What price would you pay to achieve your wildest dreams? What risks would you take to change the world? For a select few, these questions aren't hypothetical. They're an offer.
"We wager everything in the Contracts: our morals, our humanity, our very lives."
The Contract
is a Genre Blending Thriller Fantasy Kitchen Sink Tabletop RPG designed by shadytradesman and published by Sapient Snake LLC in 2020. In The Contract, you play as beings (usually regular humans) with exceptional potential chosen by The Harbingers to become Contractors, who go on deadly missions in order to gain power. The setting of your game could be entirely homebrewed, but the default setting is The Illuminated Earth, a version of the Present Day where the advent of smartphones and the internet confirmed the existence of the supernatural instead of disproving it. The supernatural exists and everyone knows of it, but actual magical sightings remain uncommon and sensationalized. Combat is usually deadly and ill-advised while creative problem-solving is rewarded. Most Contracts run as Monster of the Week episodic sessions with a minor bit of Arc Welding, and anyone can Game Master within a playgroup rotationally.
The entire ruleset is free to read on the official website which also serves as a character sheet and playgroup manager. The game also has a Kickstarter and a Patreon.
The game and its setting contains examples of the following tropes:
- Adventure-Friendly World: The Harbingers only recruit those with potential and ambition. Contracts take place in Real Life and typically include needing to keep up some semblance of The Masquerade as an obstacle.
- After-Action Healing Drama: Wounds, if unstablized, can become worse over time, necessitating healing even after you win or escape a combat.
- Anyone Can Die: Combat is quick, risky and dangerous. Moreover, if you go into a situation unprepared or make stupid decisions, it's easy to get into a Vicious Cycle of taking on stress and injuries from an inescapable situation.
- Cast from Hit Points: The Sacrifice drawback.
- Cast from Sanity: The Traumatic drawback.
- Combat, Diplomacy, Stealth: While the game encourages out-of-the-box thinking and multiple pathways to solving a problem, combat, diplomacy and stealth are usually equally valid options for going about a Contract.
- Crazy Enough to Work: The Daredevil asset, which gives you +3 dice when attempting something risky.
- Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Can be averted. Your Contractors can make a move to use their powers for money, improving their finances.
- Deal with the Devil: Signing onto becoming a Contractor can be seen as this, because although you get incredibly strong powers you have to go on deadly missions and you will be irrevocably changed.
- Dysfunction Junction: Most Contractors will pick up a trauma or two from doing Contracts, not to mention any Maddening gifts, which can lead to multiple ways of triggering Heroic BSoD between Contractors and a comically large number of delusions, complusions and phobias.
- Everyone Has a Special Move
- Everyone Meets Everyone: Since anyone can play in a session in the same playgroup, most sessions will have a scene like this where players take turns introducing their characters to each other.
- Fantastic Racism: The Sons of Salem is a loosely-organized conservative populist movement in the United States that preaches violent opposition to anything they perceive as witchcraft, demonic, or monstrous.
- Fun with Acronyms: Prometheus Ventures' business strategy—Locate, Obtain, Secure, Enterprise, aka LOSE.
- Jack of All Stats: It's very possible to make an averaged out character in this system, with the asset Jack Of All Trades giving you +1 dice to any ability you have a 0 in.
- Like Reality, Unless Noted: The official timeline of Illuminated Earth includes and consistently updates for real-life events such as Tiktok, COVID-19, and the rise of mainstream AI technology.
- Magitek: Most legendary artifacts can come off as this.
- Mana: Gifts can be activated with Source, which can be customized to your liking.
- Megacorp: Prometheus Ventures is a Palo Alto-based venture capital firm that obtains, studies, and develops business applications for supernatural artifacts. It is a small organization headed by a small circle of independently-wealthy individuals, all of whom have since become exceedingly rich and powerful due to the firm’s success.
- Necessary Drawback: Choosing drawbacks for gifts can make your gift cost lower allowing you to take more enhancements. Similarly, liabilities can give you more XP to spend on other parts of your character.
- Paranormal Investigation
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: With the creativity and mechanics of the character creation system, it's very likely that your Contract team will end up like this. In fact, the rules discuss this trope when explaining what game masters should expect a group to be capable of.
- Reed Richards Is Useless
- Schrödinger's Suggestion Box: A feature of the Gift Builder is the ability to completely customize and flavour the gifts your Contractor receives, creating your own specific enhancements or drawbacks. For instance, the Injure gift could be anything from a powerful laser blast to a jacked-up superattack or a barrage of fire.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Given the tone and mechanics of the setting, this can occur quite frequently.
- The Magic Comes Back: In 1527, the Harbingers mysteriously disappeared. They returned in 2023 to select new chosen to become Contractors.
- There Are No Therapists: Averted hard. Therapy is a direct game mechanic where you have to pay experience in order to cure your traumas, and being imbued makes you more susceptible to therapy. However, therapists may leak your information or get you into trouble depending on what might have occured.
- Urban Fantasy: The World of Weirdness has been made known to all regular humans, but encounters with the supernatural or magical are limited or suppressed and knowing of their existence has only made Muggles more obsessed with finding proof of their whereabouts.Unnatural, Uncommon: "People do not pop into their local potion shop to pick up genuine alchemy or wave hello to their local werewolf barista at Starbucks. Unexplainable phenomena happen every day, but the world is a big place. Most alien encounters go unreported. Most people who weild supernatural powers don't make a show of it or aren't powerful enough to truly matter."
