One Steppe Beyond!

You're not fixing cars. You're fixing the space between people.

What Is This?

Bodge & Faith: One Steppe Beyond is a 1-2 hour storytelling game where you and your friends drive terrible cars across impossible distances while discovering uncomfortable truths about yourselves and each other.

You'll play a crew of amateur rally drivers piloting a 1987 Lada (or equally questionable vehicle) across Transistorstan—a fictional landscape of salt steppes, decommissioned listening posts, and gas stations that sell both fuel and folklore. Your car will break down. Your crew will argue. The map will lie to you. And somewhere between the blown gaskets and the shouting matches, you'll figure out what you're really made of.

This is Top Gear meets Paris, Texas. It's Wacky Races directed by Wes Anderson. It's the road movie where the destination matters less than who you become getting there.

What Will You Do?

• Choose your approach: Are you a BODGE person (force it, jury-rig it, make it work through sheer audacity) or a FAITH person (trust the road, accept help, let go of control)?

• Drive impossible vehicles: Soviet Relics that leak blessed oil. Franken-Jeeps welded from three incompatible models. Microbuses with optimistic paint jobs and pessimistic engines.

• Face three legs of escalating chaos: Start on the Iron Plains where mistakes are funny. Survive the Glass Mountains where altitude amplifies tempers. Find yourself on the Blue Dot Steppe where silence and space reveal what remains.

• Manage three fragile resources: Durability (your car's structural integrity), Fuel (gasoline, diesel, hope, yak milk), and Bond (trust between crew members). When any hits zero, something ends—the car, the journey, or the friendship.

• Earn Style Points not by winning, but by becoming: The rally doesn't care who arrives first. It cares about the creative bodges, the moments of sacrifice, the stories you'll tell years later about the time everything fell apart and you held it together with duct tape and belief.

The Tone (Comedy → Contemplation)

This game starts light and gets heavy the way real road trips do.

Leg 1 is the honeymoon phase—blown tires are hilarious, wrong turns become adventures, singing along with your crew feels like the solution to everything.

Leg 2 thins the air and your patience. The mountains don't care about your schedule. Altitude sickness affects engines the same way it affects humans: they forget how to breathe properly. Friendships either deepen or shatter.

Leg 3 strips everything down to essentials. The steppe offers no distractions, no shortcuts, no excuses. Just you, your crew, your barely-functioning car, and the question: "Why are we doing this?"

By the time you reach Blue Dot City, you'll understand why some people measure distance in kilometers while others measure it in transformation.

What You'll Need

• 3-5 players (or fewer with solo drivers and NPC co-pilots)
• A handful of six-sided dice
• 1-2 hours
• Willingness to laugh at your own mechanical failures
• Comfort with games about interpersonal friction and repair

No prep required. No GM necessary (though one player can take the "Road Marshal" role to frame hazards and set difficulty). Character and vehicle creation takes 10 minutes.

The System (Lasers & Feelings Inspired)

Choose a number from 2-5. That's how you approach problems.

Lower numbers = BODGE (force it, improvise, bend the world until it squeaks) Higher numbers = FAITH (trust the unknown, choose connection over control)

Roll dice. Get under your number to BODGE successfully. Get over your number to succeed through FAITH. Roll exactly your number for a perfect moment that earns Style Points.

Everything else emerges naturally: crews choosing which resources to sacrifice, rival teams appearing at the worst times, checkpoint scenes where you attempt to repair both your car and your relationships before the next leg begins.

What Makes This Different?

Most racing games care about speed. This one cares about stories.

• There's no turn order, no movement grid, no official first place
• Resources deplete but can be restored through narrative acts—shared meals, reconciliation scenes, inspired repairs
• The vending machine at the finish line never works, and that's the point
• Your ending (Pilgrims, Racers, or Wanderers) reflects the kind of story you lived, not whether you won
• Failure is expected, encouraged, and often funnier than success

This is a game about motion as medicine—about keeping going when everything rattles and the map stops making sense, about laughter as the only working tool left in the kit.

Inspired By

• Lasers & Feelings by John Harper (system framework)
• The Straight Story (slow dignity of impossible journeys)
• Top Gear Specials (automotive absurdity meeting genuine awe)
• Paris, Texas (landscapes as emotional states)
• The Mongol Rally (real people actually doing this)
• Every road trip that changed someone

A Wes Anderson version of Wacky Races, with Bill Murray as Dick Dastardly, would not be far off.

What's Included?

This is a complete, free, 4-page game. No expansions needed, no "buy the full version" upsells.

You get:

• Full rules for vehicle creation, crew dynamics, and the three-leg rally
• Six pre-generated rival teams (from zealous Gear Apostles to documentary Film Crews)
• Three distinct legs with escalating emotional stakes
• Checkpoint mechanics for rest, repair, and reconciliation
• Style Points system that rewards story over optimization
• The vending machine epilogue that makes it all worthwhile

Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 so you can hack it, remix it, translate it, or build your own junkyard pilgrimage on its bones.

Content Notes

This game deals with:

• Exhaustion and frustration (mechanical and emotional)
• Interpersonal conflict between friends/partners
• Failure and inadequacy (treated gently, but present)
• Sacrifice and difficult choices

Use safety tools (X-card, Lines & Veils, etc.) and check in after heavy scenes. This game asks you to roleplay stress, but never at the cost of player comfort.

Why Free?

Because the best road trips start with someone saying "I found this weird thing online, want to try it?"

This is a love letter to every terrible car that made it farther than it should have, every argument that somehow strengthened a friendship, every wrong turn that became the story you tell most often.

It's free because the rally doesn't charge admission. You just show up with your junk car and your questionable judgment and see how far you get before something—mechanical or metaphorical—finally gives out.

Final Thoughts

You will not win this rally. You will probably not even finish it with your car intact.

But you'll arrive at Blue Dot City (or wherever your journey ends) with stories about the distance between wanting and arriving, about engines that taught you patience and roads that taught you humility, about the space between people and what it takes to keep that space from becoming a chasm.

Some arrive. All are changed. The road remembers everything.

The steppe awaits.