Highland Vice

System-neutral Martian cowboy hexcrawl.

Earth is polluted anarchy. The Solar System has been colonised. FTL travel remains impossible. Humanity's dreams are mostly dead.

Mars - the ‘fresh start’ planet. Victim of a thousand misjudged terraforming schemes. Failed utopias. Religious fanatics. Mining outposts. Cloned Ice Age monsters. High-altitude cultures - Tibetans, Peruvians - adapted to the cold and the low oxygen levels. Crooks and outlaws hiding out from the Magistrates' Guild.

You are scavengers, tinkerers, entrepreneurs and bounty hunters - the scum of the Inner System. Basically the cast of Cowboy Bebop. A valuable chunk of raw computronium, from the brain of the superintelligence Marduk, is hidden somewhere in the Martian highlands. Your job is to find it.

100 hexes + map. Woolly mammoths. Lost cities. Android anchorites. Satellite shamans. Terror birds. Mountain men. Bad tractors. Gauchos. Monks. Cannibals. Goblin lemurs. Sky bandits. Horseshoe crabs. Hell pigs. Biocosmists. Neanderthal cultists of Tiamat, the Mother Machine.

I wrote the first version of this years ago, before Mothership existed, for a half-baked sci-fi game I was working on back them. More recently I updated and expanded it. Right now it's not designed for use with any particular system. Mothership would be a natural rules fit but do what you want.