A pretty common question I get asked about Chronomutants, is what is up with setting? Well I like to think that the system can handle anytime anyplace. Sure it only supports one type of game Narrative Action, but it can do that anywhere.

The setting in the Chronomutants rulebook is never addressed directly, but the mutations, character classes, items, doomsday clock, and mission structure, all imply things about the world of Chronomutants.

• It implies a lot of things about the setting if time-travel exists, time-traveling mercenaries exist, time is always being overwritten, which all come with the rules.
• Aliens exist, animated skeletons exist, sentient plants exist, human-like robots exist, cryptids exist, which all come with the character classes.
• The items have tons of oblique references to factions and concepts, mostly in the form of jokes I wrote for what happens if you misfire with an item.

I wrote the flavor of the setting to do two specific things:

1. Invoke Gamma World

Mutants, lost technologies, apocalypses, sci-fi violence

1. Anything goes.

Nothing is prescriptive in a way that will hinder players from making up things to improvise the stories. I want the lore in the book to be starting points for player improvisation instead of rules about how things work.

So I didn’t want to have a “welcome to Chrnomtant land” section of the rules with maps or factions or anything prescriptive. I wanted the lore to be things to leave or take as players choose. I wanted it to be a blank canvas, with only the outlines of sci-fi weirdness. There is one place I feel like I might want to add more support for GMs, and that's for laying the groundwork for player motivations and outlining rules for time travel. I’m torn here because I don’t really want to tell GMs what the rules of the world should be, but I found I needed to add some restrictions to help me structure missions: A contrivance to motivate players to complete missions. If you can time-travel you wouldn’t need money. So they need something else.

Some limits on time-traveling to keep play in the sandbox.

My games I use “The Agency” as a powerful faction that uses time-travel to amass power, and uses freelancers (like the players) as a way to remain insulated from repercussions. “The Agency” is seemingly all powerful and offers players a contract with a retirement plan that includes essentially any worldly possessions, or they die trying to earn it.

For time-travel, I restrict time-travel to time, but not space. Players will need to get themselves where they are going, if not when. Additionally I said they can’t travel too far back or the butterfly effect would rewrite the entire world and void the mission, and there is a future point where no time-traveler has ever returned from.

I pretty much always use these setting rules to help me keep my games focused. I plan to write a section on how to GM Chronomutants and will talk about restrictions generally, but I don’t really like the idea of putting my games specific setting rules into the book. Those are just what I came up with to help me structure my games, but I don’t think every game needs those restrictions, or you may have different ideas for player motivations, or traveling to the end or beginning of time might be fine at your table. I don’t want my solutions to be THE solutions. Maybe I’ll change my mind, maybe I’ll just put a giant OPTIONAL out in front.

I have lots of other lore details about my game world that I know as a GM, but don’t want to explicitly share within the rulebook for the same reason. I have personally never cared for using official settings. I ran a DnD game in forgotten realms one time, and I felt like every everytime I did anything I was getting the lore “wrong” coupled with the fact that I felt one of my players knew the lore better than I did, and I kept waiting for them to “um actually” me whenever I said anything. I know a lot of folks like highly developed settings.

I don’t plan to release anything (in the rulebook or otherwise) about my setting: The Paradox War, but it’s what I use to run test games. It’s a world where time-travel is out in the world and competing individual factions use time travel to alter the timeline for their own gain. A corporate war of amoral groups with time-travel just made a mess of everything, with the timeline being overwritten repeatedly. It creates not just a post apocalypse world, but a world where every apocalypse is happening, again and again again. Another apocalypse is always coming because jerks with time-machines are always changing stuff. I called it the Paradox War as different factions competing to subvert one another and creating collateral damage that destroys everything. A world of chaos and espionage. It exists to give me the mission framework from the espionage and the Gamma World flavor of crazy robots and wasteland warbands.

So there is that, and the aforementioned cryptic agencies and rules for time-travel, and a few more quirks with parallel timelines and cross reality constants that are mostly just running jokes I use (like the ever-present fast-food chain omni-burger). I would much rather include a more generic GM advice section for why I put those kinds things in my game, assuming I can write it in a succinct and helpful way.

In general I am much more inclined to leave things oblique and implicit rather than explicit. I’d rather have things that get people’s imagination active with a weird prompt than a description of how something is. Hard reality runs counter to the way the Narrative Action system runs where Players have great leeway in improvising the details. Nothing is set until it happens in game.

I think one of the best settings in ttrpg is the implied setting in Into the Odd and the cryptic backgrounds/items in Electric Bastionland. Many details/explanations are up to player interpretation and no two tables will ever have the same world. In specific Electric Bastionland has tons of lore about how Bastion operates/what it’s like, but the details are purposely vague. I love it. I know lots of people like having all the answers given to them, but it makes me feel like there is a right answer and curbs my ability to improv and say yes to players.I much prefer the tone setting, and prefer mysteries to answers.

I am not sure if that’s going to be a popular decision, but I’m not making a product, I’m making the best game for me and mine. I think the less is more approach to setting is better for this game because of the way it handles improv.

For example, a player could easily say “I get a soda from the vending machine, shake it and throw it at the robot before it runs away” as part of a resolution of a dice pool. As long as it doesn’t contradict what came before. The GM should not say there are no vending machines in this room, or in this world. The players should feel empowered to add details to like this. GMs should instead weave these details into the world and make them canon to your world. Ask open ended questions to players to help flesh it out. 

 For example: 

 GM: “sure, but can you tell me why there is a vending machine in this medieval castle?”

Player “actually Dr. Skipper has a brand deal with the castle and put them in all over, the amount of advertising in this wing is garish.”

GM: “of course, but did you pay for the soda?”

Player “I happened to have the exact change in my Schrodinger's satchel.”

GM: “well since the machines don’t take medieval coins, it’s probably the first sale they have ever had, perhaps you’ve alerted someone at Dr, Skipper head quarters?”

Player: “They are probably thrilled, now they have the first soda sale of all time.”

GM: “but also probably starts a marketing war with other brands trying to make an earlier sale.”

These kinds of things can sometimes just happen without as much improved world building to move the action along, but also this could create a fun call back later when unintended consequences create a soda marketing war later. I tend to use whatever the players make the most jokes about and drop the rest. Had some very funny stuff with an arsonist’s community college showing up at the scene of every fire during a session.

That’s the intended use of the very lite-world building mixed in the rules. A GM section that explains these intents will go in eventually. The fear is that people that read the book will feel lost or overwhelmed.

I read a lot of RPG books and even books without an explicit setting have lots of lore. I know the current in style indy game design is really about weaving your mechanics and lore together in a way that you can’t easily remove one from the other. The benefit of that is that it creates an immersive synergy that reinforces the roleplaying. Really popular with PbtA and FitD styles of games, as well as most small indy games. I have only done that in a general way, to give the tools for gonzo narrative action, but not so specific to create a hard setting rule. I could easily say “etherium powers all time travel devices and it’s mined on Endor and controlled by the Sentai Pilots Guild.” As a player that kind of prescriptive stuff doesn’t excite me, so I’m not doing it. Now, if that becomes true through player improv for a game, that excites me much more.

Looking at my 5E book as an example there is tons of generic lore. Like for a dwarf player option there are 3 pages and only 75% of the last page is mechanical, and that is padded with lore as well. Those dwarves are also generic Tolkien dwarves. I think the implied setting in 5E is Forgotten Realms, but I don’t think it ever outright says that, I just know that from being an old nerd who read a Salvatore book long ago. The whole 5E rulebook is like this, tons of lore to sell the game mechanically. This book has tons more lore than Chronomutants, but also not a prescriptive setting, just examples from Forgotten Realms, nudging people in that direction. I think the 5e book has too much fluff, but that’s just because I think the lore that’s there is not very interesting and presents as more super-heroic than the rules support. That’s the best selling TTRPG book of all time, so I’m probably wrong, but that’s my take. I’ll pass on 3 pages about the temperment of dwarves.

So I am taking a less is more approach to lore/setting. I don’t know how much lore/setting should be mixed with the rules in a non-PbtA games. It’s different for every game, maybe being so minimal is a mistake, but we’ll see.

Back in two weeks,

-g