In Xot, players take on the roles of settlers crash-landed on a world that forces them to adapt. You might play an undying priest with an aversion to gravity, a sharp-eyed mystic with cameras for eyes, or a horned mechanic with finger-plugs that interface with machines, or any number of other bizarre combinations.

Xot is a love letter to far(ther)-future sci-fi settings like Vaults of Vaarn, The Book of the New Sun, The Dying Earth. The most obvious influence, however, is from Numenera, a game I enjoy hacking so much that it's something of a hobby within a hobby for me. I have been working on and off for a long while on a much longer game inspired by these settings, Alight, but grew frustrated with impulses to take the rules in too many directions at once. Did I want to make a game with a bunch of character options to choose from, and rules that might be passingly familiar to D&D and Numenera fans? Or did I want to make something super simple, where the sentence describing your character is basically all you need to know in order to play? 

My four-year-old (who gives excellent game design advice) convinced me to do both. I'll get back to the longer approach to Alight, but in the meantime, to play Xot, all you need to know is that you're a swift gambler with a cat-sized tardigrade floating nearby, and assign a die to each of those. And thanks to a very wide-open approach to advancement (inspired by Brad Murray's Soft Horizon games, and recent conversations with Tibbius), someday that gambler might be an impossibly swift gambler with a telepathic, lion-sized tardigrade teleporting nearby. (Though I should warn you, in case it's not obvious already, that this game makes no attempt to "balance" characters. I have no idea what a hovering tardigrade is good for, but I thought it sure sounded cool.)

This game's indebtedness to Numenera is evident not only in Xot's approach to characters (each a trait + specialty, with a distinction), and in the focus on helping settlements survive and thrive in a hostile environment, but in the "xot" themselves. The comes from exotica — alien devices from a lost civilization, littering the world. Xot are especially unstable fragments of tech, single-use devices inspired by Numenera's "cyphers." I love this about Numenera: Handing out immensely powerful items like candy keeps things exciting and unpredictable — as long as those devices are both limited in use and unsafe to hoard. The specific rules to encourage cypher usage and artifact depletion in Cypher System games are more involved than I typically like, though, so Xot collapses these risks into 2400's standard rules for rolling. Xot are also the default currency of the setting (each worth about what a "credit" would be in other 2400 games, or 1 bulky bag of scrap), in my attempt to simplify the number of currencies you need to track. 

Unlike the more specific item effects noted in a game like Exiles, the exotica in Xot are extremely open to interpretation: A "temporal annihilator" might do completely different things in your game vs. mine (or the first time you roll it vs. the second). Players can roll to try to figure out what exotica do, and my advice is tell them right out what adjective/noun combo you rolled even before they roll, and let them speculate out loud. On a roll of 5+, they know exactly what it does; I'd likely pick the most useful or interesting thing they speculated about. On a roll of 3–4, they only get a vague sense of what the thing does, and "oneiric regenerator" is about the right level of vague. And on a 1–2, the thing activates unexpectedly, so they'll find out what it does — probably the most unfortunate thing they speculated about — whether they like it or not.

Despite the "far-future" vibe of the setting, Xot is still compatible with other 2400 games; it just takes place on an isolated planet where an ark ship crashed. If you decide to run it as part of a larger 2400 setting, you might combine it with Exiles (based on another weird, isolated, xenotech-ridden world, inspired more by Ultraviolet Grasslands and Acid Death Fantasy) and/or Zone (focused on an inexplicable quarantine zone, inspired by Annihilation and Roadside Picnic). I recommend choosing either Xot's approach to character creation and advancement or the other games': The rules are still the same, items from either would work great in the other, and characters from either would work fine in the same group, but I imagine it might get confusing to have to track skills and advancement differently. 

And by all means, don't just limit yourself to using Xot with other 2400 games. Pull in material from Numenera, Vaults of Vaarn, Ultraviolet Grasslands, Acid Death Fantasy, and whatever weird science-fantasy games you've got handy. All a character needs is an interesting concept pitch, and advancement is just a matter of hanging on extra words as you go. And GMs, don't be a stickler about articles and conjunctions. It's meant to let players be tricky and creative. I even threw in "undying" as a starting option because why the heck not. This isn't necessarily a game where the most interesting question is whether or not you survive, but how you survive — and whether the you that survives is recognizable to yourself anymore at all.

All 2400 games encourage you to invent some elements, but this one's even more wide open than most. I really look forward to hearing how your game goes!