Humble Beginnings

​Hey guys. I'm Dan, the co-designer on From Rust, and the guy who junks up your screens with words. I wanted to share a bit about the game's history!

Before it was the glorious pinnacle of cooperative card-collecting adventures it is today, From Rust was actually a tabletop setting. Just after roll20.net was released, my little brother and a couple of our mutual friends asked if I could run a tabletop session through it to test the site out. The first question I ask any group who asks me to DM is: What system?

They didn't know. They weren't veteran tabletop players; they'd played D&D once or twice and that was it. The only restriction was that one of my friends wanted to play, quote, a "mechromancer." The hell is a mechromancer?

So I started thinking about settings, and I guess I must've watched Terminator a little too recently, because rogue machines and a war-torn Earth were in my head. I wrote a quick and dirty setting and some basic character classes and we ran the session -- my brother and friends were scavengers in the wasteland, fighting machines and just trying to survive. In the tabletop game, you had a limited time out in the wastes before you were hopelessly overrun by enemies, so you had to get out there, grab whatever you could find, and high-tail it back to something called a Skylight, which was basically a fancy magnetic hook that could take you back up to the floating cities you came from.

The session was a hell of a lot of fun, and they enjoyed the enemies I'd made, the character classes, yadda yadda. So I kept expanding it and eventually made a much more fleshed-out system. Before I got to run a real campaign in it, though, another friend suggested that, hey, maybe this would work as a card game.

Huh. Maybe it would.