Project Negentropy
Project Negentropy has begun its public release as a tabletop role-playing game and setting resource. The first release materials are being placed online in stages, beginning with the Department 6 field site, which contains internal pages, manuals, training notes, personnel material, and practical game references for players building Troubleshooters and preparing teams for cylinder operations.
Visit the current release site here: Project Negentropy Department 6.
Project Overview
Negentropy is a long-form science fiction and role-playing project by Nelson McKeeby. The setting follows Dustin-Rhodes Corporation, Project Negentropy, Department 6, and the Troubleshooters who enter Negentropic Cylinders for difficult work across broken timelines, failed institutions, damaged infrastructure, and unfamiliar societies.
The game material emphasizes practical problem-solving, team preparation, field procedure, historical knowledge, logistics, technical repair, medicine, language, diplomacy, and survival. Its central question is how capable people preserve knowledge, restore working systems, and keep human communities alive when ordinary institutions are gone or failing.
Development Articles
These essays trace the development of Negentropy from its first ideas in 1979 through the campaigns, manuals, research methods, and later work needed to preserve a setting written over decades. Each article approaches one part of that history in its own context.
More on Negentropy in 1979
An eleven-year-old attempt to place fantasy and science fiction inside one history led to the Great War of 5000 BCE, technical magic, the future worlds of Oasis and Ocean, and the Negentropic Cylinder.
The Origins of Negentropy: 1979
This article returns to the night in June 1979 when the central ideas of Negentropy first came together. It follows the research process that turned those ideas into a durable setting.
A Working Broken Land
The post-Fall continent is broken at the scale of the old nation but filled with societies that have spent generations building workable adaptations. The article follows Blackhawk, the Coastal Empire, and the Dromed Lords of the Weal to show how geography and history produce cultures whose cooperation and conflicts have practical causes.
Developing the Economy of a Broken Land
The post-Fall economy survives through local production and exchange, but each region grows only until a limiting factor restrains it. The article follows how surplus, transportation, Free Traders, and Project knowledge turn those limits into the economic geography of the broken land.
The Negentropic Cylinder
The Cylinder began as an answer to the problems I saw in conventional suspended animation. Its limits then became one of the main forces shaping the game.
Equipping the Team: Researching the Troubleshooter Loadout, 1980–1988 (Part One)
The first equipment problem in Campaign 80 began with two gym bags and grew into years of interviews about what a Troubleshooter should carry into an unknown future. Survivalists, gamers, and a Miccosukee elder offered sharply different answers that helped turn equipment selection into a problem of logistics, skills, and reusable capability.
Building the Project Arsenal
Project weapons grew from research, equipment I had seen, and the requirement that whatever went into a Cylinder had to remain useful later. The result was an arsenal built around commitment instead of novelty.
Developing Guns for a Sword and Sorcery Game
Firearms do not have to erase swords from a sword-and-sorcery setting. This article traces how black powder, salvage weapons, industrial capacity, ammunition supply, and cultural design turned guns into evidence about the societies that make and use them.
Designing by Research
Research became a filter that could preserve an idea, force it to change, or eliminate it. The Pipe Car shows how physical limits became part of the design process.
The Pipe Car Problem
The Pipe Car began as a compact electric vehicle forced to live within the Cylinder's physical limits. Its development became an early lesson in why a useful constraint could create better play than a perfect machine.
Magic That Could Still Be Physics
Dwimmer entered the game just before Campaign 80 and had to produce physically coherent results even when its mechanism remained extraordinary. That decision tied magic to knowledge and trained thought.
Campaign 80
The first regular Negentropy campaign began with a twelve-hour game on September 21, 1980. It became the place where the written project first had to survive sustained player choice.
Inventing the Troubleshooter Team
The first Troubleshooter jobs were not designed as a fixed organization. They emerged during Campaign 80 as players took responsibility for recurring problems, while each character still carried a lifetime specialization whose value could extend far beyond the team's immediate survival.
Classe Mulet: A Base That Moved
Campaign 82 turned the Classe Mulet into a moving headquarters that carried the team along the Ohio and Rapido toward the Gulf. The players adapted the boat around their Pipe Car and Project electrical system, creating a base they could improve without giving themselves a reason to stop exploring.
Clickers: When the Machine Became a Person
Clickers began as malfunctioning androids that Project observers misclassified as several different variants. Samely Sorbonne changed that idea by becoming a recurring person the players trusted without ever learning he was a Clicker, and the transition became explicit when Todd S. later played a Clicker named Electric.
From Elves to the Kindred
A player asked for an elf after losing a character in Campaign 80, so I brought the Oldari over from Oasis. That quick solution gradually became the much broader Kindred concept.
The Game Ladder and the Five Rules
The game ladder was the small task system at the center of a much larger body of real-world information. The Five Rules gave the Game Master a way to judge uncertainty without replacing the subject being modeled.
Knowledges Instead of Skills
The first Troubleshooter record grew from a school résumé used for internships. That origin encouraged characters to be defined by what they actually knew rather than by a conventional fantasy class.
Learning Instead of Leveling
Troubleshooters begin as trained adults, so advancement comes largely from learning the future. A campaign changes the team by reducing ignorance and turning experience into useful knowledge.
The Characters Create BEMs
Players turned BEM encounters into investigations. Their questions about tracks, anatomy, habitat, feeding, local knowledge, and recovered evidence gradually transformed monsters into organisms and made knowledge itself part of character advancement.
The First Negentropy Manuals
The early game grew through working binders instead of one expanding core rulebook. Those manuals became the first architecture of the modern Negentropy library.
Scenes, Acts, and Flowcharts
Campaign 80 required a structure that could guide an adventure without predetermining the players' route. Scenes, Acts, and paper flowcharts became the solution.
Why Adventures Became Sourcebooks
An adventure kept producing information that remained useful after its immediate story ended. That experience gradually turned Negentropy adventures into reusable setting books.
Writing Negentropy Before Word Processing
The physical technology of writing shaped a project that was already growing faster than it could be organized. Paper, typewriting, early computers, and archival media each changed what could be revised and preserved.
From XNA to Xeno Nucleic Acid
XNA began as my placeholder for alien biology at a point where I lacked the science to explain it. Decades later, real work on xeno nucleic acids gave the old term a much stronger foundation.
How Canon Accumulated for Forty Years
A setting written across decades needs both a historical archive and a current answer. This article explains how later research and reconciliation gradually turned accumulated material into controlled canon.
The MAS 1936
The French MAS 1936 was designed as an economical modern service rifle while France continued work on self-loading arms. Its durability and family of variants made it a natural example of the Project preference for proven equipment with understandable limits.
The MAS 49/56
The MAS 49/56 was the mature result of decades of French self-loading-rifle development. For the Project, its value lay in combining semiautomatic capability with the same 7.5×54 mm ammunition family already supported for the MAS 1936.
The Uzi: Compact Firepower for an Expedition
The Uzi emerged from Israel’s need for a compact domestically produced automatic weapon. Project Negentropy retains it as expedition security equipment whose 9×19 mm ammunition and compact package fit a specialist team better than a universal infantry arm.
The Browning Hi-Power: The Project’s Standard Pistol
The Browning Hi-Power was developed by John Browning and Dieudonné Saive, then proved itself through global military service. Dustin-Rhodes standardized it as the Project’s ordinary 9×19 mm sidearm rather than inventing a futuristic pistol without a mature support system.