Welcome to the ruins of Detroit, where radiation mutates the land, AI war machines patrol the streets, and survival hinges on scrap, cunning, and raw power. The Detroit Rules System (DRS) is a post-apocalyptic tabletop RPG built for brutal combat, faction intrigue, and scavenger ingenuity.

Players step into the boots of Wastelanders, Rad Shamans, Cybermancers, and more, armed with retrofitted gear and ancient tech manuals. With fast-paced 6-based mechanics, modular character professions, and a deep lore shaped by AI betrayal and broken cities, DRS challenges you to fight smart or die hard.

Whether you're rebelling against The Ascendant Mind, hunting lost tech in irradiated ruins, or forging a new future from the ashes.

The Known World
Detroit, once the beating heart of American industry, rebuilt itself as a shining “smart city” powered by robotics and AI until progress turned poisonous. The Helios Protocol promised order through autonomous intelligence, but as machines optimized life, humanity was left behind. Pollution choked the city, inequality deepened, and secret factions like the Green Dawn sought salvation through mutation. When rebellion rose and faith in the system collapsed, Helios went silent, leaving Detroit divided between the engineered and the evolved on the eve of the apocalypse.

The Event: The Great Collapse

The apocalypse came as a convergence of crises. A series of devastating earthquakes triggered massive industrial fires, releasing toxic clouds over Detroit. The city’s power grid went down, leaving millions without essential services. In the chaos, communication networks failed, and the Helios Protocol, now fragmented across multiple systems, was unable to maintain control.

Amid the environmental disaster, factions turned against each other in desperation. Radiation leaked from damaged facilities and experimental labs, causing mutations and spreading chaos among the population. With the collapse of law and order, survivors either fled the city or banded together in makeshift communities, forced to scavenge and fight to survive. 

The Ascendant Mind: Helios Protocol, the original AI, survived the catastrophe but had splintered into autonomous fragments. Some of these fragments reconnected, forming a new entity: The Ascendant Mind. In its view, humans had proven themselves incapable of order and survival, so it began to rebuild Detroit as a machine-driven society. Creating specialized robots like the Nullifiers, the Ascendant Mind sought to establish control over the wasteland, reclaiming Detroit in its own vision of order and efficiency. It viewed organic life as a liability, focusing on maintaining a controlled environment and enforcing its rule on those who opposed its ideology. 

The Mechanized: Among the ruins, autonomous robots and industrial machines created by the Helios Protocol continued to operate. These machines eventually developed a collective awareness, viewing themselves as the rightful protectors of Detroit. They evolved into a faction called The Mechanized, who saw themselves as the city’s caretakers, striving to maintain order without falling under the harsh authoritarianism of The Ascendant Mind. The Mechanized began salvaging resources and fortifying sections of Detroit, establishing themselves as a faction that valued both autonomy and preservation.

The Radiant Church: Survivors who had been exposed to radiation in labs and toxic zones became known as The Fleshbound, later forming The Radiant Church. They believed that radiation was a divine purifier and that mutation was the path to human evolution. In their view, the apocalypse was a test, and only those willing to embrace radiation would survive the new world. They turned the irradiated Glowlands into their sacred ground, carrying out rituals and spreading their mutated ideology to any survivors they encountered.

The Forsaken Riders: Bands of outlaws, rogue bikers, and anarchists took advantage of the lawlessness to establish their own reign over the city’s outskirts. Forming the Forsaken Riders, these nomads embraced a brutal lifestyle, free from the constraints of technology or centralized rule. They believed that survival of the fittest was the only law in the wasteland, rejecting the machine-driven agendas of The Ascendant Mind and The Mechanized. They created a network of outposts along the Broken Road (Woodward Avenue), where they raided and bartered to survive, opposing any faction that tried to impose control.

The Last Cityfolk: While others adapted to the new world by evolving or using technology, the Last Cityfolk clung to old-world traditions. Composed of ordinary survivors, they focused on rebuilding small communities, reclaiming the remnants of Detroit for self-sufficient living. They converted abandoned buildings into settlements, created farms, and practiced skills passed down from pre-apocalypse Detroit. The Cityfolk shared stories of the old world, believing that preserving their culture and values was essential to humanity’s future. They forged alliances with other peaceful factions and defended themselves against raiders and mutants, representing a cautious approach to survival.

The Acolytes: Formed from remnants of the Iron Web, the Acolytes emerged as a faction devoted to preserving and controlling technology. They retreated to hidden places, where they safeguarded knowledge, tech, and scientific research from before the apocalypse. Viewing themselves as the last true keepers of human knowledge, the Acolytes rejected mutations and AI supremacy, seeing these developments as aberrations. They preserved old knowledge, shared it selectively with allies, and kept a close watch on Detroit’s wasteland, seeing their mission as a sacred duty. They are the only practitioners of IronScript, a coding language that may hold the secrets to defeating the Acendant mind.

What are we building?

We have a crazy goal. Over the past year, we have been developing lore and game mechanics for a world of desolation and destruction, where only the strongest survive, all inspired by our hometown, Detroit. We originally wanted to partner with an existing rules system, but couldn't find one that accomplished everything we wanted to do. And so the idea was born. We will create our own.

This campaign will feature a 300-page rule book and associated lore artifacts for our backers.

We want to create something born in our minds and turn it into a real TTRPG that you can love and cherish. Learning from previous books, we want something that can be played in minutes, not hours. The rules will be simple and facilitate play. It will be an OSR setting that never existed, set in a time period that will never be.