Green Ronin has smashed their Backerkit Crowdfunding goal for The Fifth Season Roleplaying Game. That’s an AGE-powered tabletop game for N.K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award-winning series.
The Fifth Season is a world in which Father Earth hates you and is trying to kill you. You can check out the pitch and perhaps see how Backerkit is doing at competing with Kickstarter directly on the project page.
The RPG takes place in the world depicted in the Broken Earth trilogy of novels, where persistent and unstable tectonic and volcanic activity threatens all life and whose peoples have learnt to adapt to survive. Metal rusts and even stone crumbles on the planet, and the best you can do is prepare for the next tragedy. Community—the comm—is vital in the world of the Broken Earth because it provides support and a chance to endure.
Curious? There’s a free quickstart to download (PDF link) to introduce the basic rules, offer some pre-gen characters, a complete adventure and an introduction to the Stillness.
There’s also a Roll20 version of the Quickstart, a trend which puts early pressure on Hasbro’s promised Unreal Engine-powered Playspace and virtual market to be as generous.
Characters in the game are members of a comm with shared goals and internal difficulties. There’s a race against time as the Fifth Season is undoubtedly on its way and survival depends on being properly prepared.
Before you make your characters, you will work together to create your own comm. Really, the comm is like another character in the campaign, with its own rules for generation, traits, and qualities. The story elements and recent history you decide guide the process. During play, the comm is dynamic, with seasonal turns that provide crises and opportunities that can lead to adventure. Player character action can affect the comms’ advancement or decline. This system is one of the major additions to the AGE system featured in The Fifth Season.
It’s an experienced team on the RPG with Joseph Carriker, Hiromi Cota, Samantha Day, Tanya DePass, Steve Kenson, Monte Lin, Nell Raban, Alice Rendell, Eugenio Vargas, Kiara Vincent, and LaShawn M. Wanak involved.
Green Ronin tells me that not only is N.K. Jemisim signing a few bookplates in a special tier but has been involved throughout the RPGs design.
A pledge of $30 will get you the PDF of the core Fifth Season rules and stretch goals. Or, $59 will get you the PDF and Roll20 editions.
The first print edition, which includes the PDF, needs a pledge of $60, and unlike Kickstarter, Backerkit does not attempt to localise the currency, but Google suggests that’s about £49.
There are several special tiers, with the first, Campaign Exclusive, starting at $80 and offering an exclusive cover in a book with custom endpapers, foil and ribbon.
The $130 tier gets you that Special Edition and a Standard edition in print, for one to put away and one to play with.
That signed bookplate tier, limited to 500 and about halfway to selling out, costs $150 and gets two copies of the print.
Green Roin estimates that the PDF will be out this June, all the print books are due in September, and the Roll20 edition is also slated for September.
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