Lately I've been thinking an unreasonable amount about field manuals. Not real ones — the strange little books that used to come packed inside old games, the dense rulebooks buried in tabletop RPGs, the photocopied zines held together with a single staple. Objects that wear in specific, personal ways depending on who owned them: bent corners, coffee rings, margin notes, rules crossed out and rewritten by hand. Somewhere in the middle of all that thinking I realized I wasn't illustrating Marte Chimica anymore. I was building a game, or at least its skeleton.
Marte Chimica Operations is turning into a small solo dungeon crawler set inside the corporate ruins of Mars. You play a corporate-owned synthhuman operator dropped into sealed facilities, abandoned labs, and quarantined bunkers with one job: get in, complete the objective, get out, ideally before whatever's still down there notices you. The influences are exactly what you'd expect if you've spent time in this setting before — MÖRK BORG's grime, STALKER's dread, old SCP entries, extraction shooters, and the kind of retro-futuristic military manual that looks like it fell out of some adjacent timeline. The design idea is that every run gets more hostile the longer it goes: you make noise, security wakes up, drones start moving, room generation starts working against you instead of for you, and a routine op curdles into a scramble for extraction. Which tracks, honestly — that's more or less the whole ethos of Marte Chimica in miniature.
It's not a direct sequel to anything, but it's clearly kin to Rotten Kingdom, a project that started as a lorebook and has since sprawled into a weird little text adventure in HTML, a run of illustrations, and an almost-finished lorebook sitting on my Gumroad, soon to land on itch as well. Different setting, different rules, same underlying habit of building a world first and only later figuring out what shape the game around it should take.
Right now the system includes procedural room generation, mission objectives with extraction mechanics, weapons and augments and utilities, enemy encounters, loot tables, and a DEFCON-style escalation track, all wrapped around one playable mission called Buried Bunker. None of it is finished. Balance is probably broken somewhere, a few items are almost certainly overtuned, and I wouldn't be surprised if entire systems get gutted and rebuilt before this is done — half the actual pleasure of designing a tabletop game seems to be watching players find every possible way to break it. Eventually I want this to grow into a small library of printable manuals, mission packs, and odd little expansions inside the Marte Chimica universe, and it'll be free, the same way the rest of the setting is free — because I mostly wanted an excuse to hold the thing in my hands. A PDF was never really the point. I want it printed, folded, annotated with stupid notes, missing pages, stained, shoved in a drawer, and found again years later.
For now, it's a work in progress. Corporate duplication expected.