Long Strange Way Home

This is Earth, in the near future, close to the end. The planet, wracked by war and climate change, glassed half to oblivion and covered in the cancerous mutant growths of immense megacities, is ribboned with lines of trade and transit and information. The world hums with lives and data. Its orbits are clogged with the tumbling detritus of lost decades. It is a trash-world, and we live upon its diseased skin.

You are but a few amongst untold billions, joined by a common lot in life: you are disconnected, stateless, forever-wanderers seeking quixotic objectives, targets pursued by forces beyond your ken for who knows what purpose in a game perhaps even they barely understand. You have to keep moving, or you’ll fail, you’ll die, you’ll end up just like everyone else in the Solar System: a number lost in the shuffle, with a one-way ticket to a dead end. Don’t fall behind, friendo.

Inspired by the works of William Gibson and Wim Wenders, by the Bourne movies and Mission: Impossible, by odd mornings in foreign ports.

Long Strange Way Home is a small 6-page game intended for one-shots or short bursts of intense campaign play. It requires some scrap paper or a handy virtual tabletop, a handful of six-sided dice, and one or more players - with one player, it can be played as a solo experience - with more than one, at least one player should take the role of a game-master or facilitator to adjudge roll results and so on.