All players other than the tyrant are rebels, who collectively form a cell of the revolutionary movement. Each rebel possesses a “reason” and an occupation. Their reason is why they risk their lives to fight the tyrant, restoring their hit points whenever they suffer a significant setback in direct pursuit of that goal. A rebel’s occupation, on the other hand, gives them a handful of per-session declarations they can make based on their skills and connections.

Reasons

Vengeance: To avenge a loved one’s suffering at the hands of the tyrant

Wealth: To loot the overlord’s fortress and spread the wealth around.

Retribution: To repay the tyrant’s betrayal.

Justice: To punish the tyrant’s wickedness.

Prevention: To stop the tyrant’s master plan.

Destruction: To get the excuse to fight and break things.

Promise: To fulfill an oath you took to someone.

Ascension: To become the new tyrant yourself.

Occupation

Hacker: Declare you were carrying a one-use magitech device of your choice, or declare that you sabotaged a machine earlier: it immediately breaks or goes down.

Punk: Instantly escape a situation (taking a few people with you) or start a spontaneous riot when in a public place.

Survivalist: Declare that you are carrying a weapon or piece of survival equipment, or declare that you have a safehouse or equipment cache nearby.

Criminal: Leave the area and appear someone else, hidden but right next to someone or something, or set up an underworld meeting to fence goods, hire for a job, or make a business proposal.

Dilettante: Get into a fancy venue or a high class event with your name alone, or, declare you have something expensive back at your home.

Politician: Get yourself or someone else out of a criminal charge scot-free, or get someone to believe even a ridiculous lie, if only briefly.

Academic: Answer any question as long as you are in a library, or communicate in an unbreakable code only comprehensible to your comrades.

Worker: Ignore an exhaustion or injury condition you would take, or perform a near-superhuman feat of physical labor.

Merchant: Back out of a deal, not upholding your end of it but getting what you wanted from the other person, or produce a large sum of money, enough for a down payment or a bribe.

Soldier: Kill someone, right here and now (everyone sees that you did it), or prevent a single target from taking damage.

Artist: Embed a social action into a piece of art (anyone who observes it is affected by the action), or put on a performance that sways anyone in the vicinity to your side.

Physician: Revive the recently dead, or give someone a treatment that temporarily enhances their abilities.

Spy: Leave the scene, and any time afterward declare you were secretly a minor person nearby, or reveal that you planted a bomb earlier.

The Movement

Your cell is one component of the wider revolutionary movement. In each session, you play out a revolutionary action, typically infiltrating and destroying a piece of the tyrant’s infrastructure. At the end of each mission, a downtime phase passes, in which the tyrant and the revolution both get to take broader-scale actions. Your revolutionary organization is rated according to three numerical ratings (Popularity, Secrecy, and Funds), along with a set of resources (surpluses and deficits).

Popularity

Public support for the revolution. High popularity gets the populace to passive-aggressively resist the authorities by work slowdowns, refusing to inform on underground activities, and surreptitiously supplying resources to the cause. Check Popularity whenever the cell meets someone not already part of the government or the resistance.

Full Success: They are supportive of the movement and offer assistance.

Mixed Success: They either aren’t sure if they trust the revolutionary organization, or are too afraid of reprisal to do anything but ignore you.

Failure: They oppose what you’re doing, and may report you to the authorities.

Secrecy

How well your movement has managed to avoid scrutiny from the authorities. Poor operational security during missions can reduce it, while destroying records and silencing witnesses can increase it. Check this once at the beginning of each downtime, before taking actions.

Full Success: Your organization stays safe and out of trouble.

Mixed Success: The authorities are getting suspicious. Roll for a random downtime event.

Failure: The authorities stage a crackdown on your movement. The Tyrant may choose to remove a Surplus or add a Deficit to the movement.

Funds

The money and other assets your movement has at its disposal. You can permanently reduce your Funds to buy upgrades during downtime. You can also roll a check to make purchases while planning for or executing a mission.

Full Success: You make the purchase without a problem.

Mixed Success: You make the purchase, but it costs you – the next time you roll, treat this outcome as a failure.

Failure: You do not have enough money available to make the purchase.

Resources

In addition to the three primary ratings, your movement possesses a variety of more specific resources. By default, it is assumed that you have a reasonable supply of any given resource, and do need to mention it. However, if you are in a great need of something you lack, or possess an unusually large supply of it, then you are said to have a Deficit or Surplus of that resource. If you would gain a Surplus of a resource you currently have a Deficit in, it cancels out the Deficit, and vice versa.

Whenever you make a check with one of your movement’s attributes, you get advantage on it if you have a relevant Surplus that could help, and disadvantage if you have a relevant Deficit that would hinder you.

People: The size of your organization in terms of membership.

Morale: How much tenacity your members have left to fight.

Weapons: How well-supplied your movement is with arms and armor.

Organization: How much discipline and efficiency your operations have.

Money: How well-funded your movement is.

Territory: How much of the domain your network has access to.

Information: How effective your spy network is at keeping you informed.

Integrity: Whether your methods are coherent with your stated ethics. If you defeat the tyrant while your integrity is in deficit, your new government succumbs to in-fighting and corruption.

Solidarity: How strong of an alliance (or intensity of an enmity) you have with another faction. Unlike other resources, you can have multiple instances of Solidarity, one for each faction you have a relationship with.

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.