The old world died in fire. What came after was worse.
Machines rose from the ash and built twelve cities in the sky — the Heavenly Spires — tethered to the ruined earth by cables thick as trees. They divided themselves into five tiers, from the salvaged Scrappers who crawl through rust beside you, to the Ascended who have left physical form behind entirely. And between the Spires and the Wasteland, they built the Arena: fifteen floors descending into bedrock, where humans and machines bleed for the entertainment of chrome gods.
You live in that world. This book tells you how to survive it.
What This Game Is
World of Machines is a tabletop roleplaying game about fighting your way up — or just fighting to stay alive. Every session, your crew takes on Arena matches, bounty hunts, salvage runs, and the messy politics of sponsors who own your contracts. Between fights, you repair your mech, argue with your handler, and decide what you're willing to do for one more floor.
The game runs on a simple core: roll a d20, add your modifier, and beat a difficulty number. Everything else — combat, mech warfare, scavenging — builds on that one motion.
You will need:
- A set of polyhedral dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20), or a dice app
- A character sheet (your Character file in this project)
- A mech sheet if you pilot (your Mech file)
- Two to five other people, one of whom acts as the Game Master (GM)
What Kind of Story Is This?
It depends on where you start. That choice is the first one you make, and it shapes everything else.
| Where You Stand | What Life Feels Like |
|---|
| The Arena | You are owned. You fight in a mech — or beside one — for a sponsor who sees you as an investment. Win and you climb. Lose and you fall. The crowd decides if you matter. |
| The Rim | You live in the salvage belt around the base of a Spire, where Scrappers and humans share streets and desperation. Every bounty is a gamble. Every part you pull is one step closer to something better. |
| The Wasteland | Beyond the walls, radiation and ruin. Feral tribes, rogue machines, and pre-war horrors. No Spire to protect you. No Arena to contain the violence. Just you and whatever you've learned to survive. |
| The Spires | You are beautiful enough to be kept — a pet, an ornament, a status symbol for a Chromar or an Official. Silk and luxury, and a cage you cannot leave. Some cages are gilded. All of them lock. |
No matter where you start, the same truths hold:
- Beauty is power. The machines believe it as doctrine, and the world is shaped around it. How you look — and how your mech looks — matters.
- The Spires are rotting. Reactors flicker. Cables fray. The foundations are failing and everyone is pretending they aren't.
- You are not supposed to win. The system is designed to keep you where you are. Climbing takes more than skill — it takes allies, luck, and a willingness to break rules.
The People You'll Meet
Five tiers of machine rule this world. You will deal with all of them eventually.
Scrappers build themselves from salvage and fused flesh. They live alongside humans in the walls because the Spires cast them out. Some dream of climbing back up. Some have learned that climbing was never the point.
Organisers are your handler, your supervisor, your babysitter. Segmented, bulky, with a smooth porcelain mask where a face should be and cables at their shoulders that mark their rank. Every Arena team has one. The good ones keep you alive. The bad ones keep you useful.
Officials are the bureaucracy — cold, symmetrical, procedural. They enforce the rules, collect the tribute, and file the reports that decide whether your team gets fed.
Chromars are the chrome gods of the Arena circuit. Exaggerated, flawless, terrible. Their frames are sculptured feminine ideals taken to impossible extremes, and their cable crowns — meters of living cable spilling from their heads — are worth more than your life. They own teams the way you own tools.
Ascended are rumor and light. Crystalline minds spread across entire sectors. They almost never appear in person. When they do, you will not understand what you're seeing.
How to Use This Book
The handbook is organized in the order you need it:
- This chapter — what the game is and what it feels like.
- Creating a Character — origin, role, stats, flaws, gear, and your starting mech.
- Combat — how fights work, on foot and in the cockpit. (Combat overview → Rules → Mech combat → Damage & consequences)
Read the first two chapters before your first session. Skim the combat chapters so the table language is familiar, then look up details as they come up in play. You do not need to memorize anything — the GM handles the heavy lifting.
One more thing: the lore entries in this project — Core Lore, The Flesh That Remembers, and The Salvage Contract — are where the deep world-building lives. This chapter gives you the shape. Those files give you the weight. Read them when you want to know why the world is the way it is, or hand them to a player who asks what the Spires actually look like from the inside.
You know enough to begin. Go make someone worth rooting for.
