Electrocosmic has complex themes meant for mature audiences and is written with them in mind when the game is played. Many of these themes can be added, revised, or omitted as the GM wills.
This is executed in game structure, mechanics, scenario structure, and prosocial strategies. Said mechanics try to encapsulate complex, morally difficulty, or disturbing notions. With that in mind the game is explicitly written to allow players to explore these themes in a safe, sensible, and guided way.
The goal of the game is to encourage interaction and to allow traditionally heady concepts their due within reason. Given their variance and the way different players might engage, these are written with care and sense rather than simply shoveling all the thorny questions onto a GM who already has enough work. In this Electrocosmic provides structure to allow for people to enjoy the essence of tabletop games: interactions with people that allow for interior growth and a generally interesting experience. As such all mechanics are organized around trying to facilitate interaction or slant behavior toward it. To that end the themes are as follows:
Faulted Utopia: The world of Electrocosmic is at the edge of something greater. Technological development has moved in strange ways, but such odd movements have created novel, but familiar, problems. Will these problems go away?
Occult Technology: Technology takes on its own life. After all, what business did humans have compelling a rock to work, to fight, to move? What if it had a mind?
Power: As technical power increase power over the world also increases and power over others also increases. Where does this stop? Does it?
Psychology: The human mind is a great mystery and it carries oceans within it. It is fathomless, and each is as strange as the streets of an ancient city with layers and hidden ways. Can such a thing, even in miniature, be understood?
Terror: The human is capable of imagining the infinite but it cannot containerize it. All humans feel a great disquiet about this gap: how is it to be managed? Can it be?
Transcendence: The world is painful, flawed. To overcome and attain a higher state of being is an eternal goal as the world is difficult, transitory, and uncertain. Electrocosmic is no different, but players are confronted directly with the chance to bend reality.
Violence: The world of Electrocosmic is anxious and the violence is quick. Where it breaks out, it is hideous and of immense scale. At the helm of machines of pure violence, players are unique in their capacities and consequences.
Agency: The world of Electrocosmic is a world of immense bureaucratic systems. One cannot escape them, as they are the world as much as the stones. Or are they? Need they exist?
Hybridity: The flesh is weak, permeable, exposed, vulnerable: it is to be harried, harassed, inflamed, and moulded. Electrocosmic confronts players with the notion that they might cross with something. Become something?
Transgression: Taboos form society and are society. Society is violence. Society is murder, adultery, sex, drugs, cannibalism, and other things. Extremity coaxes them out, reveals what is hidden, and makes visible the true horror of life.
The Uncanny: The boundaries of the human have been drawn and redrawn. Electrocosmic is, in this way, the same: clones, dopplegangers, mirror-images, and simulations bring question to what is "human".
And more!
These themes are a list that might be altered, adjusted, or substituted as the GM desires to curate a game that meets their own personal goal, objective, or interest. Further, rather than trying to meet all the criteria as above ‐ or even exceeding above ‐ said themes might be thought of a buffet of options provided for the GM to execute an interesting experience for their table.
Electrocosmic provides such features in design, mechanics, and tone for all tables.
