Blister City / Blister Kingdom Twin Pack

The folks who ruined Mars have names and addresses. You have a crowbar, and a dream. Make them pay.

We named our cities after the virtues we expected them to display; Ambition, Charity, Justice; what a fucking joke. All that remains now is Ambition, a blighted hellscape surrounded by death, an imperfect blemish on the flat and barren face of Mars. We wish we had never been born here, we all wish we could leave. No one ever will.

60 years ago something went wrong, the terraforming project on Mars failed, the Splinter broke, and our atmosphere turned to poison. Only those that made it to the bubble city of Ambition in time survived. Our first outpost, our last city, our only hope. With the surviving population of a whole planet, Ambition found itself overrun, and without the government of Justice City, it also found itself rudderless.

Seeing an opportunity, The Crusade claimed dominion over Ambition, and quickly moved to pull everyone out of their homes and back to earth “where they always belonged anyway.” Battle lines were drawn over the heart of the planet. It was the robotic Disciple Army of The Crusade against a mixed army of Ambition City punks. The Red Sand Survivors were backed by The Hand, used advanced weapons and armor provided free of charge by Ares Net, and were bankrolled by a benefactor still unknown to this day. The war was brief, bloody, and kicked The Crusade off Mars permanently.

A vacuum of power was never going to last, and with The Crusade firmly off planet, the question of who ran the city remained at large. Corporate interests on Mars quickly seized Ambition, war threatened again, and ultimately The Hand took control of what remained, in the interest of protecting their friends and family. Ambition’s Hand, as they were now called, was never a group interested in being in charge, and to that end didn’t really have the structure or support to take care of a city like Ambition. Kids who had spent their whole lives raging against machines now found themselves in the uncomfortable position of being the machine. 

Now, all these years later, Blister City isn’t the same Ambition from our history. Mars is still uninhabitable, we’ve had nowhere to grow but upwards, and that land pulled by corporate interests in the wake of the War has created a culture of massive inequality that no one here is equipped (or more honestly, willing) to deal with. Corporate soldiers prowl the lower levels where the most rich and elite live in relative safety and comfort. As you climb higher in The Blister, things get worse; whole wards live without light, the air thins, and folks choke on the smog of the industry below. Advanced body modification allows folks to survive it, but the debt incurred in artificial lungs, and eyes that don’t need light is massive, empowering the folks down below to continue to make life worse for people in the mid and upper levels.

Blister City is a rules-lite RPG tacked onto an 84 page, system-agnostic Blisterpunk setting guide. It is primarily designed as a setting to run your favorite games in, but there is a game attached for folks that don’t know where to start, or want something tailored to the setting.

• What is Blisterpunk - Blisterpunk is the term I use at home to describe the setting. It's Cyberpunk without the purposeful watering down of punk themes: direct action, DIY ethics, and anti-authoritarianism that corporations would feed you. If Cyberpunk is about fashion and nihilism, Blisterpunk is about function and direct action. You might not win, but you can take the bastards with you, and when you do it’ll make the city better for the people you give a shit about.
• Where is Blister City - Blister City, formerly Ambition City, is the last city on Mars. After years of successful terraforming, The Splinter, a machine designed to provide breathable atmosphere to the planet, malfunctioned, poisoning the sky and killing millions. Ambition, the first habitable city on the planet, still had a working atmospheric barrier and managed to save itself. Now, 60 years later, Blister City finds itself overgrown, bursting at the seams, and wildly inequitable. 
• What are the Players - Players in Blister City are punks, trying to carve out a home in a hostile and unforgiving city, as massive factions here and on Earth work against each other in both obvious and subtle ways. The major problems plaguing Mars are unlikely to be solved by the group, and games set in Blister City are much more likely to be about personal and community victories for the characters.
• What do you need to Play - 2-5 players including a GM, a handful of d20s and d6s, and some paper if you’re planning to run this game. Otherwise, just this book and another game!
• What is the Tech Like - Blister City is a sci-fi setting that is post space travel, but still pre-warp/lightspeed travel. Full fledged Artificial Intelligence is likely to be a thing the world is currently grappling with, and tech that might be common could include: extreme body modification and prosthesis, devices that allow people to plug directly into computers, and guns that synthesize and fire bullets seemingly out of thin air. Lasers are not yet handheld weapons, although groups like Ares Net are likely working on that.

• What are some Touchstones
  • The space travel and political fighting of The Expanse
  • The terrible city you never want to leave of Night City in Cyberpunk
  • The construction and politics of Kowloon the Walled City
  • The modifications, and hyper violence of Ghost in the Shell
  • The dying cities on foreign planets of Mass Effect: Andromeda
• I love the setting but don’t love the game - Wonderful! Blister City is designed with other science fiction or cyberpunk systems in mind. Particular consideration went towards the following systems:
  • Eclipse Phase
  • CBR+PNK
  • Through the Void
  • Hack the Planet: Cyberpunk Forged in the Dark
  • CY_BORG
  • Cybermetal 2012

What's presented here is the unedited 1st edition of Blister City, designed to be easily printable on your printer work (never at home). It's barebones, pushing aside more flashy layout to instead make something easy to use and reference. Down the line there will be a kickstarted version of this game with more goodies, way more art, more writers, and better layout. It's just that I've been working on this game for 8 years now, and I think it's time people saw more than the early teaser.

The demo file is an old version of the setting, with out of date rules, and little in the way of setting building.

Want to see the game in play? You can see me GM a really early version of the game here:

NOW THERE'S MORE

If you thought "Damn Blister City is so cool, I wish it wasn't cyberpunk though..." buckle the fuck up, because Blister Kingdom now lives here as well. Blister Kingdom is a full on 51 page conversion of Blister City, designed instead for your favorite Dungeon Fantasy game, and better yet.... it's free for anyone who already has Blister City. It contains a full setting, horrible mutations, a bestiary, and a full adventure designed just for Blister Kingdom. Get into it.