From publisher blurb:
“Knives down. Get on the floor right now, or I swear to whatever brand you worship I’ll put five thousand amps through your chest.” I’m shouting, but it’s dark in the meatpacking room and I’m not sure if any of the clinic techs know who it is that’s yelling at them.
It’s my fault for cutting the power in their building, so I let electricity crawl blue-white up my fingers, lighting my face. I’ve got a mask on; some big faux-wood thing that the art dealer assured me was a tengu--whatever that is. I just know it’s got a nose like a riot baton, and it looks fearsome in the low light.
One of the clinic’s meatpackers screams. The others just look stunned. This kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen here. People like me are supposed to be terrorizing the poor parts of town. As if the poor don’t have enough to deal with.
“Uh-uh,” I say to a woman in a surgical mask who’s lifting a freshly grown liver out of a storage case. “Leave it.” She drops it back into the case with an audible thump. “In fact, you might want to load up a couple more of those and slide them my way. Otherwise, this deranged, criminal cape is likely to start frying little wage-workers.” I let lines of thin blue current lick and snap between my fingers, illustrating the point.
They start putting organs in cases. “So far, so good,” I subvocalize.
The first superhuman was created and patented in 2033 by Prometheus Pharmaceuticals which changed the world. As technological innovation skyrocketed corporation greed grew with it, so the fortunate ones aligned with a corporation prospered. For the unfortunate unaligned masses, they sunk deeper into oblivion. The masses ended up in the crossfire of the Corporate Warfare ignited in 2049. By the end of it, the human population of the fractured states in America had withdrawn into sections of over-crowded cities, huddling amidst concrete, and the wash of neon while the corporate elite remade society in a new image.
Welcome to Dark Times! A tabletop roleplaying game about superpowered people in the Steele City’s corporate slum trying to survive in a civilization swallowed up by corruption and greed. A puppet government functions to do the bidding of the corporations. In Dark Times, the enhanced players must work together to protect their people, try to build up their community, and protect themselves because the corporations seek to enslave them as “Company Property”.
Merc Work is a collection of missions for your friends to enjoy as you run them through roleplaying games scenarios. Unlike many cyberpunk settings in which Cash in Hand is the goal, Dark Times focuses more altruistic characters working to help the downtrodden. Someone must step up to fight against the corporations before things get even worse.
Each mission is complete, so it could be worked into any active storyline. With a little bit of cyberpunk, a little bit of noir, and a whole lot of superpowers, Dark Times mixes old-school and new-school design to create a game that is fast, pulpy, immersive, and fun to play.