E-Scape: A Science Fantasy Roleplaying Game

Overview

E-Scape: A Science Fantasy Roleplaying Game is a tabletop RPG where you play digital fugitives forever stuck in the virtual world of E-Scape. Stranded the moment your flesh-and-blood original died, you're now an orphaned copy, a ghost who must exist on the margins as you slowly degrade to the ravages of glitches and bugs that diminish who you are.

Your only hope to survive is to embrace the sub-Scape, E-Scape's equivalent to the criminal underworld. Here you join a crew of other ghosts to fulfill jobs that pay you not in currency, but time on refresh emulators that can undo some of the errors that eat away at who you are. 

You've got a choice: do nothing and waste away, or take risks and live what's left of your life on your terms.  

Actual Plays

Here are some videos depicting actual plays of the game. The first is a truncated representation of the 12-15 hour adventure from the core book. The second is a run of the adventure found in the free quickstart download.

<INSERT WIT VIDEO HERE>

E-Scape is a massive, closed-system virtual world designed to let people pursue their heart's desire through digital copies who believe they're just as real as their originals. Built to be hyper-realistic, copies engage with environments and others as they normally would; no hiding behind screen names, no reminders that what they're experiencing is just a bunch of ones and zeroes.

For many, E-Scape offers originals the time and opportunity to learn new skills they can use to advance their careers, meet people and visit places they've ever seen, and do things they might otherwise never try. E-Scape truly lives up to its name as an escape from the doldrums of everyday life.

For ghosts, it's a very different experience. Out of compliance with E-Scape's terms of service, they're hunted down by system authorities for capture and deletion. Believing themselves to be just as alive as they were in meatspace, ghosts do whatever they can to stay one step ahead. This often means a life of crime in E-Scape's dark underbelly.

Though the nature of E-Scape is pretty well defined, how meatspace looks is completely up to you. You could:

• create an alternate version of the modern-day world where E-Scape's existed for a while already;
• set it in the far future, where humanity has evacuated earth and now lives amongst the stars;
• insert it into your favorite fictional world;
• have a magical steampunk backdrop that came up with the technology through mystic means;

or anything else you can come up with. 

There's also no expectation to involve meatspace into your storylines at all, but that doesn't mean you can't. The book has an entire chapter about creating your own meatspace, including rules on how to build out broader political campaigns that enable the ghost PCs to indirectly influence what happens in the real world, or run games where players have character sheets for both their original and copy!

E-Scape is a custom dice pool/count successes system that solely uses eight-sided dice (d8s) to resolve everything. For mundane tests, your Attribute and Core scores contribute to your dice pool, while magic tests use Core and System scores. Successes begin as any rolled result of 3 or less (TN 3). Core skills and System masteries improve your chances of success by improving your TN +1 apiece and making rolled 1s count double.

The game takes a unique approach to stat design. The common concepts of physical, social, and mental aspects aren't Attributes, but are built into the Cores and skills. Instead, the six Attributes represent how a player does something. When combined with a Core, or what, this gives players narrative choice on their actions.

For example, let's look at the skill Persuasion. If you combine this with the Attribute Power, this is an attempt to intimidate. Using Network morphs it into leadership. Precision can be used to talk down someone who's on edge, while Speed enables the person to quicktalk their way out of an unexpected situation. As a player, you choose the technique that works best for you!

Every time you cast an Effect or push a roll, you gain degradation points (DPs). Gain too many and you randomly generate a glitch that diminishes one of your Core stats by 1, or a bug that diminishes one of your Attribute or System stats by 1.

When you complete a job, you get rewarded with maintenance points (MPs) you can use to buy off glitches or bugs, but keep in mind that you may not gain as many MPs as you might like. Be too cavalier with casts and pushes, and your stats may never recover.

Magic in E-Scape comes in the form of Effects. These utility spells are tools that help a crew pull off jobs. While none of them can directly force copies to do anything (excessive privacy policies make hacking a copy impossible), they can affect the many bots, apps, and vectorsthat inhabit E-Scape.

The thirty-six Effects split evenly between the System stats of Surge and Tide. Surge Effects redirect E-Scape's energy currents to direct things like reprogram apps, pilfer data, and alter graphics. Tide Effects manipulate data streams to map sites, eavesdrop on others, and see where someone's been. When you cast, you decide what you do after you roll; the more successes you get, the stronger the Effect can be.

There's no limit to how many times you can cast, but every time you do it wears on your avatar. Cast too often and you'll gain glitches and bugs that negatively impact your stats.

E-Scape has two mechanics you can use to improve your test success totals. Pushes grant you a free +1 success at the cost of 1 DP. You then roll 1d8; if the result would pass the test's TN, you can push again. If not and the result is greater than the original dice pool size, you can gain a learning point (LP) toward the next stat level.

Bit flips are earned anytime you roll two or more 1s in a test. You can accrue up to three per session and spend them on subsequent tests to grant yourself or another character in your scene +2 successes. This has been a very popular mechanic, especially when you can earn LPs for spending your bit flip on someone else!

Unlike many other TTRPGs, combat in E-Scape is a last resort. Instead, we created pursuit mechanicsto emphasize the fugitive nature of the game. Whether you're running away from authorities or going after a rival gang, these rules have been designed to recreate the feel of a classic cop chase or caper gone wrong.

Building characters in E-Scape is very straightforward:

• Choose 7 skills and fill associated dots in CORE traits for each
• Fill in 2 additional CORE dots
• Fill in 10 additional ATTRIBUTE dots (everything starts at 1)
• Choose 3 magical Effects for which your character has mastery
• Fill in 3 additional SYSTEM dots between SURGE and TIDE (both starting at 1)
• Finishing touches

That's it! No math, no floating numbers. Just dots and boxes getting filled in and writing down a few Effect names.

Adventures Await!

E-Scape adventures are tales of daring and tension. One moment, you're infiltrating a site to steal corporate secrets. The next, your charged with locating a new ghost and helping them evade immediate capture without getting caught yourself. Heists, sabotage, and underworld warfare are all viable stories you can tell in this setting.

Making meatspace a more prominent part of your game world opens up plenty more options. Political intrigues, conspiracies, vendettas against those who killed you, nihilists who want to see E-Scape go away forever ... the directions you can go are endless!

The Book

Because it hasn't been laid out yet, the exact page count isn't exactly known, but it will likely be over 300 pages in a standard letter full-color layout. The book has an introduction and thirteen chapters, divided as follows:

• For everyone:
  • Rules, Character Creation, System Effects, The World of E-Scape, and Apps
• For GMs:
  • Running the Game, NPC design, Partitions & Sites, Meatspace, and two adventures
  • Three sample partitions (could be shared with players at GM discretion)

Why Kickstarter?

The primary goal of this campaign is to determine an initial print run size. Funds collected will first go to pay for proofreading, additional art, and printing. The good news is that the book's already written and copy edited, plus we already have fifty-two art pieces commissioned and produced by Rayven Studios. 

Though it could be produced without crowdfunding, Kickstarter offers the chance to present the game to a wide audience and recoup some of the costs that have already been put into it. This is a true passion project where the ultimate goal isn't financial, but rather artistic. Breaking even would be fantastic, but what would be even better is to share the world of E-Scape with the TTRPG community. There's no better group to do that with than all of you!

Reward Tiers

You receive two copies of the core book in .pdf format. One is in page view for ease of use on mobile devices, and the other is in spread view (two pages side-by-side) for those of you who use larger landscape monitors when you play. 

The documents are full-color and share the same pagination as the hardcover document, so player groups using a mix of digital and physical copies can reference the same page when looking up info.

Save $5 off the retail price when you back now!

The Meatspace reward includes Ghost in the System free of charge+ a physical copy of the book, which will be a full-color hardcover that's stitch-bound for greater durability. The campaign price will save you an additional $10 off retail.

For the completionists out there, this reward gives you Prime Cut of Meatspace plus every add-on available: the dice set + player tokens, GM tokens, and we're fortunate enough to partner with Briarwick candles for custom scents representing the settings for the two introductory adventures in the book!

Not available to EU customers. If your non-EU country isn't available for shipping, please message us at to add it to the list!

RETAILERS ONLY: Receive five copies of the hardcover book at 50% of retail price. Can add additional bundles up to a total of 20 books. 

Only available in the US and Canada.

For the diehards who love to see a full-page contribution of their own in a book, this reward is limited to two backers! In addition to receiving everything in the Out of Site! reward, you'll also get to contribute your very own character design to be included at the end of the Character Creation chapter of the book:

• Run through the complete character creation process with the game's designer, which means you get a sneak peek at the complete Character Creation and System Effects chapters before everyone else!
• Help build out the art brief for the figure that will accompany the write-up for your custom character.
• Review the write-up and artwork before it's finalized!

If you've ever wanted to go into a RPG campaign during Session Zero, point at a character write-up in a book, and say, "I made that, so that's what I'm playing!", here's your chance!