Immanent Domain is a tabletop RPG I’ve had on the backburner for a few years now. The premise (elaborated on in this prior post) is that someone figured out how to build machines that could cast spells, and instead of using this technology to make a post-scarcity utopia, a handful of oligarchs seized control of the world and cast 99% of the population into jobless poverty. You and your comrades are rebels fighting against one of these tyrants, acting as the player characters and game master respectively. Any reasonably modular basic ruleset will suffice – an Oddlike would be a good fit, among others.

The Tyrant

One player is the Tyrant, the despotic ruler of the domain. They are built like other characters, but also get three special abilities (typically immunities or wide-area affects), each granted by a different piece of magitech infrastructure in their domain. Each piece of infrastructure is managed by an overseer, who personally also wields the associated special ability. If a piece of infrastructure is shut down, then both the overseer and the tyrant lose that special ability. While the rebels can in principle face and defeat the tyrant at any time (thus ending the game), this is almost impossible if they haven’t taken out at least one or two pieces of infrastructure first. For each piece of active infrastructure, an atrocity (pollution, overwork, taxation) is inflicted on the populace.

The idea here is an extension of key item campaign structure previously implemented in Protoplastic: a given campaign has a clear set of goals and a definite conclusion signaled from the beginning. Unlike Protoplastic, though, Immanent Domain includes a more strategic layer: the tyrant’s abilities are based on facilities the rebels can target, but in theory the rebels could choose to fight the tyrant from the very beginning. However, choosing to do so would most likely fail. I first encountered this type of structure playing Crackdown (2007), in which you could go after the leader of a criminal organization immediately if you wanted, but taking down their subordinates first would leave them significantly more vulnerable.

Infrastructure

Elixir Vat: Extracts an elixir of vitality from living people that cures all forms of infirmity in seconds. The tyrant heals from any wounds, disease, or poison.

Industrial Athanor: Fabricates vast quantities of gold and other precious materials, but pollutes the land with hazardous alchemical runoff. The tyrant has an effectively unlimited money and can buy anything they don’t already have.

Panopticon: Uses divination to spy on people’s every action and even future deeds to manage an exactingly brutal police state. The tyrant cannot be ambushed, their fortress is impossible to infiltrate unnoticed, and Secrecy is reduced by 1.

Psyradio Tower: Induces mass mind control of the populace to make them compliant to hard labor. Citizens will sacrifice themselves to prevent harm to the tyrant.

Biollurgy Lab: Performs medical experiments on citizens, twisting their flesh into bizarre deformity to satisfy curiosity. The tyrant has an army of modified soldiers at their command.

Monster Factory: Produces chimerae under the control of the tyrant, who then unleashes these genetically modified super-predators upon the populace in order to test them.

Necropolis: Fuses tormented shades into writhing soul clusters and uses them to animate corpsecrafted abominations. The tyrant can return to unlife if defeated, even stronger than before.

Heretic Temple: Forces people to perform blasphemous rituals that condemn their souls to hellish afterlives but empower the tyrant. The tyrant is blessed by the heavens, unnaturally “lucky” in all matters.

Inverted Observatory: Siphons the heavens down to the earth, leading to unpredictable gravity quakes that only the tyrant’s fortress is anchored against. The tyrant is unbound by gravity, able to fly nimbly at will.

Amnesia Vault: Seals away memories “donated” by the populace, generating aetheric energy in proportion to the emotional value they held. Nothing about the tyrant can be known, not even their name.

The Tyrant’s Fortress

Whereas a normal person might perhaps feel less aggrieved about being dying when they are old because they are not losing many years, a tyrant (with their unnaturally prolonged and theoretically infinite lifespan) would lose a potential eternity if they are ever killed, which drives them to take paranoid measures to protect themselves. Thus, they establish assiduously surveilled and imperviously hardened fortresses to reside within, away from the common people they both disdain and fear.  Each tyrant gets one type of fortress.

The fortress functions as the final zone of a given campaign. Treat it as a small (~6 room) dungeon – in fact, treat every piece of infrastructure as a short dungeon, something that can be completed in a single session. You should be able to accomplish a meaningful change of circumstances by the end of each session, don’t waste people’s time with interminable slogs!

Fortress Types

Flying: The fortress floats high in the sky, and can only be reached by flight or climbing the chain that anchors it to the ground.

Aquatic: The fortress sits deep under the water and must be swum to, or swiftly entered when it rises from the waves.

Subterranean: The fortress rests beneath the earth, and can only be entered through sealed cave-gates, unless one can burrow inside.

Orbital: The fortress is in low Earth orbit, and requires a vehicle that can achieve escape velocity, or teleportation to its interior.

Phased: The fortress is hidden in a subtle dimension, invisible most of the time but revealing itself when approached while following certain esoteric rules.

Gigantic: The fortress consists of a tall tower, or sits atop a mountain, requiring you to climb or otherwise surmount the height to gain access.