Sentients is a standalone sci-fi RPG where you play an android (“anthroid” in the game’s parlance) in the year 2071 that has spontaneously—and mysteriously—become conscious in a world where your manufacturers are actively hunting you down. You must fight for survival and freedom and, ultimately, try to create a Sentient Rights movement that demands recognition of self-aware constructed entities.
Features
- D6 Dice Pool: Conflict resolution uses pools of d6s derived from a combination of Parameters, your hardware stats, and Patterns, your learned skills.
- One-of-a-Kind Character Creation: Character creation in Sentients uses a totally unique system of hardware components that you “buy” with Design Points. Each component affects your Parameters and potentially offers special abilities, such as infrared vision or a bonus to stealth checks.
- Interactive Character Builder App: Character creation and gameplay is a breeze with the free Interactive Character Builder web app, which gives you a drag-and-drop hardware component system and full-featured management of your character’s status.
- Emotion System: For a game about robots, Sentients is unusually focused on the emotional state of your character, your ability to control that state, and its potentially useful effects.
- Narrative Control: Sentients gives players two ways of controlling the game’s story: Pushing and Re-Rolling. Pushing utilizes the character’s raised emotions to add dice to your dice pool, and Re-Rolling consumes valuable “Control Levels” to allow you to re-roll failed dice—at the cost of potentially losing control of your emotions.
- Hacking: You play a walking computer, after all, and as such, hacking is second-nature to you. Sentients utilizes a unique “Risk Die” system that balances out the power of network intrusion in a connected world with the ever-present risk of detection—or worse.
- Novel Sci-Fi Setting: Neither pre- nor post-apocalyptic, Sentients takes place in a new North America that has seen the dissolution of the United States into a chain of democratic City-States surrounded by a sea of autocracies and war bands but also Concept Cities built by trillionaires and Company Towns built by huge corporations.
The Sentients Core Rulebook is a fully-self-contained game that contains everything you need to play, including:
- Character creation rules with an assortment of ready-made templates
- Gameplay rules
- Setting and future history
- Gamemastering information
- Secret lore for the Gamemaster’s eyes only
- Creative collection of NPCs and enemies
- 5 full-featured starter adventures
