The year is 2415. The environment has long collapsed.
Humanity lives in pockets, isolated from one another, protected by polymer domes built over the remains of once great cities.
Dome governments are controlled by dictators, corporations, and the social elite who rule from the upper-levels - in unheard of luxury - close to the weak light of the sun.
To those that live below, the transparent spheres became the tops of their worlds, their polymer skies.
This is the world of Polymer Sky®, a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi role-playing game.
In the year 2114, the environment is near collapse. The Hastings Gun Corporation has secured most of downtown Portland and is attempting to buy remaining plots so it can begin work building a dome over the city. Hastings is offering a lottery for those who want to come work for the corporation--will you be one of the lucky few?
Polymer Sky is an indie pen-and-paper post-apocalyptic role-playing game set in the year 2415. Human hubris and error has brought about full environmental collapse - the remaining population now lives encapsulated in polymer dome mega-cities. Our first release will include the core rulebook and a book dedicated to the dome city of Portland, Oregon (our hometown).
Conception and writing by Shawn Montague, Joe Bertagnolli, and Jeff Alworth of Spider House Games, LLC
Art by Stephen Korbich
Whether you want to play an elite hacker, a stoic bounty hunter, or a bored socialite with cybernetic enhancements, Polymer Sky's skill-based system allows you to be flexible in how you build your character.
Experience dome technology arcs that have evolved independently of outside influence. Nanotech, cybertech, hacking, robotics, laser and pulse-weaponry. Build your own city dome with an arc that fits into your vision of Earth in the year 2415. What does the Boston dome look like in the year 2415? You and your friend's can decide!
Join a party of revolutionaries, dome security personnel, or band together as a motley crew of misfits. Earn credits, skill points, notoriety, and, most of all, have fun exploring a world enclosed in a polymer sky.
Polymer Sky will be launching a Kickstarter campaign after beta play-testing.
The core rulebook and the guide to the Portland dome are in beta and being play-tested. If you are interested in helping beta test the rules, contact us at info (at) spiderhousegames.com.
Kickstarter will help us get the funding to put the final polish on the game, publish on our own, and pay for some great artwork.
Check back here for more news as we near our kick-off!
The world of Polymer Sky is meant to be highly advanced technologically. From polymer-derived biospheres, AI computers, volitional robotics, to automated hover cars, the setting is meant to evoke such futuristic settings as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Philip K. Dick's We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (also known as the movie Total Recall), or Luc Besson's The Fifth Element.
Polymer Sky has dozens of skills to give you what you need to navigate the city, from cerebral hacking to sharp-shooting, infiltration to sky-cycle operation. In Polymer Sky, there's no reason you can't be skilled in both hand-to-hand fighting and cybernetic fabrication.
Deep under Portland, machines groan and thump. The Undercity is so tightly packed with them that the people who maintain the great metallic beasts have become cogs themselves. The machines can be repaired and recalibrated - they are permanent. Here human life is transitory, though, a brief period before the body gives out, is recycled, and quickly replaced. The rhythms of the Undercity are precise: the whoosh of fluids, the precision click of gears, the crackle of electricity. Machine sounds, a machine existence.
Above the Undercity, but nowhere near the light, are the lower realms of hell. Level One contains the chaos of Buckman, a Darwinian dystopia where the strong hunt and the weak cower in dark, flickering shadows.
In Albina, Thoreau's dictum is the motto, as quietly desperate lives afflict the mass of men. They are packed in there like chickens in cages - drab, ugly cages of grimy cement.
Central City, once Portland's glamorous heart, is where the proles go for vacation. The grand boulevards are still wide and spacious; the old buildings have some louche charm. And the gardens and trees once planted as a rebuke to the dying planet now themselves fight death in filtered, gray light. But still, it is as lovely a place as most of the workers will see in their sorry lives.
Above Central City is Irvington, now nearly two kilometers in the sky. Once the grandest neighborhood, the home of industrialists and biosphere kings, Irvington still has the bones of wealth and even a few people whom those in Level One call rich. But their dwellings, five, ten, twenty times the size of an Albina flat, depress the hearts of those truly wealthy who overnight here when forced to visit the old part of the city.
And those rare people, the truly wealthy, where do they live? Higher, always higher. Level Two was the first playground of the rich, a beta test on spectacular overindulgence...
Interested in beta-testing ahead of the Kickstarter campaign? Send an email to info (at) spiderhousegames.com and let us know.
