The best follow up to “Hello World” has got to be talking about the system this game will be built on.

LUMEN is an RPG system that was created and shared by Spencer Campbell of GilaRPGs.

When I first wanted to play The Division as a tabletop role playing game I was just getting into Genesys, which is the narrative dice system toolkit from Fantasy Flight Games (now published by Edge Studios) that’s based on the Star Wars RPG. On paper, I really like Genesys as a system but in practice I’ve found it to be “crunchier” than I’d hoped. It’s still not as crunchy as as some other games though! One of the things that kept me from really getting into Genesys though, was finding Coriolis and other Year Zero games from Free League Publishing.

A couple years go Free League released the Year Zero Engine under OGL, and I’d started piecing together some rules from some of the existing games they’ve made, mostly Mutant Year Zero which is a post-apocalyptic hex crawl game. It’s got some similarities that I thought would make the job easier, and it sort of was I just didn’t give it the time and effort needed.

Skip to last year, 2021, and I discovered LIGHT while looking at the different Destiny TTRPG clones. I was blown away by the simplicity of the system and how it just got the premise of the gameplay without making it crunchy. I still have a campaign of LIGHT planned, but I’ve been so inspired by the LUMEN system that I’ve charged ahead with my Division hack and haven’t looked back.