How does Degenesis end? :: The Roadmap 🤯 RPG Review

the genesis roadmap is a series of booklets published for the genesis role-playing game in 2021 they consist of five titles three of which are setting expansions and two which are one-shot adventures the publisher six more vodka announced the end of the genesis in october 21 and the remaining booklets planned for the roadmap were never written so these are the final entries for the genesis each entry in the so-called road map was intended to be produced quickly and through the help of fan donations they were written illustrated and published in rapid succession at a rate of roughly one new entry per month aside from providing setting expansion and a couple of adventures these booklets advance a metaplot that is tightly woven with the setting and answer a number of questions while creating new mysteries in this video i'm going to go fairly in depth into each of these final entries in the genesis line and present those answers and those questions as i was best able to understand them myself as for the one-shot adventures i will be including minor spoilers but will avoid giving away anything beyond the introductory scenes and at the end of each segment i'll offer up my honest opinion about the booklets and at the end of the video i'll give you the recommended reading order on how to read the genesis as a whole if you're watching this as your introduction to the genesis rpg it's worth mentioning that this is actually the last of six deep dive videos that i've made covering the game it's a pretty deep setting but i've managed to unpack some of the major details in previous videos you may want to watch some of those videos before jumping into this one in order to get the most out of what the hell i'm talking about each of the physical booklets have an ultra sturdy feel to them despite being staple bound booklets the cover paper is ultra thick and each page is also pretty thick the ink and paper quality are something you might see in a really fancy industry conference handout or an expensive wedding it's just about as high quality as any printing press could possibly muster as mentioned the genesis line has come to an end i've left a link below to their website where you can see if you can snag any of their remaining stock before they enter the realm of online auctions if you've read the setting expansion justice or watched my two videos on it you're aware that there is a large population of clanners in the capital city in fact they make up the large bulk of the population when compared to the cult they are as the book puts it the laborers craftsmen farmers brewers butchers bakers and any other job required for a civilized society to function among the dozens or hundreds of clans who have moved to the big city and lost their cultural identity over the generations there are now four so-called great clans these are the stukov briny providers and steel masters it's worth noting that this book does remind you that you can make up your own clan in this game the core rule book actually provides a whole tool set for doing so and it's one of the few places in this game where you're invited to really take the reins and the setting nevertheless here are the four great clans stook off politically speaking the stukov are at the top among the clans being well connected to the judges in uptown and assume important societal jobs like the guild leaders of craftsmen and merchants the cults who rule over the city prefer stukovs as new recruits since they generally have a weak cultural identity of their own and are eager to serve the existing political power structure their ranks range from mere citizen which is actually a lot better than most planners in the city up to apprentice candidates called factotums quartermasters who work in low and mid-level city administration a special firefighter rank called the fire watch to real estate agents and landlords called urbanists and finally upper middle city administrators called deputies the elderly leaders of the clan called partisans occupy a council that is actually devoid of any political power in the city but they do have authority within the clan briny nestled between the harbor the stukov quarter and the steel monolith are the remnants of a clan once known for its healing abilities after this battalions asserted their monopoly on healthcare of all sorts the brennie went underground with their services and now act as alternative medicine providers think chiropractors balms salves and more questionable mystical cures some have even turned to creating poisons while other members of the clan have risen in civilized society as renowned brewers and distillers making the best booze in the protectorate these booze making brittany often earn citizenship for their contribution to society the ranks of the british reflect their nature as healers and poisoners one starts as an aide or lackey who runs around delivering herbs chemicals and supplies then at the level of guru which is far lower ranked than it sounds they study the human body through the lens of physiotherapy acupuncture first aid and nutrition since none of these disciplines are taught by this battalions they are technically illegal to practice and thus make any brainy guru practicing clinical medicine a part of the city's underworld at the very top of the clan structure are seven meisters who dictate clan activities and are themselves masters of their chosen discipline and who occasionally appoint an inheritor a sort of chemically induced messiah who offers mystical guidance in times of great need providers the clans of the fertile rubble that produce most of the food for the city were once many but the judges hammered out their cultural identities in order to keep them in line nevertheless over time they found a clan structure and identity once again sorting themselves in family units and in a practical agrarian organization this new clan is called the providers and their entire existence is indeed to provide food through farming their ranks reflect a growing resistance to the authorities of the city that rule over them at the bottom are runners and harvesters who operate the bulk of the farming activity but there are also bruisers and vandals who selectively resists battalion authorities and sometimes take drastic violent action to protect the interests of provider leadership brigadiers are tasked with maintaining rituals and cultural practices like marriages and festivals and the jury men and patriarchs run the villages and adjudicate disputes among the farmers steel masters as the legend goes clans who sailed from asia and landed on european shores centuries ago spread across the continent three of those clans ended up using their mastery of metalworks and metal craftsmanship to serve the empire of exalt when exalt fell about 115 years ago the protectorate abducted those clans wholesale and imprisoned them in luxury in the steel monolith in justician and made them use their skills to make weapons for them in time these three clans were whittled down to two and those two the ogota and gotokai continued for several generations making arms for the judges trapped in their massive factory tower they call themselves the cloud people and now they fight amongst each other about whether or not they should ever be allowed to leave the monolith the ranks progress predictably from fledgling a steel worker gopher retrieving molten slag to a metallurgist and artificer and ends with two steel masters the heads of their respective families the great schism between the two clans are actually just a personal disagreement between these two men with ogota wanting to stay put and gotokai wanting to branch out into the city to learn new techniques and bring in new blood this supplement describes itself as an expansion to justice which itself is an expansion on the setting and that's exactly what this is it does what might have seemed impossible which is to meaningfully deepen a portrait of the city of justician which was already given a 700 page treatment since the clans make up the vast majority of the city's population it's nice to see so much life breathed into them making them in fact fully playable characters last watch last watch is a scenario that can probably be played in a single three or four hour session it's intended for intermediate level characters and takes place on the border of the protectorate pitting characters against the encroachment of the cockroach clan the setup is this you and your party have been dispatched to a lonely outpost on the perimeter of the protectorate watch tower 17 in because the two judges stationed out there failed to radio in at the regularly appointed time your job is to go out there and make sure everything is fine when your party arrives at the watchtower everything is quiet and empty a flashing mirror signal from the top of the tower draws you to the perimeter and the gate opens to a small courtyard up the tower you go where you are met with a grievously injured young judge named murdoch and an outsider named hakkal a devout calm and a baptist they fill you in on what has transpired murdoch and his underlying angus were out on patrol when they were ambushed by cockroach clanners angus was taken down but murdoch was able to escape on his horse but not without taking a poisoned slash to his leg when he got back to the tower he was able to use the mounted machine gun to mow down a number of cockroaches and force them to retreat it was at that time that the anabaptist hakal who was out searching for his abducted niece heard the gunfire and was drawn to the watchtower he managed to get up the tower and dress murdoch's wounds but as of this moment murdoch's condition is deteriorating the objective as presented by these two npcs is to get all the way out to the generator in some rocky hills to the west repair it and then get back to the compound the generator will take a few hours to spin up but once it's up and running it will send a distress signal for the cavalry to arrive and energize an electrical defense array around the tower complex that the chroniclers built some time ago the obstacle of course is a group of several dozen cockroach clanners who are lurking around outside the walls they start playing some very dirty tricks on the party to lure them out and demoralize them and the adventure takes on a desperate race against time as murdoch's condition gets worse and the cockroaches begin to realize that the tower gun is out of bullets and the electrical defense grid is not operational there's a third major area of interest in the scenario one that lends a lot of excitement to the session but it is not strongly integrated to the motivations of the characters in terms of having a reason to go there just a warning for gms as you read this scenario you may need to shore up this weak point with your own carrot to dangle at the players because it's really fun if they are lured into this third area the booklet provides ample backstory to the history of the watchtower itself as well as a lot of information on the leader of the cockroach cohort in the story which is surprising since you don't normally think of them as anything more than monsters which they are but the leader does have some dynamic aspects to his operation in the end it's hard to say if pcs would even survive this scenario like the genesis in general this is a brutal and deadly sequence of events and combat is not always avoidable here if you allow your players to be creative and support their problem-solving ingenuity they might be able to devise some clever solutions to what is essentially a survival horror situation newmancers newmancers is a classic embodiment of a degenesis book in that it advances the metaplot and huge jaw-dropping reveals as well as methodically explaining the cultural and historical aspects of the setting but it's all heavily intertwined in this case the big metaplot reveal is that there are cryogenically frozen nanite laden agents essentially super sleepers on a spacecraft waiting to be deployed 1 000 years after the esheton whereas sleepers awakened in underground bunkers on earth have been awakened at 100 200 300 years after the meteor apocalypse the greatest of them in this orbiter will descend from this orbital station above earth in the year 3073 and act as the final arbiters of a grand design plan by recombination group founder and mastermind jerome gattrell gettrell by the way is also in stasis on this orbiter but a marauder named triglaw who opposes cottrell's master plan was able to partially hack the space station the virus he sent up was contained but the station did have to sacrifice one of its pods shooting off one of these hyper elite cascade 1000 sleepers one named agathopia down to earth about 500 years too early that pod crashed into a city and flipped its political order upside down so about that city let's rewind a bid and start from earth about 400 years ago maybe in the 2260s legend has it that a man traveled from the north and found a city full of broken industrial machines he silently went to work restoring these machines and the clans all around came in from the cold and began helping him they called him the mechanist and he toiled for decades building up a vast network of subterranean factories these were called cauldron cities and the master plan was to make them all semi-independent engines of industrial production that networked together into a vast industrial techno state the mechanist died before he could finish and left behind a brutally pragmatic clan that came to call themselves the meccans the meccans were brilliant engineers but they were also ruthless heartless slavers and used slave labor to keep one operational cauldron city below them running their city and their kingdom was known as nolpelia over time a clan known as the toner overpowered the meccans and became the new rulers of this city-state but not much changed for the vast slave population that worked in the cavernous industrial hellscape underground over time the tanner developed a warrior cast among the slaves and devised a standard-issued steam-powered gun for them to use this new weapon was the pneumohammer and the warriors who used them were called newmancers things went like this for some time until the fallen spacecraft of agathopia came crashing she didn't exactly survive the crash when it came in at a low angle and obliterated the taunter palace the seat of power of the entire city-state the super-advanced nanites that composed her entire body exploded and froze instantly into a dome of fractured metal a nanite cloud was all that remained of her yet it still contained valuable clues to gatrell's master plan as far as napelia when the thing crashed all hell broke loose and the new mancers revolted they killed most of the meccans with a few escaping and then they set about trying to rebuild their city a few months after the revolt they were attacked by a nasty clan called the phosphorites and won a pyrrhic victory over them their population was depleted in their city in ruins then in 2576 about 20 years before the present a marauder named gusev arrived with his entourage of inumoy who travel in a massive armored convoy they distributed to the new manser's seeds to grow food and sustain themselves nopelia's most interesting feature is the cauldron city below ground this is a massive complex that stretches down thousands of meters and is collected laterally to other unfinished complexes every four hours or so the entire complex floods with water up to 300 meters below ground and then drains again this tide keeps people from being able to really explore the place and unlock its secrets but everyone suspects it's full of priceless mechan blueprints etched on metal plates and other technical wonders from the time of the mechanist cauldron city holds other mysteries too like vast galleries of columns covered in mushrooms frost building up on surfaces and at the lower depths the thumping sound of a giant beating heart the new mancers themselves are a strict militant people they don't understand anything about diplomacy or trade and are led by their liberator from the revolution catacomb and his trusted lieutenant deus volt they organize themselves based on their ability to resist pain and fear as well as their skills with the machinery underground smoggers boilers riggers they're all centered around using understanding and operating the mechanical infrastructure of cauldron city only at a certain level of training do they earn a name to replace their number designation and are given the right to remove their mask their weapons of war are mostly coal powered and many of their defense weapons shoot steaming hot water they are also in possession of a massive tech level 5 cannon called kingdom come which can annihilate nearby cities but they only have a few shots left i really appreciated how this book didn't just give you a playable mad maxian barbarian class in the form of newmancers but also a deeper dive into the history of the meccans and some of the final plans of jerome cottrell the new manchester tech is pretty distinct in their setting and i came away with a lot more appreciation for the clan itself after reading about their tragic enslavement frankly rough road to emancipation lex talionis lex talionis or the law of retaliation in latin is a scenario that can be played out in probably one session or maybe two depending on your pace it is recommended for experienced characters who have already established themselves in the region of justician and the protectorate generally there is some connective tissue between this scenario and last watch which i discussed earlier as well as another published scenario called harm's way but none of those connections are critical here's the setup half a century ago an anabaptist leader named nuntius restarted an order of elite soldiers called acherons he used ruthless methods to create mentally fortified agents of destruction meant to go head-to-head with the most elite of the ranks of the enemy in jehomadans a man named zeno was one of these acherons and he was tasked with going behind enemy lines and causing as much chaos and death as possible and he was good at it then seven years ago the so-called adriatic wars ended and all the acherons were called back but zeno was too far gone he had taken to drinking the blood of his victims and at one point he drank the nanite infused blood of a johamadon elite an aryanoi the nanites gave him visions and snippets of memories of aries but more than anything it drove him mad his elite pack of warriors 12 fellow anabaptist commandos all followed him as if he were a prophet and they all called themselves the rotten few anabaptist leadership put a massive price on their heads for continuing a reign of terror even after being ordered to stop at the end of the war just the other night the rotten few showed up in the anabaptist district of cross quarter ingestion and caused a huge bar fight judges were able to capture zeno himself but the rest of the gang who now just number six got away you and your party are approached in secret by the judges who are asking you to transport zeno out of justician to a nearby town you are briefed in a dark warehouse in the dead of night and told that the safety of zeno is more important than virtually anything else you're given an armored carriage pulled by six horses and steered by a young judge named d and are told to make the trip to ignatz in 24 hours as far as the setup goes that's about it but it's worth mentioning that a lot of different factions want xeno the anabaptists want him first and foremost as an outlaw who threatens their peace with the jehomidons the judges want him in one piece in order to exchange him and ignaz for another high value prisoner that they've spent years looking for the chroniclers who you are hiding this whole prisoner exchange from want him for information about cathedral city and the war-like elements of the jehomadans want him simply to die for his crimes each of these competing factions come into play and the whole scenario plays out on the road and at the final destination i think like with last watch the scenario presents a challenge to the gm of being incredibly deadly unlike last watch here there is less room for players to out think the prospect of armed conflict but on the whole the tension of the scenario is beautifully crafted because it presents outside threats on your caravan but also the internal one in the form of zeno the prisoner himself this title comes as two booklets or pdfs the first is the eponymous lex talionis which details the introduction npcs and scenario scene by scene the second book is the rotten few which covers the origin of zeno and plenty of details and stat blocks of his gang of six specialized commandos it's hard for me to avoid spoilers here when there is a whole booklet dedicated to detailing these npcs in particular so spoiler alert xeno's gang makes an appearance naturally their entry is quite intense and dangerous exalters exalters is the final publication for the geogenesis role-playing game and in some respects it's the most remarkable and quintessential it details the rise and fall of the city-state of exalt a budding empire that was snuffed out in its tumultuous war 115 years ago after the entire region united in an alliance against it i say it's quite essential to genesis because it tells the tale of a rise and fall of a civilization that used technology it didn't really understand that technology being the instrument of a predetermined outcome that might be a bit vague so let's just jump right in soon after the eschaton european survivors were lost in a haze of ash and fire and eventually started clumping into wandering tribes desperate for survival over just a few generations these people of europe had devolved into grunting emaciated husks one of these tribes with no name stumbled upon a city of stone monoliths the city gave way to a hyper-futuristic underground maze of moving monoliths that tested them as the legend goes they emerged from the tests successfully and were imprinted with the cohesive knowledge needed to build a new world the city they stumbled upon was exalt a creation born of the mind of jerome gotrell who wanted this automated underground construct to reprogram the survivors of the eschaton into something different from what humanity had become in the 21st century instead of individuality his machine complex would imprint or emboss groups of at least four people at a time with one of 22 different sort of personality types called concepts no matter what they were when entering the complex they would emerge as the concept that the machine gave them and be in perfect harmony with the others who entered with them they would be in constellation with each other and would reach ever greater heights of human achievement this machine was called the grind works and it worked the nameless tribe who first stumbled upon the grind works began to revitalize the world around them right away working without hierarchy and completely free of petty individualistic aspirations instead of relying on luck for people to find the exact right work partners to achieve a specific goal such as designing a waterproof fabric or something like that the grind works controlled by an unseen artificial intelligence would simply emboss a group of people who would work perfectly with each other to accomplish that task this whole thing was jerome gotrell's master plan something he called project free spirit but up until this video i've described a different jerome gettrell master plan one involving sleepers waking up at hundred year intervals and using verbal mimetic protocols at a personal level to control everyone in the pursuit of something called project tanhauser as it were project tanhauser was not of gettrel's design and was rather a competing plan created by his board of directors gatrell knew even before the end of the world that sleepers infected with mimetics would awaken and threaten his project free spirit so he did a few things to safeguard against that one he made the grind works off limits to anyone with active nanites in their blood aka sleepers and marauders two he made the grind works essentially neutralize any memetic programming that a person might have been victim to in practice this meant that when the sleepers awoke and tried to destabilize exalt through its own citizens their memetic programming was constantly getting erased by exalters going through the grind works and thus they never made any inroads and three guttrell planted a mole in the ranks of the first sleepers a free spirit named diamond doll diamond doll upon awakening made his way to exalt and became their leader by using a device that suppressed his nanites he was able to enter the grindworks and unlock all kinds of new knowledge ushering the exalters in two a whole new level of advancement and understanding when the 300 year mark came around he was able to save an entire batch of palers from one dispenser and used the grind works to rehabilitate them into what became known as halos exalt flourished in a way that no human civilization ever had there was no leadership structure and yet everyone worked in lockstep almost like a hive mind but as described it was almost rather a hyper-intelligent cordial agreement that the exalters participated in a mutual understanding of everything at all times eventually they began to spread their culture in the region pushback came in the form of anabaptists who had their own mutual understanding in the form of their religion between the agents of project hanhauser and the anabaptists the pushback became somewhat inconvenient for the exaltian empire but not in a serious way but in the early 2300s things suddenly turned on a dime diamond doll awakened two more free spirits like himself inseph and trice but they weren't like him they were angry and consumed with the idea of vengeance against anyone who opposed the kingdom exalt became a petty corrosive force in the region demanding tribute from its neighbors and reversing its advances in peace and stability things in exalt itself got really really bad everyone became addicted to the grind works and the decay of society in the city accelerated it became almost a daily contest for everyone to prove how unattached they were to guilt responsibility or restraint incest became commonplace to the point that the entire population was beset with hereditary diseases and the only thing that mattered was going through the grind works everything else was essentially nihilism if awakening inseph and trice weren't bad enough diamond doll awakened another sleeping agent of project free spirit the one named coltrane coltrane took over exalt completely and launched a full-scale war against all of exalt's neighbors with their advanced tactics and otherworldly technology coltran's forces dominated the battlefield in the so-called city wars it took the combined forces of anabaptists from all over europe the robot am sumo shock troops of norit the inemoy and the spatalians to beat them back and ultimately it was the underhanded spatalian bioweapon attack on exalt's civilian population that beat coltran's forces into a temporary retreat as for coltrane the mother of ravens herself destroyed his mind with a memetic attack that dissolved his campaign of terror and ended the war in the wake of exalt's defeat the survivors scattered across the continent with its largest contingent escaping to liqua nowadays the couple thousand exalters who live in the one surviving enclave based in liquor celebrate their heritage in secret they send expeditions to the ruins of exalt to try and figure out the grind works and become embossed but those hundred mile trips are all the more difficult due to the cockroach clan infestation there and the fact that a scrapper pulled the last power source for the whole operation yet they are still diligently planning some kind of revival of the city one day they arrange themselves into ranks based on whether or not they have ever been or ever will be embossed by the grind works and ironically have resorted to hierarchy and leadership positions despite that going against the exaltian ideal this title comes as two booklets or pdfs the first being what i've just covered and the second called the grindworks which goes into exquisite detail on just what the grind works are like unlike all of the other genesis books published this very final one has almost no full color high detailed illustrations incidentally its descriptions of the grind works invoke some of the strangest and most evocative imagery out of anything i've read into genesis the grind works is what created the kingdom of exalt an underground maze complex that reprograms human minds in groups of four or more so that they work in perfect collaborative harmony with each other it's a vast labyrinth of black stone blocks that form walls floors and ceilings and can move and rearrange into all kinds of configurations hiding rooms large and small except at specific times of the year attempts at drilling or blasting these stones have resulted in the stone just hardening into some kind of unknown polymer if you were to have entered the grind works when everything was powered up and working you would need to stick your arm into a hole at the same time as at least three others at other entrance points to the maze nano filaments would stick into your arm and the main computer would assess your personality type or concept as well as some other factors to determine if you're worthy of injury wall blocks would begin to move around you and you'd find yourself in a vast room lined with the giant rectangular black stones that form every surface but light projected onto these stones would give the impression of you standing in a grassy field with mountains in the background or maybe some strange alien landscape and you would be presented with one kind of deadly challenge or another depending on what the ai thinks your new concept should be the book doesn't exhaustively describe the kinds of tests you would face but rather describes them in more general terms but it does emphasize that the grindworks will try to kill you if it thinks that you have failed the test if you survive then you emerge in constellation with your companions provided they survived too but while you were in there you might also have found one kind of exaltian tech treasure or another strange devices that enhance your abilities or weapons that give you a battlefield advantage after really pondering the two exalters books i'm haunted more than anything the grind works aren't really to blame for the kingdom's downfall but the state of decay that the kingdom sank to makes it seem like maybe the grind works in gettrel's free spirit project are just inherently bad in the hands of humans but that's all philosophical in terms of exalters as a gameplay supplement the diaspora of exalt can be used as one kind of intriguing npc or another and as a playable clan and regardless of if exalters themselves come into play there is the grindworks the template of an epic sci-fi dungeon crawl where you don't battle monsters but the dungeon itself as far as the 22 concepts that the grind works emboss on people they are real elements of the game's mechanics as are constellations that gives the grind works a little bit more significance and brings concepts full circle as not just a game mechanic but an integral element of how human minds work in this fictional setting here is a suggested reading list for the entire degenesis series my six videos did not cover a number of these entries but i did hit upon some of the major touchstones in the game as has been mentioned the pdfs are all free at degenesis.com and depending on when you're watching this some of these books and booklets might still be available in print from their website as well it's interesting because there are really several ways to read an rpg in its supplements you can read them with the express intent to play which means you're scouring the text for relevant mechanics and story details for your table or you can read them critically like i'm usually doing where you're trying to assess various qualities of the book from its playability to its readability and presentation to its overall originality etc or you could just read them for the joy they give as a game you might possibly play or not play in the future just basking in the details of the story being told as the setting is described i can comfortably say that the five long-form books and seven booklets that i've read for this six video series excelled in the extreme in reading mode number three i got to experience a massive onion being peeled layer by layer with each new bombshell revelation more interesting than the last it was a storytelling format that transcended the format of a novel series because it could cover so much ground in such a relatively short number of pages the metaplot stands on its own as a story but it's not a story that will ever be finished at least not by its original creators instead it's up to you if you choose to forge your own conclusion there's so many questions for your table to answer what is going to happen to the protectorate will the vicious clans overrun the capital city and shatter the base of european civilization what is going to happen in cairo will homo gaontas be born ushering in a new kind of human that is neither us nor homodo genesis what about the exalters will they be able to power up the grind works once more and reboot their empire the creators at six more vodka have always said that they would never expand the setting to asia or the americas or anywhere outside of their chosen continental theater but you're at the steering wheel now maybe there were survivors in north america maybe a huge enclave of humans are thriving in eastern china or japan or in new zealand completely untouched by the primer the possibilities are endlessly fascinating but the original foundation the gift that is the genesis setting in metaplot is what makes it all possible thanks to six more vodka for urging me to make these videos it's been a humbling experience to see the caliber of writing artwork and layout on display in these books even though the road map project and the game as a whole ended rather abruptly and in mid-stream the genesis still stands as a legendary body of work that i think immediately goes down in rpg history as a remarkable achievement that's all i've got happy holidays to all of you i'll see you in the new year [Music] you

Channel: Dave Thaumavore RPG Reviews

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Length: 33min 40sec (2020 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021