THE WORLD IS FUCKED. THE 80s ARE BACK.
It's 2080 and Earth has given up on us. Coastlines gone, governments collapsed, what's left run by corporations, cartels and AIs that manage half the planet, badly. And against every reasonable prediction, the 80s came back. Neon, shoulder pads, chrome sunglasses at midnight. The apocalypse arrived with a killer soundtrack and appalling fashion sense.
This is a dangerous, gaudy, high-tech, crazy, highly fucked up world where players play a bunch of tacky-looking mercenaries trying to make a living by taking risky (and sometimes seriously crazy) jobs.
That's you. Not heroes; hired guns in a world that pays well precisely because the work will probably kill you. You take the job because the money's good, and because the alternative is a life so boring you might as well have drowned with Old Paris.
PLAY IT STRAIGHT. LET THE CHAOS COME TO YOU.
Here's the thing most comedy games get wrong: they demand you be funny. Constantly. It's exhausting, and by hour three everyone's forcing it and nobody's having fun.
2080 does the opposite. Think Naked Gun; the funniest thing in the room is a man taking an absurd situation completely seriously. Play your merc like their life depends on it, because it does. The mechanics are built to be swingy and dramatic, so the ridiculous arrives on its own schedule.
Don't force the fun; let it happen. But if something bonkers happens, then absofuckinglutely go for it.
ONE ROLL. THAT'S THE WHOLE GAME.
2080 is so awesome it only needs a single core mechanic. Grab a D12, add your modifier, done:
Ability Roll = Natural Roll + Modifier
Your modifier comes from one of six Attributes (Fortitude, Agility, Finesse, Grit, Awareness, Intellect), plus a Proficiency bonus when the job's actually in your wheelhouse. No lookup tables, no subsystems, no forty-page combat chapter that plays like a different game. One roll, everywhere.
Difficulty doesn't change the target; it changes the dice. Every situation gets a DC from [+3] to [-3], and that's how many extra D12s hit the table. Positive, keep the highest. Negative, keep the lowest. The whole scale, in the game's own words:
Rain on the rock, and you're in a hurry, but you've climbed it before? The GM stacks the modifiers, they cancel out, you roll. It takes four seconds and it means every circumstance at the table matters mechanically without anyone consulting a single chart.
AND 2080 IS DELIBERATELY, UNAPOLOGETICALLY SWINGY.
This is a design choice, not an accident. A D12 with a modifier that tops out around +5 means the dice always have the final word; the competent get humiliated, the useless get their moment, and nobody at the table can calculate their way to a boring evening. Swinginess is the engine that makes the chaos happen on its own, which is exactly why you never have to force it.
SUCCESS ISN'T A YES OR A NO
Results land in Hits, counted in multiples of four, and each tier tells a different story:
That Glitch tier is where 2080 lives. You picked the lock, and snapped your last pick doing it. You made the jump, and something in your ankle didn't. The story keeps moving forward and it keeps getting worse, which is exactly what you want from a game about people who take stupid jobs for money.
And when you do roll an ASS, you don't have to stop there. Every PC has the Spank It talent:
Add 1 extra Hit to an ASS (3 Hits) or Boost a Manoeuvre.
Spend a Wacky and your Amazing Screaming Success gets even louder, and since a Crit hands you a Juice you can convert straight into a Wacky, a good roll can pay for its own upgrade. You can keep spanking it as long as you can keep paying.
The other talent everyone gets is Risk It, and it's pure 2080: throw out your careful modifiers and roll a D20 instead. Hit 10 or higher and your Natural Roll becomes a 12, an automatic Crit. Roll 9 or lower and it becomes a 1, an automatic Flop. Roughly a coin flip between the best and worst possible outcome, and you can even do it after a disappointing roll by spending a Wacky. Nothing on your character sheet helps you here. That's the point.
CRITS THAT ESCALATE INTO ABSURDITY
Roll a Natural 12 and you Crit. Roll several at once, which the DC system makes genuinely possible, and the game stops being polite about it:
A Crit is a clean kill. A Badass Crit sprays the room and rattles every enemy in it. A Fuck Off Crit reduces a man to neat cubes of flesh while his friends flee screaming. And the Mother of all Crits?
If someone rolls a Mother of all Crits… fuck reality; the imagination is the limit.
Roll a Natural 1 instead and you Flop, an automatic failure no modifier can rescue, and the GM gets to decide how much it costs you.
THREE CURRENCIES, ONE ARMS RACE
2080 runs on metacurrencies that push against each other all session long.
Juice is your morale and energy; burn through it and your merc slides from Stressed to Exhausted to Burn Out to Broken, at which point you don't heal at all. Combat drains it. Grief drains it. A good meal and a proper night's sleep bring it back.
Wackies are pure adrenaline, and they buy the good stuff: your Talents, and Wacky Moves, stunts that flatly ignore what the rules permit. Throwing a chair at a man mid-leap from a helicopter, on someone else's turn, isn't a roll. It's a price. Pay it and it simply happens:
Once they happen, Wacky Moves are absolute. They can't be countered, avoided or minimised; the desired outcome or effects happen fully.
And then there's the other side of the table. Shit Points are the GM's mirror currency, earned every round of combat and every time your luck turns, spent on Shit Moves, complications you don't get to roll against. Because:
The world of 2080 is a harsh and unfair world where shit happens all the time.
HOLLYWOOD'S CHEAP DEATH TRICK
Death is real in 2080, but it's negotiable. Every PC carries 3 Death Points, and as long as what killed you wasn't an Absolute Death, you can spend one to pull off the single most 80s mechanic in the book, the HCDT:
The PC appears lifeless; no breath, no pulse, very pale. After their colleagues exhaust their desperate attempts to resurrect the PC and everyone gives up, convinced of its complete demise, tears are shed, and words to honour the PC are spoken. It is only at this moment, when everyone totally believes undoubtedly that the character is absolutely, completely and definitely dead, that they miraculously come back to life.
Yes, it's the cheapest trick in cinema. Yes, it's a real rule with a real cost: you come back with a serious penalty of XP and in a pretty bad state (this has changed in the new version). And yes, the table has to genuinely grieve you first.
ENEMIES BUILT FOR SLAUGHTER
Minions don't track damage; they have a Damage Threshold of 1 or 2, and spare damage rolls over into the next one. Get a good hit in and you're not defeating an enemy, you're clearing a room. Above them sit Goons for a real fight, and Bosses when the job goes properly wrong.
Minions are cheap to deploy, easy to manage, and deeply satisfying to murder.
WHERE IT'S AT
It's an Alpha, which means everything is subject to change and nothing is final, so if you play it, tell me what broke. That's the whole point.