On the day the UK voted to leave the EU, which happened to be the day after I read a heartbreaking investigative piece on private prisons, I woke up thinking about corporate greed, economic collapse, the excesses of the rich, Donald Trump, and human awfulness. And I thought, “I should design a game about eating the rich.”
A bit later, I thought, “No, I should design a game about the rich eating other people. Kind of like Soylent Green, except there’s no way the rich would eat poor people. So who would they eat?”
Soylent Platinum is the result: a free RPG about the rich eating the famous.
Soylent Platinum is designed for 3-6 players, with no GM. Everyone plays an obscenely wealthy person bidding for the privilege of kidnapping, killing, and eating the most famous celebrity in the world — while destroying the global economy for their own benefit.
As social commentary, it’s a lot less subtle than The Thief, my previous free RPG. As a game, it’s short-form, and there’s a bit of one of my favorite roleplaying poems, Stoke-Birmingham 0-0, in its DNA. Like the other games I’ve designed, it started as an idea that wouldn’t let go of my brain until I sat down and turned it into a game.
Alongside Stoke (which features a conversation with rules about tone) and Soylent Green, Soylent Platinum’s inspirations were the films Antiviral and Hostel and the RPGs Dark Conspiracy (paid link) — mainly its proles — and Dog Eat Dog (which weaves discomfort into its mechanics). It took me about three hours to design and another three hours or so to assemble, polish, and proofread.
If you give Soylent Platinum a whirl, I’d love to hear who you ate, how it felt, and what you thought about the game.
Campaign play: once the celebrity is eaten the non-winning player with the least amount of influence remaining is now the weakest and is set upon and devoured by the other players. They are eliminated and their remaining influence is divided between the other non-winning players. They may avoid this fate by offering up the leftovers from one of their prior meals in their place. Repeat until only two players remain. They retain an uneasy truce and fortify their holdings until a new crop of the neuvo-reich arise to devour.
That’s delightfully twisted, Matt. I like it!