Welcome to RFI: Freelancers! This is a supplement for the Genesys game line that lets you use their Narative Dice System in the futuristic and morally gray worlds of the Requiem For Innocence setting. In Freelancers you will play as a Freelancer; a sentient that lives and works out on the fringes of the civilized galaxy. You can play as someone who was born in Freelance space, and this life is all they've ever known. Or you could be a young person setting out to make a name for yourself. Regardless of who you are, you've chosen to live in one of the few wild places left in the galaxy. Your life will be what you (and luck) make of it.
If you're already familiar with Genesys and how supplements work, feel free to skip to [Character creation][]. Otherwise we're going to take a second to explain what this book is and how you can use it. If you're new to either Genesys or roleplaying games in general, read this first.
RFI: Freelancers is a complete setting supplement for the Genesys Core Rulebook. (Think of it like an expansion pack, or DLC.) This setting doesn't reproduce the rules from the core rule book; you will still need that to play. However, it will provide unique character archetypes, skills, talents and even rules to shape the game into something unique from just playing stock Genesys with the generic sci-fi setting.
If you've never played Genesys before, you should know that you will need to use special dice to play this game. You can pick up a pack at your local gaming store or online. You can also grab the Genesys Dice app (for Android or iOS) for free.
Freelancers will serve as the setting for your game. That means all the flavor of the system will be translated to match the RFI Universe setting. Also, the rules in this supplement supercede the Core Rulebook; if there's every any ambiguity, Freelancers wins.
Think of it this way, unlike the core Genesys game, you can't have dragons or mages in Freelancers. Why not? Because those aren't part of the setting; Freelancers is specific in much the same way big name sci-fi franchise have rules about who can and cannot shoot electricity from their finger tips, or what color their laser sword is.
That isn't to say you can't take the pieces you like from Freelancers and combine them with other settings. But at that point you're making your own setting.
We'll go into more details as we get into this supplement, but it's useful to cover some of the basics here. Requiem for Innocence (or RFI for short) is a writing project being worked on by me, Christopher Case. I've been working on this world for over ten years, it's something I've used in my own campaigns, writing projects, etc. I've introduced my friends to this world and they seem to like it, so I've decided to try sharing it with a wider audiance. I call this larger over all setting the RFI Universe.
RFI is closer to "hard" science fiction than most of the current science fiction on TV these days. It's been influenced by more "space opera" type settings, but at it's heart, everything in the setting follows a rule set, and that rule set is as close to scientifically accurate as possible. However, I feel that escapism is also an important component of any work of fiction, so I've made some concessions in places where I feel it makes things more fun and interesting.
For example, take faster than light travel. In RFI, that's accomplished by subspace drives. They work by using gravity fields to wrap space-time around a ship, applying a huge multiplier to their movement. Over the galactic scale they appear to move at several thousand times the speed of light, but local to the space around the ship, they're barely even doing a thousandths the speed of light.
As far as we currently know, subspace drives (also known as warp drives after another popular sci-fi franchise) are, theoretically possible. Nothing I've described violates known laws of phsyics, and more enticingly, if we could bend space-time like that, all of these effects should happen as I've described them. There's just the pesky detail that, right now, we think it would take the sum total of all energy generated by the human race, per second to warp space-time like that. Generating energy on that scale may just never be possible for us humans.
And that is why, in RFI, we have quantum gravity generators. What do they do? They use quantum vacuum energy (a real thing) to generate virtual gravitons (not a real thing) that can do this warping of space time much cheaper. Are they just a deus ex machina to get around a particularly tricky problem surrounding faster than light travel? Yes. Does it make the rest of the setting more fun? Also yes.
That's the fine line the RFI setting walks. We don't have teleporters, force fields, or sentient robots because as we currently understand the universe, those things can't exist. But we bend the rules in places to make the setting more fun. So we're not a "hard" science fiction setting, but more a "medium to firm" science fiction setting.
The elephant in the room when talking about realism in the RFI Universe is the existence of what might be colloquially called 'magic' or 'super powers'. We'll go into this in much more details in the chapter on Focus, but the basics are this: In RFI, the most fundamental force of nature (think strong and weak nuclear force kind of 'fundamental') is willpower. A rock exists because it has the will to exist. Is it sentient? No. But all matter and energy in the universe has some amount of willpower in it. Or, to put a very fine point on it, just like a photon can be said to have some 'energy' in it by it's very definition, so too can it be said to have some 'something' in it that we will be calling 'willpower', though it's not quite the same willpower most humans mean when using the word.
Confused? Perfect. Let me bottom line this for you. The universe runs off willpower, and there are individuals who can manipulate that will power. These individuals can perform feats that, on the surface, appear super natural or magical in nature. They are not, and in fact must obey the current laws of physics in the universe (including that whole pesky 'matter cannot be created nor destroyed, simply changed').
This single element, while not likely to come up often in Freelancers is the concession that lends the RFI Universe more of a "space opera" feel than "hard" science fiction.
That's simple. Freelancers is a very specific collection of elements from the RFI Universe as a whole. It focuses on Freelance space, and on the more exciting lives of the people at the edge of society. It could be said to take place in the RFI Universe, but this setting is not just a generic RFI setting. Other supplements could be written, say, dealing with the war. Their theme would be focused on military service, sweeping space battles, and more on the interpersonal relationships among military people. Can you play a military officer in Freelancers? Sure, as long as you have a reason for them to be in the Freelance Territories, away from their ship.
If you're looking to tell a story more in the general RFI Universe, you can use Freelancers as a guide, but that is not it's main focus. It's very single-mindedly designed for people who want to play space pirates, smugglers, mercenaries, etc.
Totally! It's your campaign, you should have fun with it. Freelancers is a bit single-minded, but if there's things you like from it, feel free to mix and match those with your own ideas. If you're looking for a solid "hard" science fiction base to build epic space battles on top of, Freelancers can definitely help with that. In fact, the rules Freelancers has for capital ship space combat can be easily applied to other settings where such things are needed.
TBD.
TBD.
TBD.