Daikaiju DIE! (PDF)

Daikaiju DIE!

The world is ending.

Not all at once, which would at least be efficient, but through rising seas, collapsing ecosystems, political fragmentation, mass migration, resource wars and gigantic monsters emerging to stamp humanity’s remaining cities into the mud.

Fortunately, humanity has built gigantic robots.

Daikaiju DIE! is a FATE-powered roleplaying game of kaiju, colossal war machines and the people expected to keep them functioning while civilisation buckles around them.

Players take the roles of Ridder pilots and their support crews: engineers, scientists, scouts, analysts and other specialists involved in humanity’s increasingly desperate war against monsters large enough to treat conventional armies as a light snack.

There are conspiracies to uncover, rivalries to pursue, political interests to navigate and a changing world to defend.

Mostly, however, there are enormous monsters which need punching.

The World Fights Back

It is approximately 2100, and the crises of the previous century have redrawn the political map.

Old nations have merged into vast economic and military blocs. Independent states survive through compromise, opportunism or bloody-mindedness. A stronger, increasingly militarised United Nations attempts to coordinate the defence of humanity while every major power struggles to protect its own territory, prestige and supply of gigantic mechanical toys.

Then there are the kaiju.

Some appear to be products of mutation and environmental collapse. Others suggest deliberate creation, alien interference or stranger forces at work. Whatever their origin, they arrive as natural disaster, living weapon and ecological revenge rolled into one extremely tall package.

Humanity’s answer is the Ridder: a humanoid fighting machine on the scale of a supercarrier, linked neurally to one or more pilots and equipped with enough weaponry to make subtlety largely academic.

Pilots and Crew

Daikaiju battles may be the spectacular centrepiece, but the pilots are not expected to save the world alone.

Scientists investigate new organisms and weaknesses. Engineers repair battered Ridders and develop countermeasures. Analysts anticipate attacks. Scouts and soldiers contend with human-scale dangers, terrorists, cultists, conspirators and all the ordinary people who regard an extinction-level crisis as an excellent business opportunity.

FATE’s Aspects and actions allow support characters to shape the battlefield, create advantages and keep the machine operating rather than sitting politely in the control room until the important people return.

Relationships between pilots also matter. Ridders use neural interfaces, and the emotional compatibility of a multi-pilot crew can affect how well the machine responds.

Two people who trust one another may fight as one.

Two bitter rivals can still pilot the same Ridder, but the results may become expensive.

Build Your Own Ridders and Kaiju

The game provides rules for constructing both sides of the colossal arms race.

Create a Ridder from its central concept, flaws, advantages, armour, skills, weapons and specialised stunts. It might be a ponderous armoured brute, a dangerously unstable prototype, an agile close-combat machine or an elegant technological miracle held together by software patches and the prayers of exhausted engineers.

Kaiju are similarly built around strong concepts, signature attacks, weaknesses, behaviour and scale. They can be simple forces of destruction, specialised anti-Ridder predators, scouts, living weapons or parts of a larger and more sinister plan.

Scale rules cover the interaction between people, vehicles, tanks, aircraft, Ridders and creatures the size of aircraft carriers.

A person firing a handgun at a kaiju is permitted.

The rules merely decline to pretend this is a sensible decision.

The Arms Race

Yesterday’s wonder weapon is tomorrow’s obsolete pile of scorched metal.

Kaiju evolve, adapt or are redesigned to defeat humanity’s defences. Ridders accumulate damage, expose tactical weaknesses and require continual repair and improvement. Between battles, technical crews must modify their machines, restore lost capabilities and develop new answers to whatever horror crawled out of the ocean last Tuesday.

This creates an ongoing contest rather than a succession of disconnected monster fights. The opposition learns. Technology changes. Every victory reveals something that the next enemy may exploit.

Humanity cannot simply build one very large robot and declare the problem solved.

Inside

• A near-future world transformed by environmental and political collapse

• Major economic blocs and surviving independent powers

• The rise of the kaiju and humanity’s response

• Rules for scale, collateral destruction and colossal combat

• Construction systems for kaiju and Ridders

• Neural interfaces and relationships between multiple pilots

• Roles for engineers, scientists, analysts and other support characters

• Rules for the continuing arms race between machines and monsters

• Antagonists, technology and campaign threats

• Adventure seeds

• A complete sample adventure

• Sufficient destructive machinery to make urban insurance functionally meaningless

Requirements

Daikaiju DIE! is not a standalone roleplaying system.

It contains the setting and additional rules required for giant-monster and mecha campaigns, but you will also need the full Fate Core System rules.

It is designed for Fate Core rather than Fate Accelerated.

Format

Digital PDF download.

• Approximately 61 pages

• English language

• Originally published in 2016

This listing is for the electronic edition. No physical book, giant robot or emergency reconstruction grant will be posted.

Print Edition

A separate printed edition is also available:

Buy Daikaiju DIE! in print

Credits

Designed, written and edited by: James “Grim” Desborough
Published by: Postmortem Studios