100 days and not focused on witches only. This would run to about 4 chapters all on its own. One for each month of winter.
4. skeleton - 8 votes, +4 comments - scraping in to victory by one comment? Skeleton is the WTF random-leveling rpg system (hack), with different classes of wizards, thieves, and fighters suitable for both UVG and RSBS (RSDC).
5. more vehicles and locations - 5 votes - yeah, that didn't cut it.

Perhaps the longwinter vs. skeleton challenge will call for another poll? In any case, I want to do both at some point.

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As always, thank you so much for your support! Without you heroes, RSBS (RSDC) would never have seen the light of day this way, neither would have the UVG or Witchburner. You are all utterly amazing.

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EDIT: Was too excited posting and too enamored of the name, and then I realized there are a lot of products with the same title already. So ... ok ... going to rechristen it "Red Sky Dead City" ... I'll upload a revised version with the title updated.