The Game is Released!

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It's Draco, writing to you to announce the creation of another small system while ProtoDrive's development continues. I know, shocking! Will and I just keep having ideas, sorry.

During a production meeting for ProtoDrive, he and I  decided to take a mental health break by changing gears and spitballing about what a game centered on the concept of "search & rescue" would look like. It was just supposed to be a thought exercise, but quickly turned into a few frantic hours of back and forth development.

Silly as it may sound, the idea really took flight when I made a note out loud that while all die rolls succeeded on a 5+ (fairly common for d6-based games), I was more interested in what happened on the 4-. We both looked at each other and made several faces over me actually saying "four minus" out loud and how cursed it sounded, but that was that. We had a core mechanic. We also had questions.

Where do we go next? How could this work? "What cracks?"

Come to the Rescue

This is, functionally, the whole game. After that production meeting, we spent a week kicking it around to people, getting notes on rule clarity, and then doing a lot of reorganization to make it presentable. For now, it doesn't have any art because we instantly decided it would be inappropriate (not to mention tasteless) to use any real-world disaster imagery as part of the book, but we do have ideas for the front and back covers that we think will pan out well. There's also a decent chance it'll be reformatted into a zine style for print & play, but that's for the future to decide.

As I said in the previous section, So That Others May Live is a d6-based system. Success is always guaranteed, but there may be a price to pay. For every level of difficulty in the situation at hand, the acting player rolls a die. Every die that comes up 4- begs a question, picked from a list associated with the kind of problem you're trying to tackle. If the acting player can apply one of their keywords, then the situation gets a lot easier, but then again they'll definitely have to answer a special question.

Risk. Reward.

What are you willing to give up when lives are on the line?

Join Up Now!

At the end of the book are a few examples of the kind of lore you can use to create worlds to run the system in. They're left broad and somewhat non-specific on purpose. Think of them as sparks to get the fire going before your player create characters to leap into the flames.

This also isn't the final form of the example lore section! We've already got two more we want to develop internally (one a play on hospital dramas, the other a journey to a digital realm a la TRON), but we'd be absolutely tickled to add more from readers like you!

From the time of the game's release until March 28th of 2025 (03/28/2025), we're opening submissions for more pieces of example lore to add to the section. We're looking for about 200 words per submission, which will then be edited by us to fit the format of the book.

While we can't pay for these pieces, we'll absolutely be including attribution with each piece and add your name to the contributors section that will be added to the copyright page with the next update.

You can find the submission form me here.