A Game for Two to Four Players
by P.D. Magnus
The year is 2050. It is a dark time to be a gamer. In half a century of mergers and buy-outs, the rights to every game design on the planet have come to be held in fewer and fewer hands. Last year, in a move to acquire the secret process for producing the gum that comes with sports cards, the Leetgum Corporation ended up owning the design to every game ever invented. Abetted by strange developments in international law, Leetgum now owns patents on the basic mechanics of trading card games, the concept of a roleplaying game, and even the rules of chess. Leetgum controls the trademark "game" to describe these products, but has no interest in producing any of them. Their real business is in manufacturing petroleum-based comestibles, and so all those great game designs languish in their data banks.
What are gamers to do in this dark age? Hack in to Leetgum's mainframe, of course, and take whatever they can. Lucky for you, Leetgum doesn't own any patents for network security technology.
Click here for the PDF components!1. About the Game
You take the role of a gamer and hacker, sending your digital Avatar into the Leetgum network, searching for gaming gems, and smuggling them back out. It's only a matter of time until somebody at Leetgum notices and shuts down the network, so work quickly.
Play involves hacking into Data Nodes to obtain Secrets and then hacking into Broadcast Nodes to move the Secrets off the network and into your Portfolio. . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: August 13, 2004
Copyright © 2004 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.
