Antti Hukkanen

The Great Hamster Rebellion is where pet shop residents meet the Boxer Rebels. The Hamster Republic has been invaded by the robotic Mekaton, and only the mysterious and wise Master Keeton can lead young kung fu hamsters to victory!

For a thousand generations, the hundred tribes of the Hamster Republic lived in peace among themselves and with their neighbours. The Syrians lived alone as was their way, and the Dwarfs lived in small villages as was theirs, and popularly-elected Rulers supervised the happiness of all the tribes. All were content with their lives, living off the land.

Then came the Mekaton. They were autonomous machines from elsewhere, and the hamsters had never seen anything like them. They built massive installations and labyrinthine cities, and mined the earth for minerals to build more like them.

At first, the hamsters tried living peacefully alongside the Mekaton. There was plenty of room for everyone. Ruler Titus even adopted some Mekaton customs. But then, the land started to become poisoned and the waters polluted. The Mekaton were deaf to the hamsters’ complaints. The hamsters grew restless, but wherever their unrest boiled over to violence,
the force guns of the Mekaton made short work of their opponents.

After nearly four years of procrastination, here’s my first stab at the 24-hour RPG challenge. Haven grew out of a desire to re-examine a setting that featured in a friend’s homebrew game back in the late ’80s. In the interests of simplicity, I used a coin-toss mechanic that I think serves its purpose pretty well. Unfortunately, I barely scratched the surface of the setting before running out of time, so I plan to go back and flesh this one out in the near future. This, then, is Haven: a collection of largely unrealized ideas, fairly traditional game mechanics, and unnecessarily spiffy layout.

The Premise
Haven takes place in the star system of Tau, containing many fantastic places and inhabited by several sentient species, and surrounded by an impenetrable barrier field. Several lifetimes worth of adventure await in Tau, but the ultimate mystery is this: who cut out the system from the rest of the galaxy – and why?