We had quite a few people come up to us at Cancon and after seeing our posts online and ask us, “What’s Hunter Planet?”

Our answer depends on who is asking.

I have never seen a Roleplaying Game:

Hunter Planet is a table top roleplaying game. No computers are involved, just the players, the person running the game with dice, pen and paper.

Dungeons and Dragons is the most famous roleplaying game, starting in the late 1970’s and exploded in popularity in Australia in the mid to late 1980’s.

The person who controls the ever moving story of the game is called a number of terms depending on the game system. Other games call him a Dungeon Master, Games Master or something similar.

Hunter Planet calls the person hosting the game a CM. This can mean many things – Condition Modifier, Chaos Manager, Chocolate Milk or Certified Maniac are among the descriptions.

The story of Hunter Planet is that the players are aliens from a galaxies spanning Federation of Planets. The Federation confidently states they have been at peace for over 500 years because all aggression is funnelled into legal hunts on Hunter Planets. The Aliens are anything but human. No one in the Federation has such a limited form of only two arms, two legs, one head and coming in a boring range of colours from very dark to very light brown or beige. And they have hair in all sorts of strange places.

Earth has been discovered and after the standard intelligence tests was found wanting and declared Non Compatible – will never be worthy of joining the Federation of Planets. The automatic translator has decided that our planet is called Dirt.

Dirt was sold off to the highest bidder, Hunting Tours Incorporated. HTI organises hunts on Dirt, which is a combination of a Safari and a Cruise. None of the Hunters are allowed to have any military experience.

Players create a character and assign attributes such as Strength, Intelligence and so on. They then allocate weapons and equipment and the CM announces, “You are beamed down to Dirt.”

At this point the game is a narrative with the CM explaining what the hunters can see and the players deciding what their characters will do. If the action is tricky or they want to fire their weapons, they roll dice to determine success or failure. The whole game is conducted within the combined imagination of the CM and players. The CM explains events in ways from an alien’s point of view.

One player who remembers playing Hunter Planet in the late 1980s said he was in a game where the CM described the area as a “large green area with a web across the middle and white lines in some sort of pattern on the ground.” At the end of the game the players laughed out loud when they were told it was a Tennis Court.

Why would you play a table top roleplaying game?

Because it is a fun adventure that can be played with friends for the duration similar to a normal movie. It is interactive not passive. Your decisions as a player change the direction of the story. This applies to the best laid plans of the players AND the CM.

In one game the players had encountered the end game Boss which was a huge mutant octopus. This should have given the characters immense trouble. One player experiencing her first game fired at the large eye she had seen with a five energy unit laser bolt. This is enough to destroy the side of a house. She rolled a very low number on her dice roll which indicated excellent success. The CM looked at his carefully laid plans disintegrate with a “Boom!” and had to quickly scramble towards his backup plan. “The air fills with the smell of burning calamari. Roll to see if you spot something moving.”

Already plays roleplaying Games:

For those that have been playing a table top roleplaying game, whether new or old, Hunter Planet can be called a “One Shot” game. That is, a game of Hunter Planet has no consequences on later games. It is not used as part of a campaign. It serves two important purposes:

Gateway Game

If you have never played a roleplaying game, Hunter Planet lets you experience a game without having to invest anything in understanding the rules. At Cancon 2026 we had fun games with 64 players over 26 games. Probably around half of these players had never played a roleplaying game before. They were up and running and roleplaying their characters within 15 minutes and by the end were laughing and panicking with the best.

The core of Hunter Planet is roleplaying. If you want to expand that to a game that lasts across many sessions you need more certainty and a more structured rule set is required. But Hunter Planet can be picked up and played on a whim. Roleplaying is fun.

Palate Cleanser

Experienced role-players that participate in campaigns or extended roleplaying within a rule based game can become a little stale. This is a normal state with anything one does over an extended period of time.

Hunter Planet is like a palate cleanser between courses. It provides a fun night of entertainment where players can experiment and use all their imagination within the story. If it doesn’t work, sometimes that is part of the fun. If a mad plan actually works, that is even more exciting!

What Now?

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Hunter Planet 3rd Edition will be released via Kickstarter in June.

We will also plan for some demo games in various places in the coming months for some hands on fun.