Your Favorite Game (You Haven't Played Yet)
It's very likely you've never played my favorite RPG. Probably you haven't even heard of it yet because it's still in development. It's called Orbital Megastructure and it's by the inimitable, inestimable Evlyn Moreau.
Back when I joined Bluesky back in late 2024 I followed Evlyn almost immediately along with a slew of other RPG/OSR creators I admire, she was my 10th follower. Along with Miranda Elkins, Jeremy Duncan, and the homie JFUR, Evlyn made me feel welcome in the creative space. A someone who stupidly spent the G+ era passively consuming blogs that filtered down through Reddit this was a beautiful thing for me. Sadly for me bsky has gotten worse as a place that actually engenders a feeling of community and become more of a place that I participate in people's marketing campaigns for their crowdfunders. But! At some point Evlyn started posting art and ideas for a game she was working on called Orbital Megastructure. I was captivated, and asked if I could participate in some playtesting. Evlyn invited me to her playtesting discord server and I got an opportunity to delve into the grimy yet whimsical, grim yet hopeful, dilapidated yet beautiful world of Orbital Megastructure.
If you can see the beauty of these places you can understand why I'm so drawn to Orbital Megastructure's aesthtic.
Evlyn has been inspired by many different media in developing the setting and systems of Orbital, but as I understand it the first among them is BLAME! the excellent manga by Tsutomu Nihei. It's extremely distant from being a derivative work, but if you've read BLAME! and wished to adventure in that world Orbital is probably your best bet.
Entering the Megastructure
My first introduction to Orbital Megastructure was creating the Cyborg Vizaal Creatch. Vizaal had been a diplomat and explorer of his home enclave but was exiled due to violating a taboo place. Aside from Vizaal's cyborg abilities and repertoire of Data Hacks (Area Swipe and the deceptively useful Dataline) the most striking thing was the gear. It was so evocative and told me so much about the place I'd be exploring, some of Viz's starting gear included:
- Amoeba Symbiont Armor
- a Needle Gun integrated into his right arm
- an Anti-Grav Belt
- companion Synth Knight Sarin (halfling sized, brave, and armed with hard-plastic armor and sword)
- pet Glow-Bug Fittler
If you're reading this you're almost certainly already familiar with Evlyn's art. Her writing made me daydream about the Megastructure, her art makes me see it. Here's a cyborg.
Ben, JFUR, Abdul, and I spent many sessions exploring a sector of the Megastructure. We aided a Holo-Knight protector of the Data Sphere, attempted to slay a Neuro Hunter in it's nest, followed a trail of data-logs that we hoped would lead to a new home, fought our way past the long dead Husks of cyber enhanced soldiers, and convinced a tramway AI to bring us to a new sector. It's one of the best campaign experiences I've ever been a part of. Eventually Evlyn decided that we needed to take a break so she could work commissions and other projects and also re-work a lot of the rules for Orbital Megastructure.
Flooded Sector
A Node we explored in the Flooded Sector
Husk trooper
Guardian Bug we made friends with that helped us fight the Husks
AI Datacore we rescued to help stabilize the Data Sphere in the Flooded Sector
Travelling Forth Into a New Megastructure
There have been a lot of changes to Orbital since that first (for me) playtest campaign, the system has been improved and streamlined significantly. Currently Evlyn has been playtesting the game in a GMless/Gmfull manner and I've been lucky enough to play three sessions to far with the Juno Admintech Preserved Human "Marq Daigneult" (shout out basketball fans). Evlyn has a Patreon post where she talks about one of our sessions (Second playtest heading).
We had another session just the two of us last night where we continued following Lem's datalog trail along the network of tubes and pipes we'd been clambering down the outside of. This took us to a campsite at a small shrine to a local healing deity, then a junction where we discovered an "Uncanny network of empty rooms and office corridors" which we decided had been constructed erroneously by the giant Builder robots controlled by the System Sphere. It is here that we found the final log entry in Lem's trail, they had been stymied by the maze of indistinguishable rooms and hallways and given up on his dream of seeing the clouds of the Vast Sector. We decided that we could do better, and Marq vowed to see the clouds himself. After an attempt to navigate the backrooms (heh) we came to another junction, unfortunately occupied by a nest of Null Zoners, small biosynths with the ability to disrupt data access. Surely these creatures had caused the Builder to create an environment the could hide and hunt in. Well fatigued, we decided to backtrack to the safe camp we'd discovered earlier and try to find a way past the creatures the next day. MIRNA wrote some in the groups log and then Marq asked her about the place she grew up and how she came to be a mercenary. MIRNA explained about how she was cloned from Akemi gene stock to be her communities protector, but was never treated as her own person with her own feelings and needs. Eventually she left to explore the Megastructure and find a life of her own.
Our first attempt to bypass the Null Zoner lair led to a collapsed section, but our second led us to another junction full of Miserable Moss (a food source for only the most desperate) and an exit into a series of concrete canyons. Just ahead was the Sector Exit, blocked by a powered down door marked "Transit Station A308-X, Terra Prime Heavy Industries". Marq explained to Mirna that long ago Terra Prime operated most of the Inter-Sector transit, and travelling between sectors required a contract between one's corp and Terra-Prime, thus far travel was restricted to the rich and the essential. Marq used his Beta Battery to power the door and the pair entered the cavernous transit node. That night cycle we camped in an exposed and uncomfortable crack in the wall. Myrna decided to keep watch for the night while Marq wrote in his journal about the frustration and triumph of finding a path through the maze clearing his "Unconfident" condition. Luckily the night passed uneventfully, but in the morning the Ravaged condition of the sector stepped down meaning the Husk soldiers from the long ago war would be active. Good thing we're about to travel to the Vast sector where the space is so big there are weather systems and clouds...
An In-exhaustive List of Other Things I Love About Orbital Megastructure
The Hacking, both the rules and the individual hacks (Dataline, my beloved)
The exploration rules, especially the travel roles the group members occupy.
The evocative, terrifying, but somehow tender creatures you find there.
The myriad disasters that have befallen the Megastructure over the millennia(?). Discovering the deep history of the place through play.
When you come to an unexplored Node there is a procedure for collaboratively mapping and generating it, pure fun for me.
Conclusions
If you've spent much time interacting with me you probably know that I love anti-canon world building(hopefully the post will be back up when Luka Rejec finishes his new website). Orbital Megastructure is to me the finest example of that I've ever seen of that paradigm, and enriched by Evlyn's lovely and provocative art. She's been making good progress toward a final version and the documents get more stabilized every day, hopefully soon you too will be able to explore the wonderous world of Orbital Megastructure. In the meantime you should consider joining Evlyn's Patreon, or buying one of her games (I promise they're also very good) to support her while she works toward releasing the full game.