New Game Itchfunding !

To Lay a Foundation is a game about the Civil Service

Wow, it has been a while since I shared something here! Sorry about that. However, I feel this is something important that I wanted to share about.

What is To Lay a Foundation: A Roleplay of Public Service?

The Civil Service —the career employees of the various governments— have regularly been under attack in political campaigns around the world. This has been particularly prominent in the recent US elections and the professed policies of the incoming administration.

It is the job of the Civil Service to be experts in their fields to better implement the policies of the government from the rules that keep your workplace and food safe to managing our national resources. They are also in career positions to ensure there is a level of continuity from one political administration to the next. You can learn more about US public servants here.

Public servants can be restricted from implementing what the public might see as common-sense solutions to problems because old laws or limited resources. Other times they have to interpret legislative intent so they can apply laws to new situations since our legislatures can’t possibly make laws for every situation as it arrives. This can make the Civil Service a scapegoat for people who don’t like a particular policy or who are frustrated about inefficiencies that exist due to outdated practices.

To Lay a Foundation allows you to play in the shoes of Civil Servants, as well as the people who work around them like advocates, politicians and their staffers, contractors, and industry or academic consultants. The game uses a dice system based on Iron Breeze Games’ Iron Core that encourages cooperation and resource management as you try to solve problems on the pointy end of government customer service and policy implementation.

To help support the game as we go into Zine Month / Zinequest, I wanted to set up a itchfunding campaign. Any money collected as a part of it will be put forward toward making further improvements, more materials and scenarios, and maybe even expanding the system for more games in the future. It will be running from today (January 20th) to April 30th.

Here is a direct link to the itchfunding sale page.

You can also learn some more about the game at the video on my channel here! Future videos will come out in the coming weeks to explain character creation and the resolution system.