An online co-op action RPG. There is more work beyond the wall than Haven Core has people willing to do it, so it contracts Runners: licensed, independent, and paid on delivery. One to four per deployment.
Prep, deploy, hunt, repeat.
Take a Contract from the Contract Board at the Groundwork Office, or deploy on a freeform patrol.
The Transporter opens onto active Contract areas, any Stage you have unlocked, and any Checkpoint Buoy or Transit Spike your crew has left active.
Complete the objectives, clear what is down there, take down the boss. Collect your loot and head back to Haven Core.
Tune your equipment with Ratchet (stat tuning) and Reforge (Trait reroll). Check the shop and trade with other Runners to refine your loadout.
The Mir arrived on a one-way ark ship centuries ago. The colonization plan did not survive contact with the planet, and the first century was failure and population decline. The enclaves that were left consolidated because the alternative was extinction.
Runners come in as many forms as the people of Orryx itself. The ubiquitous Mir, graceful Sire and reliable Karn are all represented amongst the ranks of this freelance profession. Runners are licensed and certified to work beyond the reach of civic authority, and some districts of Haven Core have developed around the industry.
Frontline work. Closes distance and absorbs what that costs. Highest risk and highest reward of the three.
Ranged authority and field support. A shooter first. Lowest casualty rate on record.
Resonance-integrated. The highest skill ceiling of the three, and the thinnest margin for error.
Items tell you what they are through their chip row: type, manufacturer, tier, element.
Equipment drops with zero, one or two effect slots, and each filled slot holds a Trait: a triggered effect that fires on hit, on kill, on taking damage or on a defensive action. Gear contributes bounded stats. Traits contribute style. A third slot only appears on Echo gear, dropped by the apparitions that haunt the hazardous regions of Orryx.
JG-9F Pistol
A percentage of damage dealt restores HP.
JG-9F Pistol [echo]
Echo gear is a clone of what the apparition was carrying, with every stat at ceiling and one extra effect.
TRAITS // 3 SLOTS [OVERCLOCK]Hits apply a short bleed DOT; does not stack, but refreshes duration.
Damage taken doubles into a buffer that drains HP; dealing damage burns the buffer down, and while it holds the Runner deals 25 to 30 percent more damage.
Government contractor, Haven Core standard issue. Gunmetal and matte polymer. Rated for crowd suppression, so it carries a flat Impact bonus.
Industrial workhorse for outer-wall Runners. Safety orange on charcoal. Recovers faster out of punishing states; the rancher's choice, and it keeps you working.
Precision engineering, Sire-cofounded. Longer range, lower recoil, less damage per hit. Surgical rather than brute force.
Black-market fabricator out of Ovir Station. Exposed internals and copper patina. Higher recoil and higher crit for less base damage. The naming escalates as the fabricator sees fit.
Resonance-channeling instruments, violet-black. Reduced WP costs and slightly faster charges. Coverage skews Teknician, though any class can carry one.
Coverage is asymmetric. Pistols come from all five; Greatswords and Axes only from Jury-Grade, Halcross and Sciv; Tek weapons only from Arclyte, Sciv and Vael.
Each Ratchet raises one stat by 1 to 8 percent. Cumulative tuning caps at 30 percent of that stat's ceiling.
R0 UNTUNED // R5 MAXED, NO FURTHER TUNING
When the same Trait rolls twice on an item's slots the pair merges into one Overclock. Two Siphons become Rally. It occupies a single slot and states its drawback in the same breath as its benefit.
Damage taken doubles and enters a buffer that drains HP over time; dealing damage reduces the buffer, and while it is active the Runner deals 25 to 30 percent more damage. Stop attacking and the buffer finishes the job.
Abilities cost 2.5 times WP, and every kill made with an ability refunds the full cost. WP overflow buys enhanced casts that decay quickly. Chain kills or go dry.
Emergency shields trigger at 50 percent HP, and damage dealt inside the shield window heals the Runner, HP and potentially WP. It only pays out if the fight goes badly first.
Contracts take Runners further down than most of Haven Core cares to think about. The first jobs are under the streets. The last are somewhere the city has no records for, and the light stops arriving from above. Conditions are rolled fresh on every deployment, so the ground a Runner learned last week is not the ground waiting today.
Maintenance tunnels under the periphery, still on the grid and still lit in places. Whatever has moved in came up the same pipes the city relies on, and the Groundwork Office has stopped calling these jobs routine.
Work past the wall, where Damper coverage thins and Refractant has scoured the land. An extraction plant sits abandoned mid-shift. The crews that filed the last reports never came back for their equipment.
Canyon and cliffside passage give way to caves, then to tunnel bored by machines too large to extract. This is where Orryx reached too deep, most recently. Some say the mines are haunted. Some say the machines organized. Others describe nests built into the tunnel ceilings.
Passages threading structures that predate the colony, with the underside of Haven Core hanging somewhere overhead. The geometry here was laid out by something, and it was not the Mir.
The bottom of the descent, where Refractant stops being a resource and becomes the condition of the place. Nothing down here was built for people, and nothing down here registers that people have arrived.
Run contracts alone or bring up to three others. Crews form on the Concourse, where as many as 32 Runners are between jobs at any time, comparing loadouts and looking for a fourth. Once a crew is set it moves down to Rimwalk Street, and deploys from there.
Every Runner holds a color for the session, carried on the map, in chat, and on the Transit Spikes they plant.
PZO is built in the open by a solo developer. Progress captures, design notes and playtest calls go out on these channels first.
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