Fully Automated RPG

Text pulled from my blog post here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2025/01/06/buried-treasure/

The blog’s been quiet for a few weeks while I’ve been working on another project, so I thought I’d go ahead and write about that a little.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’m also a dev for the Solarpunk TTRPG Fully Automated!, but I don’t think I’ve said so here. It’s an open-source, free (libre and gratis) project intended to be something like a solarpunk scifi version of Dungeons and Dragons (in that it has a robust ruleset and lore you can use or discard as you like while writing your own campaign). I joined like a year ago because I was looking for somewhere to talk solarpunk worldbuilding, and was drawn in by their lore and the sheer ambitious scope of their setting.

I think my understanding of solarpunk and my dreams for the future improved significantly just reading through their guide on how their world works. I think it’s by far the easiest-to-understand depiction of the end-state goal of various leftist systems, probably because it’s designed specifically to help players and GMs actually occupy this eutopian future in-game. It’s hard enough to imagine a better world, let alone to play a character who lives in it. They do a good job of depicting what a day-in-the-life would actually entail, in simple language, and it’s appealing.

When I spotted some gaps in the lore they were happy to take on my suggestions, and I contributed more and more until eventually they asked me to formally join the team.

The other devs have a wonderful knack for taking any idea I have about how something could work and dialing it up to 11. My solarpunk and cyberpunk fiction tend to be near-future things, the solarpunk in particular being much more postapoclyptic than utopian. The FA! team is ambitious and sees a much grander end state much further out than I normally focus on. If I tend to write the journey, I think they’re writing the destination.

I helped them get the rulebook ready for release, then helped review the premade campaigns they’d written. I think that was when I started thinking about making a campaign of my own.

I wanted to do something set in my neck of the woods, to explore how small, rural, ‘bedroom communities’ like the ones I grew up in would change in a world where endless growth and a total reliance on cars were no longer the societal default. The existing lore and premade campaigns are very LA-centric, so I moved my campaign to the east coast and got about as rural as you can while still having some human presence. In contrast to some of Fully Automated’s setting details, the region generally aims for a lower-tech, slightly more grounded vibe.

The end result is a sort of riff on treasure hunting adventures where the players need to journey off the edge of the map, searching dense forests and lost ruins for clues. But the forests and ruins are in a mostly-abandoned region of rural New Hampshire which is being rewilded, and the treasure is tons of industrial waste illegally dumped there sixty years ago during the setting’s WWIII (and which is now useful in the production of geopolymers). It’s got some heavy environmental themes around conservation of wild land and watersheds. As the players search for the pollution they begin to unearth other forgotten details of the region’s wartime history and draw the attention of someone who would rather they left the past alone.

I had two big goals for this campaign – the first was to explore various ways rural solarpunk could look, including questions of what makes for a genuinely sustainable community, the sort of tradeoffs and sacrifices a degrowth-based rural community may need to accept, and how towns and industries look when they accept that they live in a world without limitless resources. It examines various lifestyles and technologies that make sense in that context, local infrastructure, and even the kinds of people the region might attract. It pulls a lot from what historically worked in the region long before cars reshaped it.

In many ways, it represents a sort of amalgamation of all my rural solarpunk projects so far. If you like my postcard series, then playing this campaign should be the closest thing to stepping into those scenes and visiting the people they depict.

The second goal was to get an admittedly narrow glimpse into the Thousand-Year Cleanup – the nigh-endless work of a world where many people have made cleaning up our society’s mess their life’s purpose. The hidden pollution the players and their allies are working to find represents a common wrong from our time, and from the last hundred years of industrial production. Every time a corporation or business owner takes a shortcut that leads to disaster, or deliberately dumps poison into the land and water to save a few bucks, it represents their entitled expectation that the world around them, their human community, and all the other species impacted, will subsidize their cost savings with their health and lives.

Long term, I’m hoping to make The Thousand-Year Cleanup a collection of adventure modules (with the first being this adventure, Buried Treasure). This would be similar to Fully Automated’s previous premade campaign: Regulation, which included four playable modules. It probably won’t have a throughline plot, just a set of adventures themed around various aspects of cleaning up the world our society left to them. From buried industrial waste to massive swaths of plastic in the ocean, to endless heaps of clothes discarded in the desert, I think there’s tons of potential for campaigns based in some way around cleaning up our waste and making it useful. The scope is a little overwhelming but there’s a powerful optimism in depicting a world that’s making real progress on these disasters through the collective efforts of regular people.

I think it’s safe to say that this 160+ page campaign guide is my biggest Solarpunk project to date – it’s actually shaping up to be my longest finished work of fiction in general. I’ve tried to write several novels in the last decade or so, but usually get bogged down in logistical snares in the setting and plot. Writing for a tabletop campaign (and one I might not even be running) has been oddly freeing. I can’t know what the players or GM will do, so I present options, people and places and events which will be triggered by circumstances in their playthrough, but I’ve been careful not to set a specific set of rails for them to follow. In some ways, this plotless format has been much easier for me than writing a single story. And I’ve been able to include far more world building than any one group of players can possibly see!

Fully Automated’s dev team has a sort of template for organizing the notes/prepwork for running a tabletop campaign – it seems to be inspired a bit by the way scientific papers are laid out in sections, and while I don’t have much experience with GMing, I found it very intuitive. (Though I made some adjustments to organize mine around in-world locations rather than a timeline as Buried Treasure is a bit more open than the introductory ones they’d previously published.)

When I was writing the campaign, I’ll admit I sort of saw actually running it as the playtesting cost I had to pay to get the thing published. I had no idea how much fun I’d have actually sitting down with a group and trying it out. My players are great and I was shocked at how entertaining it was to watch them explore my world and interact with my characters, not to mention the satisfaction of watching them piece together the mystery!

At time of writing we’ve just finished up session 8 and I think the players are approaching the endgame and generally seem to be having a lot of fun. They’ve even talked about doing a second session per week which is asking a lot of six adults with day jobs and projects of their own. They have been excellent at unraveling the mysteries and at interpreting the clues they’ve found – they’ve surprised me a few times now by figuring things out quicker than I’d expected or with fewer clues than I’d prepared. I’m also very pleased with the ways they’ve leveraged community and preemptively diffused potential conflicts – they’ve not just avoided some potential fights but amassed a small army of allies who are helping them solve this mystery. That, to me, is a very solarpunk way to play this solarpunk campaign, and it feels very natural in a reasonable-people-acting-reasonably sort of way in the moment.

We’re looking at getting another group going with a different GM to better test my guide to running this campaign, and the lead dev is looking at finding an artist to do a pulp-style cover for it which is just really cool!

If all goes well we’ll publish the cleaned up version libre and gratis through the game’s various channels. But if you want to try it out sooner than that, we’ve currently got multiple groups testing it out on the game’s discord! And if you want more info or to download resources without an account, you can find Fully Automated over here: http://fullyautomatedrpg.com/>>