Introducing Disrupter by RV Games

WIP Open Source Sci-Fi Wargaming System

What happens when you’re running a Kickstarter, de-escalate your relationship with your boyfriend, and have a bipolar 2 mixed episode all at the same time? You write a game ofc. This post outlines the design philosophy behind my new open source wargame, Disrupter.

Writing Mothership modules is work for me now, so my business partner and I have been playing and studying wargames for fun. We’ve been focused a lot on Gaslands because my partner likes building the models. I really don’t care about miniatures or terrain; I want to play the games.

Not Games Workshop

I’m a sci-fi girl through and through. I play fantasy games in spite of the genre because I like the games. However, I am not interested in anything produced by Games Workshop. I find their business model to be exploitative. Their continual upsizing of miniatures and their seasonal model make playing Warhammer an inexcusable money sink for a hobby that came out of garages. I also cannot stand the way they try to distance themselves from the wider wargaming community by referring to calling their game the “Warhammer Hobby.” Finally, I don’t give a shit about lore, my eyes glaze over whenever anyone talks about worldbuilding. I prefer my worlds to be anti-canon where there’s the bare minimum of worldbuilding necessary to hold things together. The lore is the strongest part of 40k, and it seeps into the rules. I don’t want different factions with units with special abilities. I want units to be generic with equipment deciding their battlefield behavior, and I want the game to be pure rules.

In Comes Striker

I started reading all different kinds of other sci-fi and universal rulesets. Quite a few are written with factions and lore, so they aren’t what I’m looking for.

My mind was blown when my partner bought me a vintage copy of Striker, the Traveller 15mm miniatures wargame from 1980. It handled all levels of technology, was very clearly written with no lore and had a very unique command system. It took a lot of studying to figure out how to equip an army and play a game, and that’s when I realized I needed to write my own system, and that it needed to be open source, not under the control of a company that sells miniatures or books.

Panic Engine Inspired

All the systems I have discovered, still use d6 systems that often include roll modifiers (including changing the target to roll over) or dice pools. As a game designer and player, I loathe roll modifiers, calculated targets for rolling, and non percentage targets or stats. I want stats and rolls to be directly legible. This is why I wanted to make my system a d100 roll under system with all modifiers handled via Advantage and Disadvantage. Stats are measured in an intuitive way (percentage success) and you can read Advantage and Disadvantage simultaneously if you roll two different colors of d100 sets. This is very much inspired by the Mothership Panic Engine.

I wanted a command and morale system like Striker along with it’s initiative and turn structure. Once again, I cribbed from the Mothrrship 0e Panic Engine to provide a modern, streamlined equivalent of these systems. I prefer the Striker method of orders and leading compared to modern coherence rules.

Open Source

Finally, as I explored the wargaming community, most people seem to be focused on the crafting aspects of painting miniatures and creating terrain. I admire the work, and it’s absolutely something that I do not enjoy doing. I wanted to create a flexible enough set of rules that other people like me could show off their custom rules and equipment the way crafters show off their miniatures and terrain. Disrupter is designed to be able to be crunchy and “full fat” or streamlined and rules light or anything in between. People make mods and their own systems (which even get picked up by publishers sometimes), but they aren’t working together on an open source project.

Lo-Fi

The focus on crafting and the elitism around making sure models are painted turned me away from the hobby for decades. I’ve never understood the dislike for proxies or alternative markers (coins, dice, chits, meeples, etc.) or flat maps either, so I also wanted a game that was miniatures and lore agnostic and promotes this type of lo-fi play (have to give Osprey props for this, though, Xeros Rampant has a similar philosophy but a very different execution from Disrupter).

Fuck Around and Find Out

Disrupter is either new and creative or an idiosyncratic mess that only I want to play, and I want to share this art with the world to find out which.