Degenesis (2004)

From the publisher's website:

"What's Degenesis about?
Degenesis takes place in a ruined future, 500 years in the future. Civilization as we know it has been demolished by a asteroid swarm. 7 cultures (the northern Borcers, the insect-plagued Frankers, the nomadic Pollens, the war-ridden Balkhanians, the crusadic Purgaryans, the Hybrispaniards torn by civil strife and the up and coming Africans fight for hegemony. Characters can belong to 13 organisations and cults (the wandering Scrappers, the technophiliac Chronists, the medical Spitalians, mercenary Hellveticans, righteous sledge-hammer wielding Judges or the Neo-Lybian merchant kings with their avenging forces of Scourgers among others).

But there's another danger for man: A strange growth or disease came from the stars, infecting fungi, men and animals. The Sepsis, as the strange growth is called, plagues the world, as its the source of the psychoactive Burn drug. Children and newborns affected by the Sepsis show strange abilities. When these children grow up, they are often exterminated or ostracized before they grow up as Psychonauts, gifted with psionic powers but also in danger of losing their minds by communing with the hive mind created by the Sepsis growth."

From the publisher's website:

"The KatharSys Game Engine
Degenesis uses our KatharSys System. Characters have got five stats and a number of skills, all on a scale of 1 to 10. You roll 2d10 and try to roll not higher than the sum of your stat and skill. Difficult actions are described by a difficult number, which acts as a lower threshold. So if you've got a Body Stat of 6 (muscled) and an Athletics Skill of 3 (some training), but try to climb a sheer cliff (difficult of 5), you're successful when you roll above 5 and not more than 9 on 2d10.

Fights work much the same way, but characters also have action points which they can spend for getting initiative and making difficulties easier. If these action points reach zero, they are momentariliy out of action and have to spend a round or two to replenish their reserves. All weapons have a damage factor which works as follows: Pistol: 6d(5). This means that if you're hit with a pistol, 6 ten-sided dice are rolled and each roll which is not higher than five counts as a wound. If someone wears armor, the armor score functions again as a lower threshhold. Each character can take a number of flesh wounds, depending on his or her build (1-3 in the head, 3-5 in the torso). After that, a character suffers trauma wounds, which can be debilitating and downright deadly.

Character creation is quite easy: we call it the 3C-System. You first choose a culture, then you choose a concept which describes how you grew up (religious upringing, life on the streets, nomad, slavery) nad finally you choose a cult or organization to which you belong. In each stage, you get some points for your stats and can allocate points to your skills. The system is really fast and helps you to gain an idea of your character quite fast.

In the basic rulebook you play a member of one of the cults in this Europe. Though there are some basic guidelines for playing other characters like Sleepers (men and women held in cryo-static and recently released from their nano-dispensers) and Psychonauts (those men and women who have entered a symbiotic relationship with the core spore fields and can use psychic abilities like flesh-forming, telekinetics, precognition and subvocal commands), full rules for them will be available in future supplements. There's only so much which you can put in 380 pages... "