First look: Death to the Technomancer! forces players to fold away their humanity

Laurie Blake, co-designer at independent tabletop studio Stop, Drop & Roll, revealed prototype rules for a new body-horror roleplaying game, Death to the Technomancer!, during Tabletop Scotland 2026 at the Royal Highland Centre. Spoken to by Geek Native at the booth, Blake confirmed that the unannounced title marks the team’s shift from the tactical rebellion of Why We Fight into high-tempo, cybernetic attrition.

The game puts players in the role of inSURGENTs fighting their way through Necropolis, a monolithic industrial city ruled by the megacorporation Necromantech. Armed with scrap cybernetics, teams attempt an ascent up a central 100-floor tower to assassinate the Technomancer. The prototype text at the booth sets an uncompromising tone for the run:

There’s 100 floors between you and the Technomancer. Thousands of zombies, monsters and fleshbots in your way. They think it’ll be enough to stop you. It won’t.”

Mechanical progression balances survival against psychological erosion. Player characters are inherently fragile glass cannons, relying on jet legs and backstreet augmentations to stay mobile. As inSURGENTs carve through Necromantech forces, including Zombots, armoured zombies, and biological flesh-horrors, they must harvest enemy parts to repair their own bodies and sustain the climb.

Survival extracts a severe cost. Every grafted monster part forces the player to discard an element of their human identity. In the prototype rules, this erosion is tracked directly on the physical character sheet: a long strip of paper printed with the character’s backstory, personal bonds, and foundational memories. Each time an inSURGENT integrates a defeated monster part to stay alive, the player folds the strip over, physically hiding and losing access to their past.

By the time a party reaches the summit, their original identities are largely erased. If the party successfully kills the ruling overlord, the surviving player characters risk having replaced so much of their humanity with Necromantech hardware that they simply assume the mantle, becoming an even worse Technomancer.

The playtest binder on display featured origin tables that grounded player motivations before the tower run begins. Character creation establishes what brought each insurgent to the fight, from community defence to illegal augmentation, alongside the specific tragedy that broke their old life, such as corporate betrayal, industrial burnout, or brutal sweeps by corporate NForcers.

Stop, Drop & Roll presented the game as an active work-in-progress ashcan, with public playtest signups and rules feedback open across the convention weekend. Find them at B-03.