When I was growing up I had several toys from the Lego line called “Throwbots” in North America, or “Slizers” outside of it1. They were elementally themed robot warriors with bendable arms that could throw little plastic discs as their main gimmick. The discs did a clever trick where they came in seven “levels” of how notionally powerful they were, indicated by different art on the central sticker of each, used to wordlessly convey story elements about who the character was, what they wanted, and what their part of the world was like. The setting was incredibly, charmingly stupid: fantastical gonzo nonsense every step of the way. The fire robot mined volcanoes for diamonds to upgrade his flamethrower, the water robot dove for pearls that split hydrogen and oxygen to fight mutants, and the main villain robot who wanted to rule the world was powered by cosmic background radiation.
Although in retrospect I think I was lucky to have gotten to see a distinctive transitional form, at the time I felt like a bit of a fool for buying into the line, because a couple years later many of the same people that worked on that project came out with Bionicle2, which was essentially Throwbots but better in every way: better models, more thought-out worldbuilding, and a greater variety of mechanical gimmicks. From the beginning, the line was launched not only as a set of toys, but an entire multimedia project, with movies, video games, and an ongoing comic book that came bundled with issues of the official magazine. The Lego company had seen the success of their Star Wars line and craved an intellectual property they didn’t have to license from someone else.
Bionicle told a story about an island inhabited by biomechanical villagers whose deity had been overtaken by a great evil, and now awaited the arrival of destined heroes (in giant canisters shaped exactly like the ones the toys came in) to defeat the encroaching monstrous hordes using the powers of their elemental masks. A dedicated fandom formed around the world of “Biological Chronicle” (or Bonkle, as it was affectionately mispronounced), so passionate as to convince one of the lead writers to continue putting out additional worldbuilding pieces online long after the toys stopped being produced. Even now, sets in good condition remain sought-after collector’s pieces.
So, the question is: for a media franchise with that much cultural impact in the nerdsphere, why has no one yet taken it upon themselves to produce a tabletop RPG to spiritually succeed it? It’s already been done with basically every other notable show, game, and book, someone has to eventually. So I said to myself, I will be that someone – and that TTRPG shall be called
PROTOPLASTIC
Here’s the pitch: islands made of cubic metal rise above the waves of a black oil sea, surface slicked with iridescence. This oil is the titular protoplastic, a living metamaterial that congeals into solid creatures that crawl up onto the steel shores. Depending on the chemical admixture, the plastic takes on different colors and properties. Thus, colorful biomechanical robot people live on land made of stacked bricks, literally made of plastic.
Whereas in Bionicle canisters washed ashore holding prophesied warriors that saved the world, in Protoplastic, the people prayed for heroes, but the heroes never came. The mechanisms of fate were too damaged to properly respond to the decay of the world, so, if the canisters showed up at all, they contained stillborn champions at best, jumbles of unassembled parts. After generations of disappointment, the islanders chose to take their salvation into their own molded hands, salvaging usable parts to modify their bodies and wearing the masks of the absent heroes to mantle the destinies they were meant to fulfill. You play as those normal people struggling to save their homes and families from a cosmic order that has forsaken them.
I’m choosing to lean into the science-fantasy aspects of the source material, making the world a lot more outwardly weird by default. Body parts are grown from plastic starter cultures, farmers harvesting them by snipped arms and legs off of sprues. Divers collect gilded silicon pearls from the ocean floor to act as the brains of newly built bodies. Fate is the cosmic programming, making masks are like user authentication tokens that give permissions to control the artificially generated aspects of nature. Thematically it’s much more transhuman, in which people choose to radically alter their bodies rather than expect divinely appointed beings to hold the way things are in stasis. Aesthetically the environment resembles a broken industrial arcology (similar to something like Blame!), whereas the living creatures have that late 90s/early 2000s look of translucent colored plastic with visible electronics inside, like the early iMacs, or the iconic Atomic Purple Game Boy Color.
One aspect I’m going to tread very lightly with are the cultural elements: Bionicle suffered from complaints by the Māori people about the use of their language, so I’m going to steer clear of directly lifting from any real world cultures and make a (simple) constructed language for the islanders. I have no interest whatsoever in disrespecting anyone or taking what is not mine.
There’s a lot more to cover, but this post is already running long enough, so I’ll get into mechanics with the next one – as a teaser, it’s something similar to a hexcrawl, with a unique dice mechanic that leans hard into input randomness instead of output. I’m excited to make a game that satisfies an unfulfilled desire in the tabletop RPG community, and look forward to bringing that vision to completion.
Footnotes
Featured Image: Bionicle Comic Issue 9 (2002), Page 2
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