For a few weeks I’ve been fiddling with creating a very light ruleset for running dark and desperate TTRPG adventures. It’s called Fortune Dark, and it’s about cultists striving to gain treasure and glory for a capricious god against ever lengthening odds. Their god has granted them a shared pool of fortune, which will dwindle and become cursed as they play. Can they claim enough tribute before their fortune runs out?

Download it here (26 July update), or on Itch.io, for free.

It’s all about luck

Fortune Dark was inspired by discussions with my friends Marsh Davies and Jim Rossignol as we’ve been playtesting their proper and successfully Kickstarted TTRPG, Gold Teeth. Gold Teeth is a Forged in the Dark game, a system which replaces player characters’ traditional health with resource called Stress, which they can spend to avoid harm, create narrative advantages, and raise the chances of success on rolls. For Gold Teeth, in which players are corrupted pirates plying the 18th century Caribbean, Marsh and Jim are replacing individuals’ stress with a shared resource called the Ship’s Luck.

I was excited by this idea and started to imagine the Ship’s Luck not as an abstract resource but as a collection of dice which the players roll at the start of the voyage. Then they cover each die so from the outset they have an idea of the kind of luck they can expect (“Three sixes, two fives, a four, two twos. A good voyage!”), but when they choose to spend one, they don’t exactly know what it will be (“We already used two sixes, we need that last one…”).

This idea doesn’t fit Gold Teeth, both in terms of the game and how ungainly it’d be at the table. How would you individually cover a lot of dice? What happens to the dice if you need to break a voyage over more than one session? But I liked it and idly kept thinking about ways to physically represent a pool of luck of which players have an unreliable understanding of its quality.

Fortune Dark’s bag of Fortune dice, which over the course of an adventure is steadily corrupted by Cursed dice, is the result.

The rest of the rules are heavily based on another game, Shane Marble’s Occultation (thanks to Shane for permission to make my hack public), which itself is an elegant hack of Graham Walmsley’s groundbreaking Cthulhu Dark, plus a couple of other games, including Jesse Ross’ Trophy Dark.

The illustrations are by my son, Jack Wiltshire. Thank you, Jack! (btw, he takes commissions)

Notes for play

What kind of scenarios would you run this system with? With a bit of fiddling I think it’d work with any down and dirty RPG adventures in which a group of malcontents must struggle to survive against the odds. Just think about how to create a hook for a group of cultists seeking to honour their god. But Trophy Gold incursions are ideal because discovering treasure is built-in. Hey you could even use my own incursion, The Everbarrow.

And if you want to print the rules as an eight-page booklet, here’s a paginated version which will fold together correctly. Make sure to print two-sided.

If you play it, tell me how you get on! How desperate does an adventure get? Do the curses get too much?