Befallen

A dark fantasy game of obsession and corruption for one or more players.

In Befallen, you’ll create your character, take on quests, unravel plots, fight monsters and thwart dangerous otherworldly entities intent on gaining a foothold in our world, all while unraveling your obsession—the mystery that you have dedicated yourself to solve. It can be played solo, or as a group of 2-4 players, with or without a GM.

How does it work?

GAMEPLAY. The gameplay in Befallen revolves around 3 things:

• OBSESSION. This is the singular goal your character is working towards and what will drive your adventure forward. You will choose your obsession during character creation and spend the game traveling from place to place, searching for clues to its resolution. Once you’ve found enough clues, you’ll have a chance to resolve your obsession, ending your journey.
• PLOTS. Plots are the large events happening in the settlements you visit that make being in that location more dangerous. While a plot is active, everything in that settlement is more dangerous, but if you resolve it, you’ll earn some renown with the locals, gain some resources to help you progress your journey and get some clues that will help you unravel your obsession and lead you to the next stop on your journey.
• QUESTS. Quests are short tasks that you can undertake from local residents of a settlement. Completing quests increases your reputation with other characters and rewards you with resources that you can spend on crafting items, buying equipment and paying for living and travel expenses.

MAGIC AND CORRUPTION. Any character in Befallen who is skilled in Occult can learn Hedge Magic—a system of charms, rituals and enchantments that allows you to perform small feats of magic, such as scrying or turning luck in your favor. However, truly supernatural magic is reserved for those who interact with the corrupting powers. The powers are eldritch beings that are trying to gain a foothold in The Fallen Lands by corrupting the souls of those who come into contact with them. Some, like Revelry (who infects you with an all-consuming feeling of joy that erases all other emotions) are worshiped as gods, while others, like Verdant Growth (a superconsciousness of plants wishing to return the world to a green and untouched state) or The Endless Halls (an extradimensional maze of endlessly twisting hallways) are less understood.

DICE. Each time you make a roll in Befallen, you'll build a dice pool incorporating d10s from your skills, knowledge, stamina and character abilities—your Skill Roll. You'll compare this to the result of your Challenge Die—a single die you'll roll and add a modifier to to determine the difficulty of your task. Any skill dice whose result beats the challenge die result is counted as a success. If you're playing with physical dice, you can denote a specific color of die as your challenge die; that way you can roll everything in one go. 

In Befallen, rolling a 10 on a d10is always a critical success and rolling a 1 on a d10 always adds a complication to what you're trying to accomplish, meaning that even the best and worst laid plans have a chance to beat all the odds and succeed, or go awry and cause all new troubles. 

Solo and GMless Play Support

Befallen is built from the ground up to be played without a GM. The system is built on a methodology of giving you the details of the problem and asking you "what do you want to do about it and how do you want to do it". The book includes:

• 9 pre-generated settlements, which have multiple paths for replayability.
• 2-3 plots per settlement. These are large quests, which start with a mystery or rumor about something going wrong in the settlement. Once you have successfully investigated the mystery, you'll roll on a table that will tell you what you discover and set you on the path to resolving it.
• Tables of 6-10 quest hooks per settlement for short tasks and adventures when your character needs to generate some money.
• Descriptions of key locations and NPCs for each settlement.

Most characters will visit 3-5 settlements per playthrough. With the branching paths, you can experience between 6 and 10 different plot paths per settlement, meaning even if you don't create your own settlements, there's still plenty of replayability.

What does it come with?

• 326 page rule book
• interactive pdf character sheets and settlement worksheets to streamline play
• 11 character classes
• 84 pages of prewritten scenarios, broken into settlements
• a 73 page bestiary of opponents to confront
• A Community Content Agreement to make and sell your own content for Befallen, or use its dice system in your own creations.
• Alt text for all images (a proper screen reader friendly pdf is coming - some of the overlapping image and border elements are a little rough, so I'm sorting that out)

For Media: If you'd like a press kit, or review copy, please email me at dmarkiwsky@gmail.com.