RPGaDay: Flood

The obvious thing to do here is talk about Things from the Flood.  Shame I've never played it.

Mindstar Rising is a sci-fi novel by Peter F. Hamilton, and unlike a lot of Hamilton's books it's possible to lift it using only one hand.  It has two sequels of similarly reasonable size, so if you're interested in getting into Hamilton without first taking up weightlifting, it's a good starting point.

The setting of Mindstar Rising is England in the near future, where global warming has had a significant impact on the climate and landscape.  Specifically, significant areas of the country have been flooded by rising sea levels, and Peterborough is now a seaside town.  What's left of the country is suffering the aftermath of collapsing financial markets and ten years living under a tyrannical communist government.

This book came out in 1993.  Aside from the fact it's more likely to be fascists than communists at this point, this book just gets more and more plausible.

The titular Mindstars were a unit of soldiers bioengineered to give them psychic abilities.  The lead character, with powers of intuition and detecting emotions, now works as a psychic detective, and the first book is about him working for a corporation beset by industrial saboteurs.  So obviously I think this would be an absolutely brilliant RPG setting.  The theme of investigation gives a solid framework to build a campaign around, and the dystopian setting feels simultaneously fantastic and close to home (plus it's always nice to have a modern day game set somewhere outside the US).

So the question is, which system to run it with?  It's a sci-fi setting, but one that doesn't fit into a neat category.  It's pretty close to cyberpunk, but not in a way that works with classic cyberpunk RPGs - hacking, implants, etc. aren't what it's about.  It's certainly not space opera or space western, the sub-genres where psychic powers do often show up.  Not a spaceship in sight.

A generic system like Fate or Savage Worlds could probably handle it well, but the game I'd look at first is probably Judge Dredd.  While it's a very different setting in many ways, it's got the key elements of investigation, a dystopian future, and psychic powers, so should have everything required to create a Mindstar character.  However, since I haven't read any of the four Judge Dredd RPGs, I don't know how tied into their setting they are.  So rather than risk having to do a lot of conversion, perhaps a generic system is the way to go?  Simon Burley's The Code of the Spacelanes works with Judge Dredd, so if I ever decide to run a Mindstar one-shot and haven't picked up a more suitable system by then, that's likely to be where I start.