DO IT YOURSELF

Grant attended Games Transformed, an event celebrating games, radical politics, and their intersection, and wrote this on the train on the way home. At the end of the panel he was on, an audience member asked: "If you had a hundred million dollars, what would you build? What's the pipeline to draw people in?" Every single one of them said that they'd get more people to make games. There's not a solution to this problem that you can write down and enact: you need to build the world where people can solve it. And that's why DO IT YOURSELF exists.

It's based on the Havoc Engine, the same system that powers Eat the Reich, Goat Crashers, and Havoc Brigade.

"DO IT YOURSELF is the first half of a game. There's enough there to get you started but not to finish; there are big gaps where some of the rules ought to go. Some of these have explicit outcomes (there are three undefined Conditions on each character, for example, so... come up with three more), some have inferred objectives (there are two open rules slots on what you can spend successes on, so have a think about what might be interesting mechanically) and some which are more freeform (I've only provided the names for most character abilities and equipment - write the rules when you use them).

The setting - antifascist cyberpunk - is purely due to the environment I submerged myself in at Pelican House. It also plays with power in a way that I haven't done since I wrote DEATH WAS THE ONLY ROAD OUT OF TOWN with Alex Roberts; although the GM is in charge of the fascist regime, it's the players who are making the rules.

How do those power structures push against each other, in- and out-of-character? I wonder if players will write rules that swing things wildly in their favour, and approach this like a thing that must be won; or if they write in problems for themselves, put in a challenge, to make the experience more fraught."