Alright, before the curtain is called, I've gotta do at least one important chost.
Violet Core is a sapphic focused ttrpg about sad space lesbians dueling each other and making out while stranded in space. Drawing inspiration from the absolutely wonderful visual novel Heaven Will Be Mine as well as GunBuster, Zone of the Enders and Knights of Sidonia. Violet Core is a project I've been working on-and-off on since early 2019.
Violet Core focuses the dramatic tension between friends, rivals and comrades. It's a game whose beating heart is deeply lesbian in a way that is a touch tricky to put into words...its indelibly infused. It's a game preoccupied with a looming horizon of destruction and what we do in the face of calamity.
The Setting
Nemesis. A black star with a small system of planets. The millions of years long elliptical orbit of Nemesis is about to converge with our, formally hypothetical sister star, Sol. The convergence will disturb the icey debris field of the Oort cloud, ushering in extinction level events across both systems as billions of tonnes of space junk rains across them.
After a failed attempt at a long-shot intergalactic exodus, what's left of humankind is stuck. Stranded in space between the first few planets of Nemesis, exiled and unable to return to their ruined homeworld.
Three spacer factions emerged, each have a plan to save us from extinction...all of which are mutually exclusive. Your home is with one of them.
You.
You are a Pilot.
Trained at a young age or specially designed to operate your own giant robot, an X-10.
Your main duty is to duel with other X-10 Pilots, furthering the goals and designs of the faction you were born to (or have defected to.)
You may be human in the traditional sense and worked hard to earn your place within your X-10's cockpit,
Or
You may be edging towards the transhuman, grown and cultured specifically to operate a new experimental X-10 frame.
A fraught life in space is all you've ever known. The struggles between the three spacer factions seem to drag on and on. Looming doom becomes background noise as you're deployed on mission and the rival you are supposed to duel is cute as hell.
Here are some bullet points features
💜 A highly mutated Monster-Hearts informed PbtA frame work with a sprinkling of Forged in the Dark.
💜 A dedicated Resolution-Triangle Duelling system for dance-like Giant Robot fights!
💜 One of your core stats is Making Out
💜 Five main playable Pilot Types
💜 Nine main flyable X-10s
💜 Three at-odds spacer factions that you are dedicated to or stuck with.
💜 the primary character progression system is tied to your Pilots friendships, romances, rivalries and animosity towards other player Pilots and NPCs
💜 Optional guidelines for touching hands in play when passing super powerful connection dice. You can tell I started writing it before the pandemic but it's been long enough that is okay now!
💜 The Giant Robots can kiss.
💜 Use the sheer magnitude of your friendships (and/or romances, rivalries, etc) to overclock your X-10's might to gargantuan psychedelic near incomprehensible heights.
💜 A post-capital, demi-post military setting where every life that hangs in the balance matters.
💜 Three levels of reality to be emerged within: Top Space (the primary physical universe) SubSpace (like a strange, shimmering underwater lake, laying under and parallel to Top Space.) and the Violet Realm (a psychosphere that can be experienced by every pilot as their subconsciousness' are networked together by the mysterious engines of their X-10s, the Violet Cores)
Preparing To Launch
An early draft was done before I got the Dungeon Bitches gig, I worked on it a bit after DB came out, and I worked on it again after Death Spiral...and finally I'm gunna attempt to get it funded on kickstarter! It's very scary, but I reckon it'll be worth it!
My comrades Mara (@amaranth-witch) and Emily Allen (Cavegirl) have read the current version and have said some very generous words which you should read here:
Mara's In Depth Multipart Thoughts On the Game:
Part I, Part II, Part III
and
here:
Cavegirl's pretty long post on tumblr!
The Kickstarter is set for Launch around 25/26th of Sept 2024!
Wish me luck! And if it looks cool and/or sweet to you, please share it around! My platform is tiny and sucks unlike the game which is huge and rad.
Viva Eggbug!!!
