PRAXI preview #1: backgrounds
Added 2024-09-22 01:59:29 +0000 UTCfor the last couple months, as well as underside, i've been working on a lighter project i announced a while back, a tactical communist OSR-inspired thing called PRAXI: Protocol Against Xenoimperialism. it's like an antifascist united front XCOM, set in an alternate world where an alien invasion prevented the sino-soviet split and resulted in crack teams of covert socialist anti-extraterrestial operatives being deployed in a top secret cold war against alien overlords and an openly fascist US-headed alliance of collaborators.
PRAXI is a pretty harsh game that chews up characters and spits them out, so magnesium and i wanted to make the character creation process simple enough that you could have a functional character with 15 minutes and a few d66 rolls, but also evocative--every character should have a story that slots into the larger story of anti-imperialist resistance that the game is about. the background table is one place for that story to be developed: a character's background is the thing that drew them into struggle against the alien invaders, their radicalizing impetus to take up arms against galactic imperialism.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GLfBdldCWOfC5PVWkWyle6GNjGwAdGeGxRAgLQiEHHo/edit?usp=sharing
each background gives you an associated skill -- giving them a bit of mechanical valence helps underline their thematic importance. i'll be showing off some more PRAXI over the next couple months, but don't worry--underside dev diaries will be back next week :)
