POD PEOPLE

A role-playing game of space invasion and body horror.

Pod People is a game inspired by the body-snatching alien invasion movies of the ‘50s and the ‘80s - like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, and Invaders From Mars - and it reimagines them from the alien organism’s point of view.

Written by Laszlo Tamasfi, and illustrated by Michael Malatini.

THE STORY

The currents of space brought you to the tiny blue planet called Earth. You arrived as a microscopic organism: a spore, evolved to withstand cosmic radiation and the million-year journey through the cold galaxy.

Now that you have arrived, you will be driven by a single instinct: to replicate and replace the most intelligent life form on the planet. You will grow into a pod, and after a short period of gestation you will emerge as a perfect replica of someone in your close proximity. Once you take their place, you will disperse more spores, and without being detected by the humans around you, you’ll attempt to overtake their society... One doppelganger at a time.

There is one thing unique to humankind that your long evolution hasn’t prepared you for: the complexity of its emotions. If anything, this will be your Achilles’ heel… You will have a hard time recognizing suspicion, worry, anger, fear, and all the other nuances of the emotional language, which will make it harder for you to infiltrate society.

Pod People focuses on this social aspect of the alien invasion. The biggest threat to you is being found out!

PLAYING THE ORGANISM

There are many role-playing games in which you can play non-human characters, yet even those tend to be rooted in a very familiar sense of identity. If you sit down to play, you will most likely have a character with abilities and skills and desires. Someone with a history of lived experiences to look back on. In other words, a person.

IN POD PEOPLE, YOU GET TO PLAY AN ALIEN SPECIES THAT IS TRULY ALIEN. A BEING THAT HAS NO SENSE OF SELF, YET SOAKS UP OTHERS' IDENTITIES LIKE A SPONGE. A HIVE MIND THAT CONTROLS MULTIPLE BODIES, PRETENDING TO BE DIFFERENT PEOPLE...

In fact, you and your party will play the same space organism, sharing the task of animating the different body doubles it grows, in an attempt to take over the world!

Pod People successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2023. If you’re interested, you can check out the campaign here.