A story of Grass & Rubble
Grass & Rubble is a lo-fi cosmic horror game about desperate fortune-seekers risking their lives on incursions into the reality-warped Exclusion Zone of the Flicker. Their personal Drives compel them ever deeper into the Zone to complete illegal jobs or recover valuable artifacts. They return to the Belt, just outside the heavily protected border, to recover, carouse, and advance their personal goals.
When I started, I envisioned a post-apocalyptic world but without the gonzo elements—no Mad Max-style wastelands, no mutant powers disguised as fantasy, and no clichéd "everything is bad and also there are zombies." I love the inescapable harshness and uncompromising automatic brutality of this one Black Mirror episode Metalhead (s4e5). I love when the mundane meets the fantastic like in Tales from the Loop (the rpg). I love the melancholy of decay in The Last of Us (game and series). I love the overgrown, the derelict, the archeologisation of every day objects. Especially when they get paired with the incomprehensible like in two of my major touchstones: Roadside Picnic (novel from 1972) and Annihilation (novel from 2024).
There are many games I'm exploring along the way and I'd say that all of them influence my drafts in some way or another: Hearth: The City Beneath by Rowan, Rook and Decard, Trophy: Gold by Jesse Ross, 24XX and QZ by Jason Tocci, Cairn by Yochai Gal, Slugblaster by Mikey Hamm, World of Dungeons and Blades in the Dark by John Harper, Offworlders by Chris P. Wolf and Orbital Blues by SoulMuppet just to name a few.
The game has gone through multiple iterations. It started as what I would now call a FKR-style sandbox outside the walls of AI-controlled megacities, then evolved into a Forged in the Dark hack where players struggled to keep their community alive. Now, it exists somewhere between NSR and story game design, leading groups into a gameplay loop of Zone incursions and downtime struggles.
My goal is to release a playable beta by the end of Q2. I’m not aiming for a polished commercial product. I want to build something I enjoy playing with my group and contribute to the design conversation by writing about it and publishing playable material.