Workbench Saturday: Promethean: The Unborn (Patreon)

I really wasn't sure about releasing this game for people to see. I first wrote it last year, and it was my first real foray into the world of tabletop gamewriting. However, it's also a really fun and intense game that can be really emotional and involved. It's also not nearly as done as I'd like, but is absolutely finished enough to play on your own. 

Promethean: The Unborn is based on the White Wolf game of a similar name. It was inspired when I was reading the rules for the White Wolf version, and was struck by how little I actually liked the rules. In addition, the game felt so...limited. Getting to play as monsters who have been abandoned by their creators? Incredible! The way World of Darkness did it? Pretty disappointing! To that end, I wrote this. It took a lot of my feelings about the notion of Prometheans, namely, what an incredible opportunity to explore hatred and rejection. 

I've heard this game talked about as kinda being about being an X-Man, but also kinda about being a trans reject. Each skin in the game is about a different relationship with your body and with the world around you - from the Hedorah, which is about the fear that everything you touches dies, to the Galatea, which is about the feeling that people are only in love with an idea of you. 

As mentioned, this is the first game I wrote, and because of that it's super derivative of both Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts, which were my main inspirations. There's some moves and skins that are ripped directly from those systems. However there's also some real gems in there, and I fully intend on going back to this baby and breathing life back into it. 

In the document folder I've linked to there's a basic rules document and a skins and rules document. The skins and rules contains both a) the run down of the rules, so that you can print things out and run it, and b) the various skins that people choose to play as. The basic rules goes into more detail about how exactly things work, while still assuming you're familiar with the core PbtA system. Like a lot of things I need to work on, I need to go in there and explain what "rolling" means...

Also, if you have any interest in me running the system for you, let me know and I can work something out! I'd love chances to playtest it more. If you want to run it yourself, I would gladly sit down and tell you all my brain-ideas about GM moves and such, on the condition that you tell me all about how it goes.