IXX KALPA

Stories are the echoes of perspectives. They vibrate through history and through everyone who creates it. And in this empire of ours, the number of stories has no end. Here, the things and problems of the present twist into the shapes of fairy tales. Here, the fantastic lurks at the fringe of the mundane. And here, the single move of a microbe has the same weight as the schemes of entire dynasties. There is nothing here that has no history. In this empire, that changes as the storytellers tell their tales.

IXX KALPA is a hack of Jason Tocci's 2400 system and my personal rip-off of my favorite book, Kalpa Imperial by Angélica Gorodischer.

It is furthermore my attempt to bring together my two favorite RPG systems, Jason's 2400 and Chris McDowall's Ask the Stars. If you know those games, you'll see that I just took their core mechanics and threw them together.

And all of that mixing and shaking took place in order to give me a concrete something that entails the favorite playstile of me and some of the people I play with. Which is basically exploring a setting through collectively creating small details and obsess about them afterwards.  Or as the german storyteller Helga Gebert said it "recognize the big things within the very small things".

This is a story sandbox that is aimed at players and  less at specific characters. Think of it as a campaign where your main protagonist isn't a character, but the setting itself. You can still deep dive into your characters and play intense and spicy dramas with them, if you want to. But I won't give you any mechanics to back that up. Instead I give you a simple mechanic to encourage your players to create details and gather meta-items in order to unlock more of the setting. Like playing a sandbox video game in coop with your friends ... without a prebuilt setting ... and without a computer.

Fucking metaphors. It's about gathering things, kids! Gathering stories, myths, scenes, moments, details, ideas. And then connect the things you've found.

I'm probably shit at explaining it here, so feel free to ask in the comments, if something in the module seems unclear. If you should be confused about the Story Knots, look at the Surprises in 2400 The Venusian Job. It's basically the same mechanic.

Here is also the prototyp post on my blog that started that whole construct. Maybe it can help to clear some gaps.

And to confuse you even more, here is a big pretentious list of things that had an influence on the whole thought process:

- The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. LeGuin
- Fantastische Märchen by Helga Gebert
- Kommunikologie by Vilem Flusser
- 365 Deeprock by Andreas Gloge
- Superkalleider by geevs
- Kenshi by Lo-Fi Games
- The "Trophy: The Scoundrels Quarter" Actual Play by Jason Cordova and his friends
- Mushishi by Yuki Urushibara
- This Town of Ours by Paddy Hutchinson
- The whole process behind Tamriel Rebuilt
- Dark Designs by g0ri
- Some, if not all, of the short stories of Jeffrey Ford
- Microscope by Ben Robbins

Note that none of the mechanic stuff, I'm throwing at you here, is truely original. This is just the result of me thinking way to much about my desire for fictional negative spaces and then sucking up to much Indie roleplaying stuff to somehow give this feelings a playable form.

And now I'm handing all that shit to you, together with this big list of further readings and this way to long intro text. Maybe it'll bring you some fun. 

Take care!

And, most important, be nice to each other!