have you been enjoying absurd Helldivers 2 nonsense?
multiple players have independently called my compared my satirical scifi skirmish storytelling TTPRG 🎲 PLANET FIST to Helldivers—so much as to call it "exactly the tone of Helldivers." the new Faithless Edition of PLANET FIST will be releasing this year, and if you buy it now, you get the new edition for free!
in PLANET FIST, SHOOTOUTS ARE STORIES, and they're goofy and over the top. you're an undying, unsleeping soldier who can get blasted to bits and thrown right back onto the battlefield next round. if you're looking to see how it hits that Helldivers tone, just check out some of the FACTION TRAITS below!
what's PLANET FIST about? what does it play like? read the PRINCIPLES OF PLAY here!
what are people saying about PLANET FIST, besides that it's like Helldivers 2?
"PLANET FIST is a quick-to-learn and quick-to-play system for characters thrown into FPS-style deathmatches on a world that knows nothing but war. It's a game of high-emotion, low-consequence combat, for when you're wondering what the infinite Master Chiefs are thinking during Halo multiplayer. PLANET FIST is 'war never changes' said with the same inflection as 'it's all made up and the points don't matter.'"
- Caleb Zane Huett, designer of Triangle Agency
"An absolute blast—and then another, and then another, and then another, each leaving remains splattered on a wall. Gleeful, and tactical, and winkingly tongue-in-cheek; a masterful game from top to bottom."
- Jeff Stormer, host of the Party of One actual play podcast
or check out some table stories:
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Operation Trident
David Clarion couldn’t see much from his drop harness: his only point of view was a murky, juddering picture visible from the dropship’s landing cameras. The North Sea was a fuzzy blur stretched around the outer rim of the image. The rest of the view was taken up by the beach and the remains of Ostend’s promenade, five hundred feet below. If you looked closely, you could be mistaken for thinking the surface of the Belgian coast was alive; patches of it crawled with a languid sort of ripple, like a circus tent being pitched.
Clarion knew better though: he knew that the shifting ground meant Gaurans.
There was a high-pitched chime, followed by a series of shuddering whirs as the dropship’s propellers rotated into hovering position. A robotic female voice filled his ears in inflectionless, emotionless English. He knew the same command was being relayed in dozens of different languages to the soldiers in their harnesses all around him, swinging like carcasses on a meathook.
Prepare for combat zone drop in T-minus thirty seconds. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight.
The doors beneath his hanging boots whooshed open, turbulent air carrying the stench of sea salt and the roar of the wind through his suit’s filters. Beneath it all, there was a ceaseless metallic stink, like the inside of a bitten cheek, and Clarion resisted the urge to gag. He’d heard the stories, of course, even fought against the Gaurans during simulations, but the familiarity of their smell still terrified him. It was something primal: how could an alien race so far removed from man, so distant from the Earth, carry a smell that felt so much like home?
He locked eyes with the soldier directly across from him. Their face was obscured by their helmet, and their body completely unrecognizable beneath a combat mechsuit identical to his own. Their breastplate carried the same United Nations sigil as his: the only difference was the Irish flag, and the name printed beneath in block capitals.
KENNEALLY, J.
Constricted by his drop harness, he couldn’t do anything more than look directly at the opaque void of Kenneally’s faceplate and nod. A few seconds passed with no acknowledgment: just the steady countdown in his ears and the piercing whistle of the wind.
At T-minus seventeen, Kenneally nodded back. Clarion re-checked his suit’s status – safety off, machine gun primed, battery charge at maximum – and took a series of deep breaths. The Mechsoldier’s Mantra came back to him, unbidden but always there, pressing up against his mind.
A soldier with no mech is exposed; a mech with no soldier is inert. A soldier without their mech carries the strength of flesh and blood: a soldier with their mech carries the strength of a machine. You are your mech: it is as natural to your body as the breath in your lungs and the heart in your ribs.
A mech gives their soldier the courage to face the enemy, a thousand-to-one, and call it an even fight.
There were four short, sharp blasts on the launch siren, and Clarion felt the dropship shudder as the first wave of soldiers dropped away. He barely had time to look back up at Kenneally before the drop indicator in his helmet display flashed green. There was a hiss, and in a fraction of a second the interior of the dropship was totally out of view, disappearing as quickly and totally as a coffee ring stain under a tablecloth.
The drop line whirred, and Ostend’s beach rushed up to meet him. Unperturbed, Clarion simply selected the ‘detach’ option from his suit’s menu. There was a muted clunk as it dropped away, and as the brownish sand rushed up to meet him, Clarion realised he’d miscalculated: the line hadn’t had time to pull taut, and he was now plummeting unguided. Gritting his teeth, he simply closed his eyes and prayed that the impact wouldn’t kill him. It’d be really embarrassing to have your suit scraped off the sand and your family told that you’d died within a minute of your first combat drop. With his luck, his suit’s recorder feed would end up on one of those sick WarFails sites, and millions of people back behind the Perimeter would laugh their socks off as he broke his spine and was helplessly slaughtered by a passing Gauran.
He slammed into the sand with a whoomp. The impact knocked the breath out of him; for a second, Clarion stared slackly at the blurred fuzz of his faceplate display. Nothing mattered more than air. It felt as if cement had set in his throat.
Suddenly, he was unceremoniously hauled to his feet: frozen pixels hung and then solidified into the image of a mechsuit, both arms clamped around his shoulders and the faceplate inches from his.
“Oi, mate, you all right? Looked like a nasty drop!” the soldier’s voice asked in his ear, crackling with transmission static. Clarion cut his gaze down to the other suit’s breastplate out of habit. This time the flag was Australian, with MARINO, R.T barely visible beneath a spray of tiny crater-marks.
“Ye..yeah… I, ah, cut my drop line too early…”
He coughed. It felt like a strawful of air being blown through razor blades.
“Right, shit, okay. Stick with me! The G’s are being pushed back into the streets. C’mon, let’s go! Shake it off!”
Marino charged toward the ridgeline at the top of the beach, which was already a maelstrom of gunfire, sand and flame. Clarion followed, still slightly breathless. The off-kilter remains of Ostend’s seafront high-rises seemed to watch him, poking into the sky like fractured fingers.
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