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(Or, Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space as collaborative fiction)

This is a very derpy play-by-post game in which each player writes about a page of fluff minimum, and then condenses it into crunch actions. These crunch actions are fed into a fair dice roller to determine the outcome, which is then written about. And so on and so forth. Actual play sessions should last max. an hour and involve occasional interaction between the races before, during or after the rolling.

And so the small scale, less pompous gods made it manifest that whoever first traveled to the moon would meet one of their numbers there (Something about a timeshare there), and have a prayer answered with no uncertainty, no tricks and no monkey's paw style shenanigans.

The races that had long shaped the world with their wars and renaissances were too busy to listen.

Three smaller people, long considered lesser by most everyone else, heard the call and chose to answer it.

The fluffy, bouncy rabitians in their forest warrens.

The solid, stalwart and somewhat potato-like kerbals, from that little desolate island that was their whole world until the Great Pillow Fight.

And the energetic, passionate, spazzy goblins, who in fairness had been wanting to go to space for many todays but finally got around to stop picking at each other.

Rabitians are cuddly bunny-people who make up for their lack of fine (or any) manipulators with telekinesis. They are quite good at math, and most importantly they are level headed enough to listen to those who are good at math.

Goblins are thin, hyperactive orkoids who would be incredible builders if they understood the concept of making things one after another in an orderly fashion instead of all at once. They can't do math, but have great instincts for driving large, loud and explody things, which makes up for that.

Kerbals are large-headed green critters that are not related to goblins. They are marginally related to potatos. They excel at building reliable things, but cannot pilot for beans. Apparently they got some sort of giant yelling at them what to do when in the cockpit.

There is very little automation allowed! Magic will probably be used for the first stages of things, but it stops working somewhere up in the sky. Fluff it how you will!

Milestones include:

• Find out where magic stops working! (Unmanned Suborbital)
• Send somederp up there to see what it does! (Manned Suborbital)
• Get something of visible size to go up and stay up! (Orbital Satellite)
• Go around the globe! (Manned Orbital)
• Learn how to steer IN SPACE! (Orbital Docking/Undocking)
• Build a house there! (Station)
• Go around the globe enough time to make maps to sell! (Duration / Polar Orbit)
• Go up so far up that it becomes out! (Hohmann Transfer)
• Throw something/somederp so far that you'll never see it again! (Escape Velocity)
• Hit the Moon! (Lunar Impactor)
• Now go take a close look at it! (Lunar Pass / Lunar Orbital)
• Do it again, and this time come back with pretty drawings! (Lunar Polar Orbit)
• Take home delicious Moon cheese! (Lunar Landing)
• Steal their toys and take them home! (Unassisted/Contested Docking)
• Get back some of the derps that have been left up with no way to go down! (Rescue Mission)

... and finally, go ring the doorbell of the gods! (Targeted Lunar Landing + Extended Lunar EVA)

It's not that the (dice) gods hate you, but they are trying to be fair. So... onto the crunch!

Most everything is measured in resource points. They mean money spent, time dedicated, deals made, days wasted thinking of lost days, grad student marathon sessions, derps hitting their head on the toilet and coming up with Y shaped gizmos, you name it. Resource dots are how man resource points are generated per week (Kerbals, goblins and rabitians are too small as societies to have developed a functioning bureaucracy, so they work fast). The other important measure is weight. Rabitians, kerbals and goblins all weigh about 25kg, so let's call that 1 derp-weight. Points can be spent on research to make something more reliable, or less heavy.

• Everyone start with 40 resource dots.
• Completing missions gives you extra resource dots.
• Failing missions removes resource dots from you.
• An up-goer vehicle is composed of the following parts: First stage, extra stages, payload (including containers). The first stage may be magical in nature. Or maybe it's a really big trebuchet. Or maybe it's a balloon. The other stages however must be some way to push against nothing! Suborbital missions do not need a second stage. Shots that do not try to go Far Out do not need a third stage. Going to the Moon and coming back needs at least four stages (launch, orbit, kicker, return).
• Points are spent for buying/building things, making things work better or cost less, training derps (you don't need to hire them, there's a line around the corner for volunteers!), and maybe messing with other derps' stuff. In fluff buying something might be a quest that a group of derps undertake to go get it, training might be rabitians doing a relay race to build endurance or kerbals figuring out how to swim without their huge heads flipping them upside down, and so on.
• To keep it simple-ish, things must always weigh at least twice as much as they can carry. So to send a small thing Far Out, if the payload weighs 1, the kicker must weigh 2, the second stage must weigh 6, the first stage must weigh 18. If it's a suborbital shot and the payload weighs 1, the first stage can weigh 2, and so on. The math is (whatever i am carrying)*2.
• The gods use D20s, because they do.
• A thing (first stage, extra stage, capsule, cart with a carnivorous plant on it, space suit, etc), starts out as working on a 20, failing harmlessly on a 19, and failing badly on a 1~18. Points can be spent to make things work better.The absolute best you can get is something failing harmlessly on a 1, nothing ever works quite right!
• Making a big complicated thing is easier if you already know how to make a smaller simpler thing, so there is some carryover from improvements done earlier (In fluff this may be, say, the goblins finally finding a rocket they like the shape of, and tying a bunch of them together).
• Once you have made a thing that works well, you can make it lighter! Spending point to decrease something's weight leaves the thing alone for all calculations except what can be carried by it. So a very advanced capsule can maybe carry 3 derps, will only weigh 3 instead of 6 when it's time to assemble the vehicle, and it's marked as weighing 6-3.
• Derps can be trained to fly the up-goer, jerry-rig things that are broken, and last longer in spaaaaace before they have a stress explosion (Derps can have a stress explosion. So can things. The two events use the same words, but are very distinct). So they basically have three stats, piloting, mechanic, and stamina.
• Milestones can be skipped at a penalty.