Velvet Cutter
Action Fantasy RPG · Fabula Ultima
No one has seen the sky in 400 years, and you are a Cutter, a debt-slave monster hunter who rappels into the toxic fog of the Dredge to kill biomechanical beasts and sell their parts, because the alternative is suffocation when the Company shuts off your oxygen.
The World
The world is the Silt-Stack: a vertical megastructure of incomprehensible scale, layer on layer of industrial infrastructure stacked so high and so deep that the original ground is a myth. Humanity built upward until the structures merged and the sky disappeared, about four centuries ago. The lower sectors drowned in toxic runoff and became the Dredge; massive bulkheads sealed each sector into isolation.
You live in the Hab-Belt, a thin layer of barely-habitable machinery suspended between the poison below and the sealed bulkheads above. It has breathable air, if you pay the Oxygen Tax. It has gravity, if you pay the Gravity Rent. It has the Company, which controls everything, and the promise of a Ticket Up through the bulkheads to the Upper Sectors. No one has ever seen anyone use one. The dream keeps people working anyway.
What You Play
You play a Cutter, a licensed exterminator who descends into the Dredge to kill Rust-Fauna and harvest their valuable parts. You took the job because you were born into debt; everyone is. Your parents' debt transferred to you, plus administrative fees, and the daily cost of breathing means you will never climb out doing honest work. Cutting is the most dangerous job in the Hab-Belt and one of the only ways to make real money.
Cutters come in shapes: the Striker who lands surgical, part-preserving kills; the Tank who soaks what would shred anyone else; the Support who keeps the crew breathing. You can fit a mold or carve your own niche. You will not pay off the Ledger. You hunt anyway.
How It Plays
Velvet Cutter runs on Fabula Ultima, the action fantasy RPG, tuned for the grind of contract hunting and the spend-everything tension of a fight in the fog. The tone is what we call GrimeHOPE. Monster Hunter crossed with industrial horror, oscillating between cozy and brutal: eating with friends and petting the robot dog one hour, fleeing through rust from something that wants to eat you the next.
It is a seasonal, live-service-style Play-by-Post world. You write your posts on Discord on your own schedule while the Hab-Belt keeps moving, seasonal arcs advance, contracts roll over, and a custom Discord bot stack tracks your inventory, dice, wounds, and the debt that never quite shrinks.