Crypto

The year 2100 came and went … adoption of an untraceable digital currency freed Corporations from the State, bankrupted governments and ushered in a new era where the democratic rule of law was replaced by unchecked economic powers.

Around you, most live their lives adrift in a turbulent sea of urbanism populated with office buildings, coffin hotels, storage lockers, and neon cathedrals that hum beneath penthouse palaces. Beyond the city limits, the absurdly wealthy live out fantasies in theme villages while autonomous robots run farms the size of small countries. Above it all, the population of Low Earth Orbit numbers in the tens of thousands. Global conglomerates, self-organizing arcologies, old-money empires, and the pioneers of new frontiers are all locked in a struggle to achieve their ambitions in this world.

Welcome to the cryptoanarchy. We hope you enjoy survive your stay.

Crypto is a tabletop role playing game about exploring a possible future dystopia as citizens of the cryptoanarchy. Suitable for running games featuring cyberpunk, dark future, and/or dystopian political themes.

It has been through a fair amount of play testing and multiple revisions. While the game itself is in late draft stage, final proof-reading, art, and professional layout are still to come. This is a work-in-progress and your feedback is very much welcome!

Highlights of the game system include:

• A fast, card-based life path system for generating characters. Role playing over dice rolling.
• Your social network is a part of your inventory, with contacts that have loyalty, skills, resources, and more.
• No character classes, no levels, just skills sorted into Body, Mind, and Spirit plus Humanity and Renown dice. Make the characters you want to play, not limited to what the game designer imagined.
  
• A simple universal dice resolution system.
• Encounters (combat, intrusions, etc.) are run using declared actions (replacing  initiative) for fast and fluid action. Characters can cooperate to combine actions (and dice rolls), chain successful actions to help each other work towards success, etc.
• 40+ pages of gear, each with a micro-game that supports role play with that type of gear. Buy wardrobes, build amazing drones and motorcycles, set up labs and maker spaces, … it's not just guns and cyberware (it's also those things, too)
• 75 NPC archetypes sorted into 13 themes, each with multiple progression points. Create a crime family, and corporation, a team of investigative journalists, or a cyber'd up extraction team in minutes.
• Moving Container: an introductory adventure for 2-6 players, in which the players are commissioned by a wealthy patron to hunt down a mysterious shipping container that has come to their attention as it moves around the city. Their job is to find out what is inside the (literal) mystery box and report back. They may run into dockyard intrigue, dive-bar entertainment, and ultimately the contents of the moving container.

Crypto is an homage to the novels that kicked off the "cyberpunk" genre in the 80s, which were about people and the power structures they found themselves in, not shootouts or people becoming psychotic androids. So while Crypto has crunch, tactics, and lethality, it is neither Cyberpunk: Bookkeeper nor a gonzo meatgrinder, something too many "cyberpunk" role playing games end up as (at least, in the author's opinion), while still being an action-adventure rather than a story or lyric game.