Blame!
Overview
Blame! is useful when cyberpunk should feel architectural before social. Its world is a practically endless machine-city where governance has degraded into hostile automation, access privileges are genetic, and most inhabitants are stranded descendants of lost infrastructure. The strongest campaign value is scale and pressure: movement itself is hazardous, and every subsystem acts like a faction.
Reusable Design Patterns
- Turn infrastructure into biome: floors, shafts, bridges, and voids are world geography, not just encounter maps.
- Make access rights existential: one credential trait can decide whether systems protect, ignore, or exterminate a population.
- Run sparse-exposition play: reveal history through ruins, interfaces, and bodies rather than long NPC briefings.
- Use machine factions with incompatible mandates: safeguard logic, remnant authorities, and adaptive posthuman groups create constant crossfire.
- Keep protagonists persistent rather than safe: resilience, repair, and endurance are more important than tactical perfection.
Referee Uses
- Build vertical expedition arcs where route-finding is as important as combat.
- Treat each major zone as a living protocol with one core rule and one failure mode.
- Use transhuman drift as both utility and danger, especially around identity continuity.
- Let player success reactivate old systems that create new political and ecological consequences.