SIGMATA: An Anti-Fascist tabletop RPG

I was skeptical at first but it actually seems more well-thought-out than what you could expect in the current political climate.

The kickstarter text actually makes it look kind of cool.

The resistance seems to be much more than just the leftists against an oppressive government.

>The Resistance is bolstered by an unlikely alliance of radical Leftists, right wing militias, Christian extremists, and wealthy entrepreneurs....

Also the retro-future 1986 sounds like a neat idea, could be cool.

No idea how the actual mechanics will actually work in play, most likely i won't back it, but I'll take a look when/if it comes out.

That poster is pretty good pseudo-fascist stuff, but most of the art design they show off on the kickstarter is really mediocre. Sure, update your fascists to look time period appropriate, but don't turn them into the blandest flavor of masked cyberpunk thug available. The fascist aesthetic is half the draw.
I mean in the grand scheme of things this is a trpg, so the art design is pretty irrelevant, but it really isn't making me interested in the project.
Aside from that basically what said.

I think it looks surprisingly cool, though whether or not it's going to be fun to play is another thing entirely.

Could be good for a modempunk setting.

So it's 1980s Wolfenstein The New Order?

I can get behind that.

Yeah i'm unreasonably intrigued with the 1986 retro-future as a setting.

Looks pretty great desu. I liked Cryptomancer, so the guy's clearly got design chops.

No.
I hate the art. I hate comics in general.
I find superheroe themes to be the most boring and childish thing ever.
I hate having political agendas of whatever group inserted in my hobbies. I play both rebels and fascists, and i want settings with power struggle.
I want imagination and creation, i dont like rehash of reality.
Its a crowd funding, so strong chance of scam or fail.
Overall, it seems to be the worst game i could think of.

>supermen fighting the nazis
>even though the nazis thought that they were the supermen

Also
>it's the 80s and there are explicitly few computers, low tech
>but the characters are cyborgs

Everything else about the kickstarter was also dumb

>soviets and immigrants
>not bad

Yeah,and the magical signal towers are entirely normal.
This isn't meant to be realistic.
Regardless,it does look interesting but high chance of them fucking it up and making it as SJW as possible.

>Its a crowd funding, so strong chance of scam or fail.
Honestly I can't think of many tabletop RPG kickstarters that haven't delivered. It's a pretty good funding model for this kinda niche product.

It does not look interesting

Chances of scenarios where you oppose oppressive communist or socialist regimes like the Khmer Rouge or the GDR?

The bit where they acknowledge that people on the right can be libertarian as well gives me hope for this system. I would have preferred not having them be cyborgs though, I don't like the visual design they went with for those.

Depends on the GM I suppose. You could put anything you want in for the Authoritarian state if you are the one running the game.

The setting could have been interesting if the devs didn't go out of their way to insert their political agenda into it. It's not even a general idea like whateverpunk's "fight against The Man" or "technology vs humanity". It's straight up "right-wing bad". With a side-dish of "empowering women and minorities so they can beat up the straight white male", judging by the art.

A real shame.

Entirely subjective.
Then again
But the interest outweighs the disinterest.

Yeah i specifically highlighted that bit because it would have been so easy to just make it liberals and the left against everyone that is even slightly right of center, which implies the author is willing to take a broader look at various groups opposing the Regime.

Now can the game still be utter shit? Of course it can, but it might be alright, or at least have some salvageable ideas to be used in some homebrew.

You know, this is something I've always wondered about. What *is* it with the whole idea of guerillas fighting an army and winning?

I mean, pound-for-pound, your average soldier is better armed, equipped and motivated than your partisan. It's like Wolfenstein, where all the Nazis are armored to the teeth and clearly using steroids and BJ tears through them like they're a joke.

Shouldn't it actually be more like, you know, Jin-Roh? There, the scary soldiers in armor ended up...being completely invincible in armor. The few fights against guerillas end with incredible brutality and with massive casualties on the side of the guerillas.

Oh God, this is basically peak SJW, isn't it? I'm sort of at the point where I'm beginning to wonder - just for a change - what it'd be like to be the Man, hunting down the rebels. I think only the Technocracy games in Mage are focused on that.

Aren't we sort of at the age where fighting the power is passe? I mean, WE'RE the Empire.

>What *is* it with the whole idea of guerillas fighting an army and winning?

It's the underdog story, triumphing against all odds.It's just one powerfantasy among many.

Well in this setting, the resistance fighters are übermensch.

That bit gave me hope too. Hope that it may not be pure SJW wank. Then I read the stretch goals.

Because it's not as interesting when you just slaughter your entire opposition.

> youtube.com/watch?v=Q8_4m13MnNo

>But the interest outweighs the disinterest.
>24 posters
>33 posts

So when do the Nazis hack the broadcast, and deploy entire armies of supermen?

"Only in the tales that humans tell, do the hunters kill the wolves at the end."

Nazis can't hack, silly. It's a low tech setting, which is why the resistance has access to super advanced cyborg tech.

Well,SJWs are basically the opposite of fascists in a retarded form and this game is all about fighting fascists.

>The first six stretch goals will fund alternate-setting campaign modules for SIGMATA, all based on or inspired by actual people movements throughout history, and written by both up-and-coming and established game designers alike. Each PDF will feature a cover illustrated by Ario.

>all based on or inspired by actual people movements throughout history

There is also apparently that.

That's the most joyless ending to a show I've ever seen. What's wrong with Japs?

>You know, this is something I've always wondered about. What *is* it with the whole idea of guerillas fighting an army and winning?

It happens often enough IRL. Heck, even in Chechnya, the Russians eventually decided to just throw their cash at one of the local resistance commanders while telling him that they'd keep on doing it if he kept the place under lock and stock.

It's what happens when you try to fight someone with bigger guns and power armor.

I'm sure some of those are just the same people saying things twice but there are also replies to other people.

But either way,are we gonna argue about wetherthere are more interested in it thatn not or the opposite?
Like I said.Entirely subjective.If you don't like it then don't like it.If you do like it then like it.

At this point just stop it, no one wants to buy your shitty game

The setting is basically a future where the fascist have won, so the various paramilitary police and paramilitary secret service branches are shooting and backstabbing each other up over issues of jurisdiction and budget allocation.

Can we play AS the Authoritarian state? Like, deep-cover agents who infiltrate Resistance movements, then bust out the superpowers when it's go time?

shill

Asians in general tend to be more pragmatic when it comes to putting down revolts. The Japs, Koreans, Taiwanese and Chinese all utterly crushed any uprisings.

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I'm not even gonna support this shit.I just said it looked interesting and that everyone's opinion is their own.I then used logic.I know i'm not gonna get anywhere responding to you but i'm still doing it.

Not eve a /pol/, but those stretch goals at least read like straight up someone's tumblr fapfic:

>An alternate setting module about resistance and self-determination in the violent, male-dominated culture of the world's largest democracy. As women from various age-groups go missing, die without ceremony, or fade into the background of society, a new resistance has formed, demanding autonomy for women and threatening to topple a cultural regime of abuse and murder built on centuries of misogynic programming.

Hell, if we're indeed going to play a makebelieve fantasy game, as a straight white male, I think I'd rather play as a supersoldier of the Aesthetic Nazi Regime than some Indian queer femme fighting the evil patriarchy.

But hey, if this finds an audience, good for them. There's room for all kinds of games.

>1488
OP is a Nazi. This is fate.

archive.fo/0Tu0D
Nice dubs OP, but you forgot to put the archive link instead of the actual link.
It's already politicized, it was set out to be from conception. It's a game marketed to antifa/commies, presumably because they thought it was a big market to tap into after their successful overthrow of drumpf on nov 4th.
Everyone imagines themself as the white-gloved morally pure ubermensch shooting their subhuman enemies in FPS games where you play as "good guys." Yes, even world war 2 games. They think of themselves as the righteous ubermensch and the germans as the morally degenerate subhumans. Everyone who opposes the protagonist is the subhuman, and the protagonist is unquestionably in the right. It's a rare game indeed that does not promote protagonsit-based morality, but those that do are among the best.

I've been playing a bit of Iron Grip: Warlord (dieselpunk Tower Defense Quake 3) recently...

The goal of Le Resistance in that was to draw out combat against the military forces to force the kingdom to bomb their own people (ruining their rep). Game mechanic was that if you kill civs, you were penalized (bad PR) and if you got the military to kill civs you were rewarded (good PR).

I want to ask the creator if there is the option of playing as a resistant movement within the Evil Government, in the vein of Von Stauffenberg or The White Roses. Whether internal reform is viable or if violent chaotic upheaval through revolution is the only "viable" solution. But something tells me the Bad Guy Faction lack any semblance of nuance or narrative sympathetic capacity, so no room for actually human or relatable Bad Guys.

Not the creator obviously, but even if there would be no official support for internal resistance, no one (except i guess the GM) can stop you from making such a character,if that's what you want to play, then play that.

>their successful overthrow of drumpf on nov 4th.
Kek'd pretty hard at that one.

I dunno, I think that this game is "pretty problematic and tone-deaf given the current political climate, and we should twitter with our allies to pressure kickstarter to make sure this kind of unsafe, offensive game has no place in our society."

But then it's just calvinball. It's more the question for the creator if someone who happens to be in a particular organization must be categorically evil, or if they can have their own noble narrative. Really, are the masks being worn by humans or strawmen?

You see? That's good shit. It explores the morality of fighting a war, it makes you question yourself at times wondering if what you're doing is right or if it's really worth what you're doing to attain your goals. Any GM can make an exploration of morality like this I suppose, but it's one thing when a GM decides that you're going to be the hero of a campaign, and entirely another when the RPG itself says you're a hero who can do no wrong. It actively removes any discussion about morality and the real ramifications and consequences of what you're doing and just gives you a gun and some people to shoot.
Hey, now there's an idea. You're fighting the axis-aligned America from The Man In The High Castle, but you're being funded by war profiteers who hope to cause as much death and destruction as possible to America so they can profit immensely from it and hold sway over whatever new nation they puppet from the ashes. That's an interesting exploration of right and wrong. But this RPG is just so much sjw schlicking themselves to the thought of white men dying.

>Why are people uninterested in playing a game where they face an army of invincible enemies that they can't possibly hope to triumph against?
Gee user, that's a real stumper.

>But then it's just calvinball.
Well kind of but not really, i mean you can bend the setting information to allow such characters that still function within the mechanical rules of the game - i wouldn't classify that as calvinball, considering i personally do that same bending and twisting the various rpgs all the time.

It's totally possibly the creator intends to use the Regime as strawmen evil guys, that's author intention, but nothing really forces you to take everything as word of god.

I think this is just different approaches to rpgs, since I never really use all of the setting information exactly as presented with any game I run, but i totally get it that some people do.

>But either way,are we gonna argue about wetherthere are more interested in it thatn not or the opposite?

Yes, that's what most people on Veeky Forums these days want to do, sadly. Piss on each other's faces and cackle.

Very fair. I'm just leery of that author intent with this project.

My opinion in this case is less important than Veeky Forums's global rules. Specifically the ones prohibiting advertising. Buy a self serve ad or fuck off.

>advertising self serve ads
Are you aware that is a bannable offence.

By the fact that this thread is auto saging, I think the mods are aware.

>Cyberpunk about playing freedom fighters
Cool
>1980s FM Radio is the source of your powers and integral to the setting
I don't get it. Also it says its set in the 80s but all the designs scream early 2000s scifi/superhero comic books.