Geodesic Gnomes

“Geodesic Gnomes – Redefining the High Tech Low Life” is an RPG written for the 1km1kt.net 24 hour RPG contest hosted in 2009.

Geodesic Gnomes is a full RPG, with background and setting, character creation and advancement rules, character sheet and even a sample adventure. In the cities of the future, people who find themselves with no place within society because of unemployment, criminal behaviour, or just mental illness find themselves pushed out of the domes that protect them from the hazards of the world around them. And since no one wants to live outside the domes, they move into the one place left for them – into the superstructure of the dome itself.

The game is a cyberpunk-styled RPG where the players take on the roles of the gnomes – the descendents in culture if not genetics of those people who moved into the superstructure of the domes. This is a world that is entirely “off the grid”. They have to scavenge for everything from food to water and in some domes even for air.

Geodesic Gnomes was written as part of the 24 hour RPG challenge. The goal is to design, write and publish an RPG in 24 hours. Further, for this summer’s contest, there are some additional rules and a panel of judges – the game must use one of a selected list of names, and must include an NPC named Keeton. Geodesic Gnomes was developed from May 4th to May 5th of 2009 and the progress was tracked on both my blog and on the 1km1kt.net forums.

You can download the PDFs of Geodesic Gnomes here:

As of July 26th, 2009, you can also download a Printer Friendly version of the game’s contents PDF below. For best results in printing this booklet, set the print dialog in Adobe Acrobat to “Booklet Printing” and set the page range from pages 1-24 (ignoring the OGL on page 25, since you don’t need that to play the game). This results in a nice booklet format that only takes six pages of paper to print out and that you can staple (saddle-stitch) to hold it together. The next thing I’ll have to do is produce a higher quality front and back cover PDF to print on cardstock.