The Game

Nightsong is a tabletop role-playing game of high fantasy in a world descending into the forever long night. You emerge from an amber tomb into a vast land of towering trees and ethereal dreamlines. Your memories are gone, but your purpose awaits.Navigate the regions of Penumbra as an Oro—sentient bug-folk connected through the dream of dreams. Soar through the Voidways aboard giant insects, explore the depths of the Undergrowth, and beseech the eight Beast-Gods who shaped reality for the strength to endure the encroaching shadows.

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The Features

START SIMPLE, EXPAND OVERTIME — The core of the game fits on a single trifold pamphlet, including the character sheet. If you want more detailed combat mechanics, exploration mechanics, or Voidways navigation mechanics, just add more trifolds to your game. If you want solo rules, more tables, or adventures, again, simply add more trifold pamphlets to your table.EXPLORE A HIGH FANTASY WORLD OF NOSTALGIA, SORROW, AND CHAOS — The world of Penumbra is filled with beautiful regions to explore, complex factions, and NPCs to interact with, but every aspect of the setting comes with its own share of both wonder and grief. You are a free blade, and you can either wait for Curses to consume the land and profit off the chaos it causes, or do something about it. You play to find out how your choices shape the world.USE MECHANICS WHEN YOU WANT IT — This is a game, a real one. You have a hypothetical "game controller" with buttons you can push. Those are called actions. If you don't push the buttons, you stay in the fictional world of the game. The conversation. The GM and players both have their own set of actions they can voluntarily push to inject mechanics into the story. And every single one of those actions moves the story forward.LEARN IT ONCE AND YOU'RE DONE — The core dice roll of the game relies on rolling a pool of d6s where every 5 or 6 is considered a hit. Every player or GM action then details what happens when you get two or more hits, a single hit, or no hits at all. 90% of the actions of the game rely on this format. In some cases, the pool of dice may be formed from attribute ratings, but in other cases, it may be formed using the total amount of stress a character has, and the more hits there are, the worse the outcome for the character.THIS IS AN OPEN LICENSED AND EVER-EXPANDING UNIVERSE — We have big plans for this world and want to continuously expand on it for the years to come in a steady, incremental way along with the help of the community. Its open license will help us build a thriving community of third-party content so that there's always something new to explore in the land of Penumbra.

PLAY-TESTING

We're currently in the playtesting phase of the game. If you want to participate, be sure to join our Discord !

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