2400

2400 is lo-fi sci-fi. It’s centuries in the future, and it’s a decades-old modem that screams like a dying robot when it connects to the net. It’s a space ship with an FTL drive, artificial gravity, and a flickering display you gotta tap a few times to see the jump coordinates. It’s hacking something together with whatever cheap materials you have on hand, ignoring the rules until you need them, banging out something that might not sound finished, but definitely sounds fun.

2400 is a plug-and-play toolkit. It’s not just one RPG, but a series of self-contained modules, easy to slot in or ignore entirely. Each one is 3 pages plus a cover, fitting on two sides of a letter-sized sheet of paper.  They’re all for the same setting, unless they aren't. There are over a dozen so far.

• Cosmic Highway: space truckers trying to keep their rust bucket flying
• Inner System Blues: cyberpunk freelancers in a grainy retro-future
• Orbital Decay: a space-horror scenario generator
• ALT: uplift, AI, and clone operatives in a world without death
• Zone: exploring an area where known science no longer applies
• Exiles: twenty weirdos surviving in a xenotech-riddled quarantine world
• Xenolith: an alien crew faces threats from ancient relics
• Eos: human marines fight for the common good in the galactic community
• Project Ikaros: rogue psychics flee—or fight—elite agents
• The Venusian Job: a casino heist above the clouds on another world
• Codebreakers: reality-hackers elude daemons to escape The Simulation
• Data Loss: memory-corrupted clones collect SOULs on a ruined world
• Resistors: activist hackers take on corps in a cyberpunk dystopia
• Xot: settlers adapt to a world littered with unstable alien devices
• Tempus Diducit: timeline-bending mashup setting for all 24XX games
• Habs & Gardens: community responders on an idyllic (?) space station
• Legends: a world of classic high-fantasy presided over by DEUS
• Battle Moon: a combat rules primer & battle royale one-shot … in spaaace!
• Junior Hybrid Battle Cryptids: anthropomorphic animals save the city 
• Nuclear Family: explore post-apocalyptic wastes with a band of misfits
• Emergency Rules: (slightly) expanded version of the rules and principles

2400 is short and sweet. In the time it took you to read all this, you could’ve started playing.

Need more? Here are some additional resources.

• The free 24XX SRD has CC-licensed text and templates.
• This 24XX games collection includes over 100 titles by creators on Itch.io.
• The Google Sheets character keeper makes it easy to manage character sheets and ships in online play. 
• Discord servers where people talk about 2400 and 24XX games include 24XX Cord (run by Tibbius), New School Revolution (run by Yochai Gal), and the FKR Collective (for discussion of rules-light, rulings-oriented games). Please note: I do not moderate Discord servers run by others.
• Check out 2400's major influences for more detailed advice on play, GMing, and safety tools, including Electric Bastionland, The Soft Horizon, Ghost/Echo, and Script Change.

Art on this page and in 2400 games is by BEEPLE (Mike Winkelmann). Header image based on art CC BY BEEPLE.