Setting the Stage Episode 64 – Kevin and Orbis

Kevin tells us about his setting and TTRPG, Orbis. It’s a crunchy mech combat game!

Central to Orbis is the Ion Tempest storm. It started long ago and afflicts the world with electrical storms, cold snaps, heat waves, and odd magnetic and gravitational fields. History of the world before the arrival of the Ion Tempest is lost. Some sort of apocalypse occurred to this science fiction civilization that destroyed everything and created the Ion Tempest. The storm also has sentient representations of it called Apostles. The chaotic wilderness is full of lucrative treasures from before the collapse of civilization. People known as ronin go out into the wilds with protective mechs known as armored gears to fight behemoth monsters, secure territory, and find loot. Some ronin are trained as voltweavers, able to use the energy of the Ion Tempest itself to perform magical feats.

On the system side, Orbis seeks to unify mech games that focus on the mechs with ones that focus on the pilots. Both your mech and your pilot are relevant and advance as you play the game. As you might imagine for a mech game, customization is rampant with tons of options, gears, levers, and nozzles to fiddle with for how your pilot and mech are setup. For action resolution you compare the score of your most relevant attribute and skill to a difficulty number. You gain a modifier on a d100 roll equal to the difference between your numbers and the difficulty number. Your target is always 50 after that modification. Critical successes occur whenever you a double on the D100 (11, 22, 33, etc).

Orbis is still early in development but there is enough material to start playing it if you’re interested. Join the Discord for rule files and to connect with Kevin. Or follow Kevin’s BlueSky account for the latest updates.
Orbis Discord
Orbis BlueSky

And one of our previous guests, Peter from Tales From Elsewhere, is crowdfunding his first TTRPG book, Clockworld. Check out the Kickstarter!

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