Cavaliers of Mars Campaign
The history behind the game
At its core, the original book is about running a game similar to Three Musketeers in John Carter's Barsoom (Mars) with Conanesque savagery and Jules Verne feeling of wonder.
So my game had to be really different. No really. This is just the way I tend do go about games - read into the setting, then take it apart, pick up the things I feel I want to work with, and then reinvent the wheel with spiciness borrowed from my inspirations.
My version of the game started with my undying love for humble beginnings of a revolution against a fascist government, an established yet working order being turned upside down by people who were born there, and feel that a change is due. And then living with the consequences of living with the changes.
I started with the premise of Fullmetal Alchemist - a world run by military junta, good people trying to do right things in dire circumstances, dark secrets of the past hinted in the prologue, and then even darker truths slowly coming to light.
There we have Illium, a polis on a terraformed Mars in a far future. Illium is run by a masked group of individuals, apparently unchanging since like forever. They form a council. Then we have ministries, army and London-like city. The PCs work for a Fahrenheit 451 insitution - a Lost and Found Bureau (under supervision of Ministry of History), an institution tasked with searching for threats of unique nature, and then dealing with them.
The characters start with Basic Orientation Course for Government Employees.
Books and inspirations
The original game is Cavaliers of Mars by Onyx Path Publishing, with credits listing Rose Baily as the Creator, and the additional writers being Onyx Path Publishing staples: Benjamin Baugh, Storn Cook, Steffie de Vaan, Meghan Fitzgerald, Jordan Goldfarb, Danielle Lauzon, Ethan Skemp, Lauren Stone, Travis Stout, and senior writer Audrey Whitman.
The inspirations:
- Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom
- Fullmetal Alchemist
- Alistair MacLean's Guns of Navarone
- H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness
- Spriggan manga
- Robert E. Howard's Black Canaan
The System and the PCs
This is another CortexPrime hack.
About the system: CortexPrime system is quite simple: assemble a dicepool based on your stats, juggle it a bit to improve your chances, roll and then select three dice - add two of them to create your success total, select a third one to find out how well you succeeded. You need to exceed your difficulty number. If you fail, you take consequences (penalties) that accumulate until you're eliminated (it's a system where taking a first loss sets you on a bad path, so you either don't want to take a loss at all, or you want to recover from it as quickly as possible).
PDF charsheets (the characters are as they appear at the end of the campaign, well into the third mission):
- Bubmblebee Mk2, an electric truck and a mobile lab housing character assets
- Lucca Puglessi, an anarchist and a spy
- Osir Yei, an academician assassin
- Alessi Saadauri, an aristocrat, a pilot and a plotter
- Guillame Gavroche, a herb merchant, actually a member of Hungry Brotherhood and a poisoner