Life on the Rim (A Rimworld Story) Interest Check!

[GloomCookie]

Life on the Rim (A Rimworld Story)

Alarms were blaring all around, with the ship’s hull groaning and buckling all around them. The survivors were running as hard as they could, getting to the emergency escape pods located near the cryogenic bay. Each jumped in and slammed the button, with automatic restraints coming down to lock them into place before rocketing away from the ship.

Once clear, they could see the long, spindly shape begin to break apart. There was no air in space, so the ship didn’t burn, but it did break apart. There were only a handful of pods, and they seemed to spread out. There was no time to worry about who did and didn’t make it out of the emergency cryo defrost because it was too late to save anyone else.

The tiny pod began to rattle as it encountered the upper atmosphere of the planet below. Flames started small but soon licked all around. The computer had this, it had to have this. Gripping the restraints tightly, each survivor could only wait out the inevitable. Rockets flared to life and began to ease the decent until finally the rattling became much calmer.

With a sudden jolt the pod landed. The restraints retracted and, with nothing more, the pod’s emergency bolts fired. The pod sheared itself to pieces and left twisted metal fragments on the ground all around. There were only a few, and one was an emergency supply pod, containing some emergency rations, tools, and other necessities for survival.

With the star slowly rising up over the horizon, it was soon obvious that whatever had happened had been sudden enough that there was no way to tell how long it would be until help arrived. The survivors came to the same realization almost at the same time. They were going to be here for a very, very long time.

Welcome to the Rim.

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Hi everyone! So this is a fun project I’ve been wanting to do for a while. It’s a slice of life game set in the same universe as Rimworld, where you and the other players work together to create a colony. Sounds fun, yeah?

This is mainly an interest check since I’ll be traveling for the holiday, but ideally if there is enough interest I would post rules and how you would go about building your character. I’ll also generate a map of the region you’ll be landing in and give you guys a chance to figure out what you want to do and how you want to go about it.

So how does it all work you ask? Well, for character creation you’d pick two backstories, one for your childhood and one for your adult life. Those determine your basic stats, such as what you have a knack for and what you’re capable or incapable of. Then you’d pick up to three traits that would further enhance your abilities. It will be up to you to determine if one of those traits is negative but only one. I’ll put all this stuff together when I get back if there’s interest.

Each task is broken up into an hour long segment of time, with the day being 24 hours long for simplicity, and you’ll have to devote around 8 hours for sleep. That isn’t a hard rule, however, because you can choose to forgo sleep to get more work done, but that will end up costing you in the long run as fatigue sets in, until you are forced to sleep after 48 hours. Basically for every 2 hours you remain awake, you need an additional hour of sleep to recover.

So when you post, you’ll be posting what you want to do with your day and when. An example would be that you’re going to spend 3 hours cutting trees, so you cut down 3 trees and haul them back to the camp where they’ll be tossed into storage. The main bulk of your post is you doing the work and describing it and how you relate to your fellow colonists, I just need a short blurb telling me what you’re doing so I can move resources around.

From there, you’ll have to balance the resources of the colony versus your own personal desires and needs. If you cut down trees you’ll have wood in the community stockpile, so then you’ll need to decide if you want to use some of the wood to fabricate some new furniture, build out a new room, etc. BUT also remember that the other colonists will have needs of their own, and how that gets played out is important. You may want a new bed because your current one SUCKS but you also really need a room for John because he’s tired of sleeping in the barracks and Steve snores like a train car.

Also unlike the standard Rimworld I’ll be letting you guys explore a lot of fun options that would otherwise not be on the table in a standard Rimworld game, such as getting to build what amounts to a small town and tricking it out how you want. Suppose you decide to put a small storefront on the stockpile so you can trade easier with passing caravans, or you build a palisade to defend against bandits using upturned logs. Maybe you decide to try your hand at building a small logging camp down by the river to cut wood planks because you don’t want wood log huts anymore or just want to sell planks to passing merchants. The sky is the literal limit.

Now of course, the difficulty is something I’d be open to as well. I can’t give you 100% peaceful all the time of course but I’m also not going to throw endless waves of barbarians at you either. It’s all a calculated risk and it’ll only get worse as your reputation grows. How you handle prisoners of war will do a lot as well, along with going to visit other nearby communities and settlements and how they treat and deal with you.

Yes, this will be an incredibly complex game but most of it will be done on my end using a publically available Google spreadsheet to show everyone’s stats and colony resources, so you can easily keep track of what you have and where it’s at before your post. Each day will have updated stats (depending on the speed of the game) so you can tell what you want to do with what you have.

If you have any questions, comments, concerns, praises, or anything in general you want to talk about, feel free to comment or send me a private DM to ask me questions that you might not feel comfortable asking in public.

Thank you very much for reading and I hope to hear from you guys soon!

[Stendarr]

This sounds kinda interesting (I love Rimworld), but I'm a bit weary of the heavy mechanics that might be involved. I think I would be keener if it seemed more freeform.

[GloomCookie]

This sounds kinda interesting (I love Rimworld), but I'm a bit weary of the heavy mechanics that might be involved. I think I would be keener if it seemed more freeform.

The only heavy mechanics would be on my end. I'll give you an example using blue and purple for a player post and red for what I do in the background.

Stendarr awoke with a yawn at 0600 and stretched, before rolling off the bedroll and getting up. She headed over the partially smoothed floor and out into the hall towards the main dining room, stopping to get one of the prepared simple meals and sit down. Everyone else beginning to rise would get a wave as she happily ate some of the rice with a nice glass of water. There was a lot to do today but an hour of socializing wouldn't hurt. Putting her empty dishes to the side when done, she headed out into the beautiful morning to see the partially built wall going up along the western edge of the colony, and noticed that there still wasn't enough wood. They'd used up a lot of wood building what they had so far, but it just wasn't enough. So, she decided that she would go and chop some trees for about three hours. That would take her to 1000, just enough time to drop off some of the wood for the wall's construction.

The trees were in a small cluster to the south, and it didn't take long for Stendarr to get to them. Someone had left their axe there from yesterday, so she picked it up and began chopping the wood. Each tree would take a bit of time, but that was ok. She enjoyed the birds chirping and the gentle serenity of the place. She'd grown up on an industrial world, and thought for sure they would die out here. But, things don't always turn out bad, and so as her axe bit into the wood of the trees and brought them down, she felt like she was doing her part to make life better, and genuinely felt happy about it. As she dropped off the wood she'd just cut to the construction job, Gloom was using her axe to chop off the limbs and shape the wood to fit in with the rest of the wall.

"Hi Gloom!" she said, dropping the log down and stretching, "Hope things are going ok today. Need a hand?"

Gloom had awoken around 0700, having slept in a bit since she'd stayed out a little late hunting the night before. A damned boomrat had gone scurrying off into the underbrush and made her look like a damned fool chasing it, but there was nothing to be had. She'd opted to grab a bowl of berries instead of a meal because she was in the mood for something sweet and no one had produced any sweet rolls yet. They'd just brought in the harvest of sugarcane two days ago but the grinding wasn't done. After the sweet raspberries had filled her tummy, she had decided to kick off the sweet rolls herself by heading over to the storage barn and grabbing a basket of raw sugarcane and heading for the kitchen.

The kitchen was warm from the heat of the oven, and Gloom felt warmth seep through her being as she set the basket by the grinding stone and began to arrange the stalks. No one else was in the kitchen right now so she had herself to quietly chat with as she began to turn the wooden crank and grind the stalks into yummy yummy sugar. "Oh le fiddly me the ship is coming for thee, best leave your work be, for it is here you will see, that you can come fly with me," she sang to herself as the sugar was revealed. The chronometer said it was 0900 so she grabbed some flour and other ingredients and began to shape it into a gentle coil. Soon enough she had a lovely pair of sweet rolls and set them in the oven to bake. The smell was amazing and it was all she could do not to just gobble one up when they came out. Instead, she carefully carried them to the dining room and set them on the shelf for others to enjoy before heading for the wall to begin working by 1000.

She had just begun working when Stendarr arrived with another log. She paused to give a little wave and a smile, "Hey Stendarr. Thanks for dropping this off, we'll probably get a few more segments of the wall up with this." Her hatchet chopped off another limb and she continued, "Yeah things are going pretty good. I got some sugar ground so we should start getting more sweets out of the kitchen. And I have this segment but if you want to haul some of those boards down the wall I'd appreciate it." There was a stack of lumber lying nearby and it all needed to be hauled to its final destination.

Ok gonna remove 20 sugarcane from the inventory but add 5 sugar and two sweet rolls but take away 20 flour based on the recipe chart. Three trees at 25 wood each gives us 75 to the inventory and each wall segment is going to be 5 wood so that's now 15 wall segments with the resources allocated. Gloom has a construction rating of 8 so roll... she gets a 5 so she succeeds. Update the chart... dun.

So as you can see no rolls on your part or updates, I just come in, update the sheets, and off you go. You're free to do what you want however you want, just using up 1 hour intervals as you do.

[Stendarr]

Hmm, okay. But it seems not entirely conducive to giving characters much face to face time. Although I suppose with a little preplanning you could have characters happen to be around each other enough.

I'll keep my eye on this.

[GloomCookie]

You know, thinking about it, I think I'd just like to dial it back and let the players go more freeform. Basically step in and give direction but otherwise let everyone do their thing. It would be more dynamic and we could create a lot more fun that way.

I would of course create a map of the region and alter it, but I have software for that and it wouldn't be that big a deal. So hopefully the change in direction appeals.

[Voidknight]

I'm curious and don't mind the crunch so much, I'd only ask we not be quite as doomed as the average Rimworld game! Don't mind there being other potentially hostile groups on the world though.

[Budenniy]

Looking forward to getting addicted to luciferium.

[GloomCookie]

Well! I think I've got two peeps who don't mind a little number crunching. I'll see if I can put together a simple system to figure out what you can and can't do, and go from there. It'll be rule light, I swear.

I would love to see at least two more people confirm interest before I build much more though.

[Stendarr]

I'm still keeping a lookout for this one. I could be convinced to hop on.

[Jezabelle]

I know I'm over a week late to this party, but colour me interested.