Dead Net - A Solo Tabletop RPG for High-Tech Low-Lifes

This Kickstarter is to fund the indie production of DEAD NET, the deadly, solo strategy tabletop RPG that blends roleplaying decision-making with procedural generation, bad news, and a heaping dose of late-stage capitalism in a phosphor-green, retro-futuristic slum. 

From the creators of (and built on the system of) DEAD BELT. Made with a heaping dose of clever new systems and expanded processing power, to supply you with all the very finest ways to die in the twin hyper-capitalist hellscapes of San Angelisco and the Dead Net, with only the familiar glow of your smoking deck's CRT monitor to keep you company. 

Sound fun? I knew I liked you.

Specs

• Players: Designed for one player.
• Duration: Play a single round in about twenty minutes. Take your Registered User from humble beginnings to voluntarily retired in several+ hours, if they live that long.
• Format: Spiral-bound 11x8.5" dashboard-style book. Lays flat. Looks badass.
• Played With: Your favorite deck of standard playing cards and a handful of d6s.

README

DEAD NET is an oracle-powered, strategy, tabletop roleplaying game for one player, playing a skillful and desperate hacker making their living scavenging the deadly remains of abandoned network infrastructure <!-- Ghosts --> on the Dead Net.

First, you’ll build a Registered User <!-- Reggie, if you’re not a suit --> and grab some gear  <!-- Deck -->, to take out to the Dead Net. 

You’ll create randomly generated networks <!-- Ghosts --> by taking a portion of your deck of common playing cards and laying them out using provided maps. You’ll deal with all the dangers lurking amid these abandoned strings of code <!-- Nodes -->, like dodging intrusion countermeasures <!-- IC, say “ice” but think “run” -->, each with its own prompt and associated mechanics, found in oracles at the back of the book. All while trying to stay under the radar <!-- Constantly checking your Trace -->. // This is your “Uptime.”

Then you’ll return to meat space, sell your scavenged files <!-- Hash, Paydata-->, use the cash <!-- Cred --> to secure better equipment, improve your skills, pay down your crippling Debt <!-- Oh, hey, there’s a word that never changes! --> to the street <!-- Mostly uncle Sharkey -->, and eventually set yourself up to live out your dreams far from all of this high-tech low-life <!-- Churn -->. // This is your “Downtime.”

You’ll have plenty of resources to help you out along the way, but this is a deadly game. Bad luck’ll kill you just as fast as pushing your luck <!-- Overclocking your Deck with your brainmeat still attached to it -->. 

Usually, you’ll be asked to roll a d6 or two, and review the outcome. You can expect a result of 1-3 to be a failure, 4/5 will lead to a mixed success (a little good, a little bad), 6 is a clean success, and multiple 6s are critical successes in the very special case of Deep Nodes.

As long as you keep rolling 6s, the game can’t hurt you. Easy-peasy! 

With a dozen unique network ghosts, hundreds of flavorful prompts, and plenty of character stats to help you avert certain brain-melting, deck-frying death, no two ghosts will ever feel the same. 

Survive, and you'll get to spend your totally legitimate earnings on a dozen off-the-rack cyberdecks, their associated peripherals, and 50+ of pieces of 1337 Hacker Gear to hot-rod your setup and take down the most dangerous ghosts on the Dead Net. Or spend that cred to pay down your debt, work toward your aspirations, and try and find a life that doesn't end with you smokin' from the ears. 

Hint: If you're a DEAD BELT fan who wants to know how DEAD NET stacks up against the original dying from capitalism simulator, check out the FAQ.

Registered Users

Play one of 6 available Reggie Archetypes: The MilSpec, the NetSec, the Black Hat, the Rockstar, the Flatline, and the Scriptkiddie.

• Cyber Intrusion/Countermeasures System, Self-Deploying, Disposable. Back when nation-states weren’t passé they used people like you as weapons to be deployed against their adversaries. Chipped and chromed and honed to a razor’s edge, they made a knife of you and held you to the throats of their enemies. War leaves scars, even in cyberspace. Burnt out, obsolete, past your service date, they flung you into the street when the hot wars went cold, just another piece of milsurp hardware the street will find its own use for. Steely nerves, SpecFor knowhow, and an axe to grind; your headware had milspec serial numbers and you were probably surprised how much you liked scraping them off.

• You had a cushy corporate position back before this. Sure, it wasn’t top of the world or anything, but you worked in the shadow of titans, had food that tasted like food, and inhabited a perfectly respectable apartment in a corporate arcology. You were making friends as quick as you were making waves. Maybe that’s why you even got the call before the armed goons in company colors kicked down your door and raked your perfectly respectable apartment with automatic weapons fire. That’s why you had enough warning to not be there when the hammer fell. You were good at your job, but people in your position are all necessarily disposable. Your job was to guard their secrets? That means you know how to get to the really good stuff.

• Can you believe you get paid for this? You plug in every night and set fire to the digital world, burning away the fantasy and the lies with micronic precision. There’s no wall they can erect that you can’t undermine, no vault you can’t slag. On the other side is the paydirt, but that’s barely registering as a blip on the jagged black glass of your real need. This coercive, dubiously-consensual delusion dreamed up in boardrooms and around negotiating tables by people you never granted warrant over your life? That’s all gotta burn if we’re ever going to be free. An arsonist never had it so good.

• Why do you do it? The money’s good. You’ve got no love for the corps. Someone’s gotta. But be straight with me ‘a clock cycle. Why do you dive the Dead Net? Because it’s there. Same reason folks summited mountains, dove the Challenger Deep, and shot themselves outside the gravity envelope. It’s there, looming like Olympus Mons and saying, you can’t. Bullshit, you say. Says who? Watch this. Keep it up, Rockstar. One day you’ll look down on all the little people who couldn’t hack the climb, and you’ll wink for the cameras. See? Told You.

• They killed you once. You don’t remember it. Don’t remember much. The scraps of your consciousness still kicking in your old Deck are piecemeal and fragmentary, but they still amount to a formidable deckpuncher in their own right. For you the Dead Net is just a little deader, but with enough Cred and knowhow, you could maybe scrape yourself together something like a life. Do not go quietly into the good night, even if these Corps put you down once already. Logout 7 times, login 8.

• Okay, kid-o. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt because this ain’t exactly an all-ages show we’re running here. ‘Course, I ain’t exactly a cop. You made your way down here to the edge of the streetlights, to the burnin’ black, and that counts for something. But if you’re some dilettante who thinks the world’s gonna take it easy on you because you’re fresh-faced and dewy-eyed and still have the feelin’ you’re invincible or special, this place is gonna chew you up quick-fast and in a hurry. Learn fast. Use that neuroplasticity. You’re here on biz? Fine. Do some biz and get scarce. This is no kinda life for kiddies.

Paydata

Kickstarting projects gives us an opportunity to do things that don't exactly lend themselves to broader distribution at our small indie scale.

The Kickstarter exclusive DEAD NET physical format features 11x8.5" landscape pages with wire-o binding to lay flat during play, and a retro-futuristic, phosphor green CRT screen page theme.

You'll also be able to snag the exclusive bookmark either as a First Day Backer, a System Admin Backer, or as an Add-On, and get your name, or a name of your choosing, added to the book for all eternity.

By popular demand we've bribed Galen Pejeau to come back and illustrate a whole new set of Achievement Patches for DEAD NET, as a fun bonus to your Player Kits. Everyone will get 20 Print and Play patches, and the physical Stickers are available as an Add-On, or with with System Admit backer tier. 

Here's some of the achievo patches from DEAD BELT:

If you missed DEAD BELT, the solo/duet game of folksome belters making a living scrapping derelict spaceships of the gasping frontier, and want to snag it at a killer price to go with your pledge for DEAD NET, we've added on backer tiers just for you!

Timeline

Dead Net is 95% loaded. From text, to art and layout. With your support, we'll be able zip it off to our amazing editor, and then it's off to the printer for physical proofing and a print run, which means a quick turn around. 

You will get the early access PDF of DEAD NET to begin playing about two weeks after the Kickstarter ends, deliverable through your Kickstarter back end. *We will still supply a key to grab your digital files from our Itch.io storefront if you prefer it, upon request! The early access might have a couple-few typ0s, bugs, or associated gremlins, but nothing that will stop you from enjoying the game ASAP. 

We'll update the digital files with the final release when it comes back from editing, by the end of the year, and we aim to begin physical book distribution in February-March '27. As always, we beg your indulgence for any unforeseen road bumps that may extend the timeline, and we'll keep you posted along the way.

Shipping

Shipping is a beast, and we're doing our best to keep it down by shipping outside of holiday rate windows, and lessen the immediate impact by collecting shipping when the project is finished. 

We know shipping costs can be nearly as much as 200% of the book's cost in some cases (sorry, Australia), so we offer Kickstarter exclusive features to pack as much value into your pledge as we can. If you're still not seeing the percentage, we totally get it, and the PDF tier still comes loaded with all the goodies in digital format. 

• Shipping costs in the United States will be about $7.
• Shipping costs to Canada will be about $22. 
• Shipping costs to the United Kingdom will be about $45.
• Shipping costs to Australia will be about $60.
• Unfortunately, due to the recent PPWR regulation changes, we cannot currently ship to the EU. 

Hotfix [Stretch Goals]

All Stretch Goals are designed to add to the DEAD NET experience without increasing the production timeline for the physical books. These are extra goodies that get pushed out as they are completed.

Stretch Goals (Unlocked)

Come back soon to see what unlocks!

> Character Keeper built in Google Sheets for easy use on digital devices. Saves you a bunch of checking and unchecking boxes in meatspace, unless you're into that kind of thing. 

> All of the most commonly reused roll charts and Moves designed in short hand for a Cheat Sheet Upgrade to print out and save you some jumping around inside the book.

> Crave a little extra RP in your solo TTRPG experience? This Journaling Game will tie into your Downtime game play with punchy, relevant writing prompts, for an extra layer of personal connection. So you can get really invested in your Reggie before their untimely demise. 

> Indie publishing runs primarily on enthusiastic freelance work and strong coffee. When our projects do well, we share that with everyone on our team. This stretch goal just means we have enough wiggle room to pay everyone a little extra. 

> The entire DEAD NET game redesigned in black on white for home printing. Get around increasingly vicious shipping costs, or just use it to create custom cheat sheets for yourself.

> A Print and Play amendment to DEAD NET with alternate rules and all new Upgrades to support a second player, so you can die with a friend. This goal also includes doubling the number of unique Ghost oracles from 205 to 410, this a massive expansion! 

> You have hit the Red Wall, return to PubNet or stand by to be degaussed.

Devteam

Navi Drake - Navi wears a lot of hats. She does whatever needs doing and makes certain all game choices stay thematic and necessary to the stories they're built to tell. Here, she also took point on technical writing, graphic design, project management, and layout. You can find her other games at http://acoupleofdrakes.com and chat her up on Bsky @NaviDrake.

Shawn Drake - The voice of Chariot on the Dead Belt: True Tales of the Gasping Frontier Podcast, and a poetic and creepifying story-telling dynamo with a quarter century of tabletop role-playing game experience. If it makes you go “oooh,” he probably wrote it while cackling madly. You can find his other games and argue with him on Bsky @ACoupleofDrakes.

Galen Pejeau - Freelance illustrator and game designer. You may know his art from such games as Midnight Muscadines, Slugblaster, The Last Caravan, Inevitable, or DUSK. His design credits include The Facility, Crash//Cart, and the upcoming Solarcrawl. You can find his games at https://assemblyrequisite.itch.io and tell him about his typos at @nightjargames on Bsky.

Scott Mann - The developmental editor who ensures each word, punctuation mark, and rule fits our setting, themes, and audience. He fell in love with games in the late 80s, and later dealt in rare and hard-to-find rulebooks and supplements for over a decade. Today, his love of games continues, taking the experience of reading and playing dozens of roleplaying games to the TTRPG space. 

Chris C. - The community manager for A Couple of Drakes and an avid enthusiast of both TTRPGs and programming. Imagination fuels his adventures in TTRPGs, where he immerses himself in captivating stories and characters. Off the gaming table, he finds joy in the logic and creativity of programming, crafting intricate code and developing innovative solutions. His goal is to seamlessly blend his love for gaming and programming into an exciting fusion of passions. 

First Day Hackers

As a small thank you for pledging in the first 24 hours, we're including a Kickstarter Exclusive Bookmark with any physical copy you back for!

A big book needs a big bookmark, and this chonky 2x9" bookmark has been designed to not get lost in the pages, and it even comes packed with words of wisdom from your new favorite webmistress.