The normal approach I take when playing my own custom rules is that I translate another game’s rules for the express purpose of either simplifying it or because there was something I could use from the game.
So far, I’ve done this with three games: Scalemail, which was a simplification of Chainmail, Yurei World, which was my attempt at extending After School Curse Club, and lastly Winter’s Duty, which was an expansion of the original game Winter.
However, the game I’m playing today, 2040, was a game I made as part of a game jam and not out of a desire to clone and change up a previous game. It was a sort of challenge that I ended up achieving at and I feel like a good test of the game will work.
One of the charms for the 24XX system is that you can easily generate a character and story at random. In this case, it’ll take a lot of die rolls. But first, allow me to sell you the setting:
The year is 2040. Mankind discovered a means to artificially extend their lives with man-made organs known as Augments. However, with this came the need to monetise and soon, companies made it so that the Augments are on a “pay-per-month” basis and that missing out on a payment will get the organs repossessed, regardless of if they were keeping the person alive.
If you find this familiar, that’s because I based the premise off of Repo Men and Repo! The Genetic Opera, which both involved artificial organs that would get repossessed. The difference is that with this setting, players take the role of people who either went without Augments or actively refused to pay for them. In other words, they’re out of the system and are free agents, which ties into 24XX’s “job of the week” style gameplay, though there is the backdoor for a campaign about taking down the system should the GM decide to expand upon that.
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