Daniel (@dungeondive) descends into Substratum Protocol from Pandion Games (designer Andrew Boyd), an apocalyptic-mystery RPG that casts you not as a grizzled soldier but as a scientist: an anomaly has appeared at the Earth’s core, landmasses are dissolving, and your expedition team must descend 5,700 kilometres — sector by sector — to hypothesise what it is before the endgame triggers. The star of the review is the conflict resolution. Every action pairs two skill dice against two flipped playing cards; beat a card and it goes into your hand, becoming a currency you spend on exo-suit systems, boosted rolls, or — Daniel’s favourite — challenging the GM deck to make a narrative assertion come true. Skills degrade down a usage-die chain as you use them, forcing rests. He also loves the field-journal loop (a D20 bestiary of deep-earth flora and fauna feeds your notes, which feed your final hypothesis) and the clues printed upside-down so you can’t read them by accident. His critiques are specific: the game asks the GM to introduce complications but gives few procedures for generating them, and travel pacing between sectors is similarly under-specified — gaps he’s been patching with the Roll & Play Sci-Fi Toolkit. Verdict: a fast, clever one-shot-friendly design with a card system he wants other games to steal, playing as zoologist Dr. Prefab Dembo and his doomed-optimist team.
Substratum Protocol lets you spend earned cards to assert facts into the fiction and dare the deck to contradict you. What’s the best player-facing narrative currency you’ve seen a game use?