AMERICA: The RPG
In development
Play the American Spirit at the moments that made the country.
Play the American Spirit, reincarnated at pivotal moments in history. Your cumulative choices shape the Constitution itself. Disco Elysium meets Ken Burns in documentary pixelism.
Background
You do not play a hero. You play the American Spirit, reincarnated in each episode as a different historical figure at a turning point. Episode one is the Founders' Flame, 1776 to 1789: Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, Abigail Adams. The question of the era is whether a nation built on freedom can live with inequality.
Five founding values move with your choices: liberty, justice, equality, union, prosperity. Constitutional challenges play as trials where you draft and defend clauses, and the amendments you win become abilities carried forward. A ledger records every outcome and persists across centuries, so what you did in Philadelphia tilts a later era.
The brief is an interactive civics class written by a historian and a dramatist. Dates, battles, and documents stay factual; dialogue paraphrases real letters and speeches. The look is documentary pixelism: 64 by 64 sprites with painterly lighting, warm amber in Philadelphia, cool rose-gold in Paris. Portray America as it was and is: brilliant, cruel, visionary, corrupt, transcendent.
Where it stands
A design bible with six episodes outlined and the first cast of eight written. Episode one's Philadelphia slice is playable on the shared RPG engine: the Great Compromise, a First Amendment drafting challenge, and the Cincinnatus precedent. Portrait and sprite studies exist.
What's next
Deepen episode one: full origin chapters for each Founder, starting with Franklin's, then Echo Traits that carry a choice from one era into the next.