The Unwanted Inheritance

A collaborative storytelling game where you play uplifted soldiers—intelligent animals engineered for military service—navigating what comes after. Your creators' civilization has fallen. You inherit functional infrastructure, sophisticated equipment, and complex conditioning, but no orders. No oversight. No purpose except what you choose.

This is a game about negotiating legacy: What do you keep? What do you transform? What do you reject? How do you build community when you disagree about the past?

How This Came to Exist

The Unwanted Inheritance originated months ago as a thought experiment: What if a game about uplifted animals wasn't about resistance or survival, but about reconstruction? What happens after the oppressors are gone, when you're left holding systems designed for purposes you may no longer want?

The timing is absurd: this released the same week as Untamed Worlds, a much larger game exploring similar territory. But where that game centers on serving (and potentially rebelling against) your creators, this one starts after they're already gone. Different questions, different tools, strange synchronicity.

This is a game for stories that don't get told as often—the hard work of building something new from inherited parts, the philosophical labor of questioning conditioning without clear enemies, the civic challenge of forming community with people who interpret the past differently.

What You Get

• 9-page PDF: Complete rules for 2-4 players
• No prep required: Session Zero creates your community together
• Flexible timing: 45 minutes to 2+ hours per session
• Rotating facilitation: Everyone shares the Guide role
• No resolution mechanics: Decisions emerge through discussion, consensus, or deliberate deadlock
• Generational play: Optional rules for skipping ahead decades to see what your choices became

Who This Is For

This game demands philosophical engagement. You can't play it casually. If you want tactical combat and power fantasy, look elsewhere. If you want extended conversations about identity, authority, and inherited social programming—dressed up as melancholy fables about intelligent animals in military ruins—this might work.

Content Notes

Themes include: inherited trauma, military conditioning, authority and autonomy, post-collapse survival, interspecies social dynamics. Session Zero tools included for establishing boundaries.

Price

Free. Not pay-what-you-want, just free. This emerged from conversations with language models about politics and story structure. The supply chain is ethically compromised enough that charging money felt wrong. Take it, play it, modify it, ignore it, recycle it.

License

CC BY-SA 4.0. Do what you want with it as long as you share alike.

Credits

Design: The Grey Ledger Society + CGCG Helix,  A human/machine collaboration 
Inspired by questions about what inheritance means when you didn't choose what you received