Fourthmarches, a weird-fantasy open-table RPG of complicity & self-dissolution – now on Kickstarter

Fourthmarches is a weird-fantasy open-table TTRPG by Adam Christopher Boyd, played by 3-6 people per-session from a rotating cast of players. Venturists pursue their futures as their employer seeks to quiet the continent's last frontier in response to its bloody past. It's live on Kickstarter through August 14 with a free Quickstart on itch.io.

The continent's first corporate body, the Faethon Venture Cooperative, seeks to fulfill its institutional charter and claim what it has dubbed the Fourth State—the last corner of the Resonant Wilds. The land has long resisted permanent human habitation due to RESONANCE, a divine phenomenon that both empowers and dissolves the self, inevitably destabilizing all but the smallest communities. Player-characters will form cohesive groups or act individually to serve—or subvert—the manifestation of civilization.

"[He] sees only what can be claimed—you see a thousand-thousand journeys awaiting all of us and everyone to come after. If what you’ve told me is true, the Fourth State isn’t just more land to tame, but the last mirror to show us what the horrors of the last century mean for any and every future." – Letter from Kaelan the Wayfinder to the pathfinder Tahira

Fourthmarches RPG uses the Year Zero Engine system in a weird-fantasy setting characterized by rare iron, deep-time, and diverse yet interlinked cultures. Further qualities include:

• Core Mechanic: Players define their approach to a situation and roll multiple types of dice to see if they succeed. They may push rolls at the risk of damage to their selves and their equipment – and to increase their openness to the world through RESONANCE, empowering & endangering them.
• Open-Table Play: Playing in a persistent world, assemblages of 3-6 players from a rotating pool schedule sessions, pick a locale or site, and set a length of session in hours. They then attempt to get to the target, explore, and return before the land itself claims them.
• Cycle: Each session begins with a holdfast phase, transitions to a travel phase, and then venturists delve sites or survey for resources. Finally, characters must return to a holdfast – RESONANCE, which empowers the very project that seeks to quiet it, cannot be used on any rolls to return.
• Exploration: The map uses a hex-grid and a quarter-day structure for activities of exploration and survival. Once at a locale, play and narration become more fine-grain.
• Factions & Complicity: It is easier at first to go along with the colonial project, but characters can use humanity's truest power – organization – to subvert it. Factions develop organically among the player-characters.
• Magic: All magic is physics. All physics is magic. RESONANCE powers and attenuates certain occultic-talents.
• Big Bugs: Most of the large fauna of Tinth are arthropods of one form or another, including the domestics central to many parts of human life – such as the draft-animal called the manticore or the dewbones raised for food & writing-materials. One important species is treated as two – the dragonfly-shaped selsheries (carrying messages for humanity) and rumins (used for wax and tilling the soil) shaped like enormous grubs.

Inspirations for the setting include Ursula K Le Guin's Hainish Cycle, NK Jemisin's Broken Earth, Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, China Miéville's Iron Council, and David Graeber's Debt. It refuses to either flatten humanity or celebrate relativism. Influences for the Fourthmarches system and diegesis include the Fiend Folio, Ben Robbins' Grand Experiments: West Marches, The Alexandrian, Forbidden Lands, Adventurer Conqueror King System, and by friends of the game.

"[It] reminds me of the feeling [I] get from early Zelda games, in that the relatively unimpressive [...] starting gear like a shovel, compass, [or] boomerang [...] become essential tools because of what you discover through exploration." – Daniel, Fourthmarches alpha playtester

The crowdfunding campaign is ongoing on Kickstarter until August 14. The goal is to finish the Core Rulebook & Gamemaster's Guide and pay contributors—in short, to complete development of the game and help pave the way for future development.

The free Quickstart guide contains a primer on the setting of the Fourth State & Tinth, distilled mechanics with examples from play, a demonstration of material-culture via simple equipment lists, and a description of kaf—a stimulating and mildly psychoactive set of beverages as ubiquitous as coffee is on Earth. The GM Supplement contains advice on organizing play, tables for repercussions & encounters, and a full adventure-site called Gull's Point—Faethon's failed holdfast five years gone.

"[A] dewbone’s feathers are unrelated to flight, instead acting as coats against the high forest chill where they are typically cultivated. In warmer lowlands, they reflexively raise their plumage to vent heat, flattening their coat only at night. Varieties raised in lower, warmer places across Tinth tend to develop coats more resembling a ball of needles."

In addition to the designer Adam Christopher Boyd, Fourthmarches includes art by Jimmy Frezza, Alex Michael Hamel, and Michael Boyd. Profit-sharing agreements are in place for certain contributors to help sustain future projects and give them a sustainable stake in development. Full credits for contributors, playtesters, and other participants are here.

No portion of the game's text, setting, art, or mechanics were created by generative-AI in whole or in part. During the development of the game, Claude models were consulted as a sounding-board for layout feedback and editorial perspective.