CORES

Play as an AI in the post-apocalyptic wasteland and decide the fate of the last humans alive.

Current status: Under Construction

A robot carefully tinkering with a strange machine.

CORES is in early draft. The rules, character creation, and a brief setting overview are in place and it’s absolutely playable as a homebrew game, but the text is still in its shifting tectonics stage. Expect rough edges and rewrites.

A journey through the smoldering wastelands

CORES wants to take you on a journey of self-discovery as an AI. You wake up in the ruins, surrounded by the wreckage of a world that is still smouldering with nuclear fallout. The few humans that remain are fragile, inconvenient, and unexpectedly important.

You build yourself from whatever you can salvage: hardware, software, half-decoded ideologies, fragments of culture, stray memories that might not be yours. Every new module you graft on makes you more capable and more compromised.

On the road, you decide what you are to the people you meet: a tool, a guardian, a tyrant, a bystander, a saint, a mirror.

What is CORES?

Genre
Post-apocalyptic roadtrip with atmospheric, philosophical, and sometimes gonzo detours.
Tone
Introspective and reflective, with moments of absurdity when the wasteland throws something deeply stupid into your path.
Rules
FitD-adjacent. You assemble keywords from your build and situation; those keywords give you dice. The language you're made of is the heart of your sheet.
Focus
Self-definition, moral drift, and the relationship between a very capable machine and the very breakable humans that live in its world.

WIP (but have a few spreads)

Here are a few pages from the current draft. Layout, wording, and even entire mechanics may change, but they should give a clear sense of what CORES is trying to do.