Build a better post-apocalyptic future with the TTRPG Dreams & Machines

polygon.com:

British publisher Modiphius Entertainment is putting a more optimistic spin on the post-apocalypse with Dreams & Machines, a new tabletop role-playing game. Pre-orders for the starter set begin today ahead of its official release at Gen Con this August.

“I wanted to create something that’s feel-good because the world’s a grim place and there are enough grim games out there,” Modiphius founder and CEO Chris Birch said.

Birch is no stranger to subverting genres, having brought pulpy World War II action to Lovecraftian horror with Achtung! Cthulhu, a game inspired in part by the Great Patriotic War Museum in Minsk and the stories it tells about heroes who saw the war against the Nazis as nearly impossible but still wanted to go down fighting. Dreams & Machines is set hundreds of years after a war against a rogue AI known as the Builder devastated the futuristic society of Evera Prime. It explores how humanity has found ways to survive and thrive despite the ongoing threat of mutated wildlife, techno-cultists, and long-dormant mechs reawakened.

Modiphius recruited a diverse group of freelance writers including Logan Boese, Mari Tokuda, and Jen Kretchmer to work on the book’s playable factions. The Dreamers are inspired in part by the cliff-dwellings of the ancestral Pueblo people in Mesa Verde, Colorado, and avoid using electricity and mechanical engineering in favor of focusing on biology and chemistry.

“They’re like Ewoks on acid,” Birch said. “They know how to build traps for mechs. They’re really good at non-advanced technology.”

Rivers — people who use their boats to bring supplies and news to isolated settlements — draw on modern-day truckers, Louisiana Bayou culture, and Western naval hierarchy. Spears pass on their