nekoewen

The Office Hack

Added 2019-04-25 22:41:46 +0000 UTC

For a while I’ve been contemplating the idea to use The Black Hack as the basis of a game about office workers in the vein of Papers & Paychecks (from that one comic in the AD&D DMG), Offices & Bosses (the spinoff of the Hello From the Magic Tavern podcast), and so on. I got inspired to start actually working on it, tentatively calling it “The Office Hack.”

The Black Hack is an interesting game that manages to be old-school D&D in a lot of ways, yet the designer was willing to make changes to make the resulting game simpler and smoother to a degree that you don’t usually see in retroclones or retroclone-adjacent games. It also has a really nice aesthetic, with art that feels like the artist started out doodling rad dragons in their Trapper Keeper. There’s even an undead astronaut in the selection of premade monsters. The system is simple and easy to grok, which makes it a good choice for me to dig in and start hacking. I may add in weird office versions of some of the D&D-isms that The Black Hack cut out, like I might include alignments if I can figure out a suitably stupid office version.

One big thing I want to do is really play up the idea that it’s a game made by and for people from a fantasy world who only know about Earth’s office culture through games and novels written by people with at best second-hand knowledge. The default setting is the world of Merica from the classic Gray Eagle campaign setting, and the setting section and whatnot are full of weirdness and “mistakes,” hence e.g. the list of Gods of Merica includes Jesus, Uncle Sam, Beyonsay, Lincoln, and Wendy. The idea is for it to be about as accurate to real life as D&D is to Westeros or Middle Earth.

The biggest rules change I’ve made so far is to add the concept of Job Dice and Job Points, which are basically hit dice/hit points for a character’s employment status. I still need to work out how that will all work, and I’m still figuring out what classes to include in the book (my tentative list goes Accounter, Assistant, Customer Service, Technologist, and Temp).

I most likely won’t go quite as crazy with appendices as I did in The Dungeon Zone, but I am going to do appendices for things like Office Dressing and a catalog of previous supplements and modules (Consultants & Contractors, The Book of Exalted Policies, Occidental Adventures, T2 Leadership Retreat of the Frog, etc.).

So yeah. I just wanted to share that. On the health front, I’ve been getting physical therapy for my herniated disc, and it’s going well enough that my doctor thinks I may not even need a steroid injection, much less surgery. I’m feeling a lot more like myself, and not just because the pain meds have side effects that can screw with one’s emotions. I can actually be on the computer for more decent stretches of time, and I can go outside and get stuff done.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with what I have so far of the fake Appendix N of The Office Hack: