Dark fantasy where your only tool is the problem
The dead king is coming back a piece at a time, and the one art that can stop him is the art they would burn you for practising. You are going to have to do it where people can see.
No account, no card, nothing to install. The world's lore is already built, so it starts in seconds.
A cost is not a cost if it can be talked away
What your character takes on — wounds, exhaustion, the marks of what you have been doing — persists, and worsens or eases by rule between turns. So paying for power is an actual arc rather than a line of description.
The world
The tyrant Mourne was buried in seven pieces so he could never return. Now the pieces are being gathered, and the one person who can read the death-magic to stop it is the one who fears it most.
Grist is a grim land of plague-pits, ossuary cathedrals, and a death-magic the church both uses and condemns. The dead do not always rest, the living trade in bone and blood, and the worst monsters wear crowns.
Who is in it
- The Pale Synod
- the church that monopolizes and polices death-magic.
- Cult of the Seven
- fanatics gathering the pieces of the dead king Mourne.
- The Gravewardens
- an order sworn to keep the buried dead buried.
Where you go
- The Ossuary Cathedral
- a temple built from the bones of a million faithful.
- Mourne's Seven Tombs
- the scattered graves where the tyrant's pieces were hidden.
- The Plague-Pits of Grist
- mass graves where the death-magic runs thickest.
What already happened
- The Quartering of Mourne
- the ritual that split and buried the dead king.
- The First Gathering
- the cult's recovery of Mourne's first lost piece.
Who you can play
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Sister Vex Reluctant necromancer
A haunted ex-priest running from a power the whole world now needs her to use.
At the start: the only one who can read the rite—and terrified of what it costs.
-
Warden Holt Gravewarden
A weary, faithful warden torn between his oath and the necromancer he was taught to burn.
At the start: duty-bound to stop the cult, distrustful of the necromancer he must protect.
Or write your own character — the setup form takes a name, a background and what you are good at, and the game master works from that instead.
How a turn works
- You say what your character does, in your own words.
- What you attempted is weighed against your character sheet and the state of the scene — and the outcome is settled before the scene is written, so the part telling the story does not get to decide that you succeeded.
- The game master narrates what happened, grounded in the world's own characters, factions and places, and remembers it for the rest of the run.
Start playing The Bone Throne →