My kids (10 & 13) and I are wrapping up our first campaign together in D&D 5e, and I’m starting to think about the next one. It’s going to be a homebrew setting–future humanity decimated by climate change, but also elements of weird magic with giant plants and insects, inspired by things like Studio Ghibli, Kipo, etc.
After watching the recent Critical Role - Tears of the Kingdom oneshot, I started tinkering with my own system (PbtA based, with lots of opportunities for inventive crafting, and a video-game-inspired skill tree rather than strict classes) which is fun, but really time-consuming.
Wondering if anyone knows of an existing system that would work well for this setting? I’d like to find something simpler than 5e (which is the only system I know well), since they mainly enjoy the story and role-playing rather than lots of number crunching and detailed rules.
Flatpack: Fix the Future is the first game in the smash Hyperoptimistic Postapocalyptic genre of gaming. Flatpack is a game about building a new society using pre-apocalypse technology that you don’t always trust or understand, and solving terrible problems creatively.
Sorcery and Super Science might work for this. It’s already most of the way there. Most characters are mutants though and all humans are sorcerers so it might not be a perfect fit
You can also try a bit of a combo move with Worlds Without Number and Stars Without Number. Both games could probably handle this by themselves, but the rules are similar enough to combine which would give you scifi and magic together
Mutants & Masterminds 3e – available for free online as d20herosrd.com – can do literally anything. It’s originally written for superheroes (obviously), but I’ve seen it used for D&D style fantasy, sci-fi, and so on. There is literally one single spell in all of fiction and film that I have tried to replicate in that system and not been able to (Balefire, from The Wheel of Time, because weird shit with time). It’s all the flexibility of GURPS with a fraction as much math, all the power-fantasy of D&D without the game-breaking power-loops (there are a few but they’re easy to spot and avoid). And all the complexity is front-loaded; once you get through character creation, it’s all just d20s. If you can play D&D you can play M&M.
For something less crunchy, try Fate. Whether Core or Accelerated or whatever I couldn’t tell you – I personally hate this entire family of systems – but it is very rules-light and storytelling-focused. It might suit your needs.
Trying to figure out balefire in a D&D campaign sounds horrifying… would be fun though!
Technically there is a WoT d20 version of it, but trying to shoehorn WoT into Vancian magic works about as terribly as you would expect.
I can think of three options, none are perfect, but each could be tinkered with to get what you want:
In the Light of a Ghost Star – This is much further in the future than you intend. But it has incredibly simple rules which are easy to customize. Also I made a psionics supplement for it here. I had pretty good success running it.
Mutants & Machine-guns - A loose, fairly tongue-in-cheek system. Free.
Mutant Future - Basically a cleaned up clone of early edition Gamma World. Less light than other games mentioned.
Wow, I haven’t heard of any of those. This decision is going to be harder than I thought! Thanks!
