Welcome

Head-and-shoulders painting of an alien, human and robot.

What is this?

EXP: The Game of Technological Chaos is a paper and dice tabletop Sciency Fiction role-playing game (RPG). EXP is meant to be played with real people around a real table. Everything you need to play is on this website right here. Let’s go!

  • Create a persona from any of three main families: anthro, robot, or alien.

  • Extend your persona with phenomic and psionic mutations.

  • Train your persona in a vocation like mechanic, biologist, mercenary, spie, or veterinarian.

  • Equip your persona with Sciency Fiction hardware like aerosols, pharma, biomech, or spacecraft.

  • Play in a world of your own creation, or jump right into the generic mythos.

Nerdy Details

  • EXP is a heavily play-tested, rigorously edited RPG with more than 7 versions.

    • EXP has a history that stretches from a 1970s homebrew to yesterday’s git push.

  • EXP supports traditional roll-over success/fail mechanics or storyful consequence-based mechanics.

    • The roll-playing system (core rules) uses many dice rolls including a kilodie mechanic that allows for highly granular tuning.

    • The role-playing system (in the appendices) uses a 4D2 mechanic to generate narrative-driven outcomes.

    • Mutations, vocations, and technologies work in both systems.

  • The ruleset is resilient: you can discard rules without making the game unplayable.

  • A Python terminal program with approximately 30,000 lines of code can generate personas and printable PDFs.

    • EXP_Tools is only available on request.

  • The documents for this website are publicly available, free, and open source (with attribution).

  • This RPG and website are written by hand. LLMs are used to help with spelling and grammar.

  • Presently, all artwork is human-made except the illustrations of AI personas, which are AI-generated.

An insectoid, a humanoid, a robot and an alien posing in front of old-school silicon.

an insect, a robot, and an alien walk into a web page