Taking This Somewhere Else

The engine is genre-agnostic below the skin. Here is what to change and what to leave.

Building a villain campaign

Almost nothing changes mechanically, and the two layers that do are the interesting ones.

Heat inverts into something better. Keep the field, keep the 0–10 track, and re-point it: Heat is now how badly the heroes want you, and the thresholds become "a cape has been assigned to you," "they have your pattern," "they know where you sleep." The Identity Clock works unmodified.

Ties do the heavy lifting. A villain protagonist with three named civilian Ties is the entire pitch of the genre. Do not weaken them into assets. The free Push for protecting them is what makes the character a person rather than a threat statblock the players happen to control.

Recast the Fronts as heroic institutions with clocks, and keep the escalation rule exactly as written. The city's response Scale still equals the protagonists' Scale, one arc late — it is just wearing a cape now.

Reskinning the setting

Delete Locations/, Factions/, Threats/ and Characters/, and rewrite the shipped Powers/ and Equipment/ files in your own idiom. Then:

1. Rewrite settings.imageStyleInstructions first, before generating any art — it composes into every generation automatically.
2. Rewrite settings.gm.personality to match your tone. The shipped Scanner persona is deliberately terse and physical.
3. Rewrite the game start. A template game start is the clearest sign of an unfinished project.
4. Leave GM Instructions/Ascent Core Rules alone unless you changed a rule. It is genre-neutral.

The Player's Handbook mentions Verge City files by reference in three chapters. Update those mentions or the chips will point at deleted files.

Other genres

The engine ports cleanly anywhere power levels span orders of magnitude and you want one ruleset across the whole range: mecha, kaiju, cultivation fantasy, cosmic horror, a Dragon Ball-shaped power curve.

Rename the vocabulary and keep the machinery:

Every one of those substitutions is a text change. None of them touches the dice.