Yup, that’s where they got the name

Thanks!

It was written in a NeurodivergentOS environment so it should run natively there. Your mileage might vary on other distros but we’ve dedicated a lot of time to various cross-system compatibility features (and fortunately only the GM has to run the full version to get it started). Wine etc is always recommended.

That’s good to know! Yeah they might have walked it back but it’ll get worse - it’s the inevitable trajectory of corporate social media

Not yet - we’ve been looking at discord alternatives for awhile but haven’t settled on one. I’m happy to take recommendations, I think we set up test servers on Matrix and Stoat but weren’t amazed enough by either to commit to moving everyone over. I need to try the new Movim rooms feature and see if they’re a better candidate too.

We do have a lemmy community over at https://slrpnk.net/c/fullyautomatedrpg

The twine game/gamebook won’t be ready for a while (probably another year or two considering how long this version took me to make) but it’ll be free when it’s finished. This campaign can be downloaded from the following places:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/584013/fully-automated-buried-treasure

https://fully-automated-rpg.itch.io/fully-automated-buried-treasure

Or if you don’t like sites where you need an account you can also get it here:

https://fullyautomatedrpg.com/resources/

And here: https://mega.nz/folder/HUEA3TyB#jB2zQnczETliHMKGIDeSyw

If you ever decide you want to get into tabletop gaming, the Fully Automated folks have a discord where they sometimes run games (it’s also just a really nice community):

https://discord.gg/2FtTfGGDJr

If not, then the single player gamebook version might be a better fit, once it’s done (sorry I don’t have a timeline on that, I’ve never written one before).

Hi! Thanks for taking an interest in the campaign! Tiresia is right, it’s a tabletop game, sort of a solarpunk equivalent to dungeons and dragons or cyberpunk 2020, though with hopefully less fighting!

You could play around a table with a group of friends or I ran most of my games online, through discord. The big zip folder of files is sort of intended to make it easy to drop maps, location and character art into the chat.

I am working on a gamebook / twine game version but that’s a ways out at this point

I don’t think I can overstate how excited I am to finally share this thing. It’s by far the largest solarpunk project I’ve finished - in fact it’s the largest fiction project I’ve completed at all. At 300 pages it’s longer than the game system’s actual rulebook, and between the text, location and character art, maps, and paper evidence, it’s pretty dang elaborate! In many ways, it represents a sort of amalgamation of all my rural solarpunk projects so far. If you like my postcard series, then playing this campaign should be the closest thing to stepping into that setting.

Personally, I also think it’s a pretty solid introduction to solarpunk. My second player group were entirely friends from other parts of my life, none of whom were familiar with the genre beyond intuiting that it was similar to steam- and cyberpunk. Their investigation and the twists and turns of the mystery they were uncovering certainly kept their attention, but throughout the dozen two-hour game sessions, it was the chance to explore a grounded, optimistic future which seemed to really delight them. I ended up getting to share far more of my worldbuilding than I’d expected to just because they wanted to see more of the world, and the hopeful setting and the way it was influencing their real-life worldview came up several times when we talked about their experience.

It may be obvious from my other projects that worldbuilding is my favorite part of writing, and the TTRPG campaign format has allowed for an admittedly rather absurd amount of world - certainly more than I could have fit in a novel. After all, the players will determine which bits of the setting they’ll engage with and dig into. That fact, combined with my preference for being able to play the part of a knowlegable character accurately, led to a lot of research and a lot of notes on everything from crop rotation to phytoremdiation.

The campaign provides dozens of locations to explore, from isolated homesteads and farms to deconstruction sites, rewilding/forestry camps, environmental restoration projects, and a modern agricultural village and food forest made from an abandoned development of McMansions around a golf course. You’ll also find thirty-plus named NPCs with backstories and character art, maps with toggle-able layers for each discovery, evidence files, and location art.

It’s also a sort of manifesto on solarpunk in rural New England: on the recent history of the region; how it looked and worked in the past; the changes which have shaped it into the sprawling, car-dependent, habitat-fragmented place it is today; and some of the ways it might change (good and bad) in a more solarpunk world.

One of my main goals was to explore various ways rural solarpunk could look, including questions of what makes for a genuinely sustainable community, what sort of tradeoffs and sacrifices a degrowth-based rural community may need to accept, and how towns and industries might look if they were to accept that they live in a world without limitless resources. It collects a lot of my thoughts on how the exurban “bedroom communities” I grew up in would change in a world where endless growth and a total reliance on cars are no longer the societal default. It examines various lifestyles and technologies that make sense in that context, as well as the kinds of people the area might attract. Along the way, it explores some of the aspects of life where people can independently arrive at solarpunk practices out of necessity or goals like individualist self-sufficiency.

In contrast to some of Fully Automated’s Los Angeles setting, the campaign generally aims for a lower-tech, slightly more grounded look at rural areas.

It’s also got some heavy environmental themes around conservation of wild land and watersheds: The primary setting is actively being deconstructed and rewilded, essentially being turned into a large natural park. The players can visit deconstruction sites, an unlined town dump in mid-excavation, a once-badly-damaged rewilding zone, phytoremediation sites (including one where they’re rebuilding a wetland contaminated by cheap fill), beaver dam analogs on rivers, an enclave of fuel-engine mechanics, former sandpits, and more. Watersheds play a fairly large role in the story - the main map aims to show how old world borders split watersheds so they couldn’t be managed effectively, treating rivers as boundaries rather than as shared resources. The town itself is divided into three watersheds which merge downstream. Only one has been poisoned, which can help the players isolate the source, but if they fail to find it, the poison will eventually follow the rivers as far as they go and contaminate everything downstream.

I’m very glad to have made this thing, and I really hope you’ll check it out! And if you like it and would like to support us, please share it around! Email it to your friends, upload it to a file share site, leave it somewhere on a USB drive, whatever works for you!

I’m working on an interposed, bookbinding-ready version for anyone who wants a hardcopy version, but I need to make it myself before I’ll know how tall the book block will be, and thus how thick to make the spine in the cover file. I also need to make a rear cover as my original plan had a different front (which never got finished) and would have used the current one as the back.

I’ve got a few other projects lined up to start once this thing is officially launched. I’m actually working on a gamebook version but, to my surprise, it’s already becoming a distinct project, sharing a setting, some characters, and the broad strokes of the mystery and some of the plots from the campaigns but adding new characters and events. I’m interested to see how far it’ll diverge from the campaign. Some of the changes I can spot from here - more built-out scenes, fewer charts and blunt chunks of worldbuilding - but a lot of the shifts are subtler and come from thinking about this place and events in a different context. I really hope it works out.

I’m also excited to get back to smaller-scale projects like the postcards, some bookbinding work, and some tech restoration.

If it takes off, it also represents a bit of demand destruction right? If this version works well and more efficiently companies might switch over when diesel is expensive and not switch back if it gets cheap.

Oof.

I probably should take up some kind of 3d modeling program at some point, instead of manually fitting textures, cut up photos, and screenshots of 3d models onto a sketch. It probably won’t be gmod though

I’ll admit I was picturing the closer track as a rail siding left over from when freight trains would stop to unload here but that certainly isn’t shown. And it’d still be in service with modern trams, I just don’t know how often they’d stop (never decided if this is a passenger stop, but there’s honestly no reason it shouldn’t be)

I’ve managed to pack an absurd amounts of stuff into a sedan over the years (it often looks like the photos of your truck, jammed floor to ceiling) but there have been times when I really wished for an open bed for bulky items. This thing has more cargo space than my four-door and looks smaller overall which is a huge plus in city driving (even my sedan feels too big a lot of the time). Plus it’s cheap to buy, cheap to operate, probably cheap to insure because of its low speed. If they are frequently hauling cargo but less than you are, and need to drive and park in tight roads in the city (where it’s intended to be used) it seems like a better fit than a car (from someone who uses a car).

It’d be nice if there was another way to learn about other countries

You have to open negotiations with a strong position you can afford to negotiate down from

This is a great addition and I’ll find some way to include it! I think it’s important for the wiki to call out accessability topics wherever they fit. Also if you’d be interested in putting together any standalone topics (such as accessable urban layout) which you’d like to see writers include, I’d be happy to help!

A while back I started a discussion on the anarchist community looking for some similar discussion - some of the answers there might be useful:

https://slrpnk.net/post/35979981

This is exactly the sort of stuff I’m looking for, thank you! I think when these systems are coupled with lower expectations they can be way more efficient than the infrastructure defaults - that’s something I might have to work into the definition if I can back it up