Stillfleet is a relatively new TTRPG, the core rulebook of which I received for Christmas. Full disclosure, the game's chief editor is a friend of mine.
Stillfleet is a far-future, sci-fi, class-based RPG, but one that downplays fighting monsters (though you can do plenty of that) in favor of having a wide array of abilities that can help with traversal, social encounters, and other such things.
Set hundreds of millions of years in the future, Stillfleet is a post-human world. There are "humans" that you can play as, but these are more accurately the descendants of modern humanity in most cases. There are also various strange life forms, including some synthetic kinds and some that are extra-dimensional - one rare option is a being whose three-dimensional "shadow" that we would see is like three elephant legs and a sphere.
The game is meant to be weird, and readers of this blog and my other ones will recognize that I am someone who has become very interested in the New Weird literary movement.
The main setting for the game is upon a space station known as the Spindle, which is an utterly vast structure that has within it various tunnels that act as teleportation portals. Decades ago, the Spindle was a hub for a vast empire across known space, but after the portals stopped working, contact with the rest of the cosmos was cut off, and their recent reactivation has led to a wide-scale effort to re-establish ties and lay the groundwork for a re-establishment of this imperial control.
Players work for the Worshipful Company of Stillfleeters, also known as "The Co.," which is explicitly an evil, proto-colonialist entity comparable to a far-future version of the Dutch East India Company. The degree to which the Co. exploits those on the various planets and ships you explore, as well as your characters - the "Voidminers," becomes a big part of any story in the game.
In terms of gameplay, you'll pick a race and class, much like other RPGs. These include the Banshee, who specializes in operating archaic technology (known as "arcahetech,") and are needed to activate the "Malkovich Tunnels" that allow you to travel to other worlds, or the Witness, a kind of anthropologist who specializes in connecting and understanding the alien cultures you encounter, to the Stillrijder, which is the arms specialist whose job it is to defend the rest of the party.
Like other RPGs, you have various broad attributes, but rather than getting a modifier to a d20 roll, you'll assign different dice to these various attributes instead (you can also sometimes get little bonuses to these rolls, but the main thing is figuring out which thing you have a d12 in versus which you have a d6 in).
Classes begin at level 1 with various signature abilities, but as you level up, rather than getting a steady progression of new features, you choose from various lists that your class enables you to pick from. In other words, you'll get a little harder to kill as you gain HP, but every feature can be picked at level 1, so you don't have to wait very long to get your super cool stuff.
While this is a science-fiction game, there is a vague equivalent to spellcasting, which is known as "The Hell Sciences." These are areas of study where empiricism has kind of taken a back seat to superstition, and is themed around cosmic horror entities, like the King in Yellow.
One of the core mechanics of the game is "Grit." As you level up, you'll have a Pool of both Health and Grit. The former works as you'd expect it to, but Grit is essentially the fuel you use for your abilities. Your abilities cost different amounts of Grit, and often a somewhat randomized amount of it (an ability might cost, say, 10-dMov, which means you'd roll your Movement die and subtract the result from the cost of the ability). Grit is also what keeps you alive if you are reduced to zero hit points, so it becomes a bit of a gamble when you use different grit-spending features.
I'm still only around halfway through the core rulebook, but I think that the overall intent of the game is to be one where you're making strategic decisions about your character build, but which doesn't force combat to be the be-all and end-all of what your Ventures entail.
As I go through the rules, I'll post more about how different systems work, such as technology levels and complexity and the structure of the Co.
No comments:
Post a Comment