The year is 2405

Almost twenty years after the brutal fall of the Avignon Empire, its once-shimmering capital city still stands as little more than a broken monument to fascist folly. The terror bombings may have stopped, and the foreign peacekeepers are mostly gone, but no economic redevelopment program can truly make up for what was lost.

Siblings, cousins, parents - everyone lost someone back then.

In the face of solitude and devastation, many of those who did banded together and escaped into the ruins - became misfits, or "Racailles". Back then, it was for survival: it was that, or waiting to get mulched by a rogue imperial mech plowing through your assigned refugee camp. Today, it's for belonging: to not die inside while making ends meet in a city that, by design, still feels like a prison to most. 

A new and improved Nouvelle Lutesse - newer, sleeker and more angular than ever before.

Back then, those "Racailles" skated because it was fast, agile and took the edge off. It's not like you could just drive around what remained of the boulevards: first, because you never knew when a fight could break out between army remnants and peacekeepers; second, because you sure as hell didn't own an unexploded car. Twenty years later, they do because Alliance architects have unwittingly turned the city into a veritable skater paradise - and nowhere else is more true than in the West Side, home to most of the city's best skating spots.

So clock out, get your board and come shred them. 

Radio Free Lutesse is a GMless, 1-to-4 players skate session RPG Inspired by Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Thrasher: Skate & Destroy and La Haine. A game about skater misfits and a city that doesn't want them anymore. You are one of such misfits: a Racaille (often shortened to "Rack"), and you're out there in your offtime, hitting one of the West Side's many street skating spots. You may be doing so alone or with friends, and you know that if you make too much ruckus you'll find yourself running from a variety of pissed off civil servants: from disgruntled foreign peacekeepers to private security in souped-up standup scooters. Still, you shred - because fuck'em.

Featuring a 4-stat dicepool system very loosely inspired by the World of Darkness games, Radio Free Lutesse is all about agility, chaos and drama: a single skating session plays something like a narrative board game, in which each player takes a turn attempting a trick off of the architectural features visible on your chosen spot's postcard. After every round, passerbys of different kinds will come snoop on your session - all while your mistakes and failed tricks slowly but steadily attract the attention of nearby cops. Whether you're chased off the spot or call the session of your own volition, that can be considered a full session of Radio Free Lutesse. 

In case you got particularly attached to your Racks however, the game also offers a couple of mechanics for continued "campaigns" through multiple skating sessions - mainly with the Hangout and Board Shop systems, with which you may further the relationship between your characters and the city itself, give each other bonuses or debuffs, get really angry about posers waiting in line at the crab shop or replace your broken custom board with the one piece of cheap garbage you can actually afford.

In a manner inspired by Hardcase, many of this game's systems are optional and modular: meaning you can very well play with just your 4 stats and a pre-generated board if you're just here to skate - or give your Rack a specific clothing style, graffiti crew, horrible dayjob and up to three, potentially contraddictory political fixations if you want to truly get RPG with it. 

You caught all that? Then tune in and turn up: it's Radio Free Lutesse.

Best played along with the official soundtrack.