PICARO! Early Modern Role-Play Using the Grit System
Rob aristocrats with guns, swords, or eldritch wytch-craft—the choice is yours!
Plus One Experience is proud to announce the upcoming launch of a modern edition of PICARO! Early Modern Role-Play as part of the RPG Zine Club. This once-old-school TTRPG is now easy-to-learn and full of innovative rules thanks to game designer Wythe Marschall (creator, Stillfleet; co-developer, Blister Critters). It’s also packed with dozens of illustrations by HODAG RPG, with graphic design by Sunaree Paiwong.
The year: 1700. The setting: a lightly fantastical version of the real world. The concept: there are endless medieval fantasy games, but few set during the early modern, and few set in a lightly fantastic real world as opposed to a lore-heavy alter-world. Moreover, in PICARO!, player-characters are not epic heroes, but rogues and outcasts tumbling through often inglorious, always darkly hilarious capers. (Think more Don Quixote or Tristram Shandy than Aragorn or Geralt.)
PICARO! now uses Marschall’s highly adaptable Grit System, which also powers the successfully Kickstarted TTRPGs Stillfleet and Blister Critters as well as the upcoming Danse Macabre: Medieval Horror Roleplaying. The Grit System’s mechanics are simple (your scores are dice) and narrative-focused (powers just happen, leading to big “tilt” moments).
In the 60-page RPG Zine Club edition of PICARO!, you will find:
- Quick-to-learn, player-empowering rules
- Complete, concise rules for the Grit System
- Fast, deadly combat: static wounds rather than ever-increasing hit points
- A unique infamy system for acquiring gear by asking non-nobles for help
- A unique dueling system
- Many options for character creation
- 8 playbook-style classes that double as pregenerated characters: the assassin, the dancer, the diabolist, the dragoon, the intelligencer, the leech, the orphan, and the thief
- 30 eldritch Weird powers (spells)
- 6 species options
- Historically referenced swords and guns, bundled into simple categories
- Sections for the GM on running the game and using history as a resource
- 30 encounters, including ape-ants, dust gnomes, imps, and walking orchids
- 30 hooks for capers (adventures) of different kinds
- A one-page, Appendix N-style reading list of picaresque novels from different regions and periods
- The new edition continues to draw inspiration from novels such as Gulliver’s Travels, Dracula, and Barry Lyndon, as well as recent picaresque works by authors such as Marlon James and César Aira
- Plus—colors, graphics, and paper textures directly drawn from the 1970 edition
- Enhanced by the copious, freewheeling, vibrant art of HODAG RPG: if you like old-school fantasy art, this is reason enough to pick up the zine
To locate the zine in print or PDF edition, merely wander over to:
PlusOneExp.com/Products/PICARO >
You can buy the new edition of PICARO! for the first time at PAX Unplugged 2025 in Philadelphia (Saturday, 11/22, at 2 PM). The creator, Wythe Marschall, will be happy to sign any copies purchased at PAXU and to discuss the mysterious provenance of the original, anonymous game.
Don’t miss your chance to pick up a game that you probably heard of as a kid, but that hasn’t been in print since the last edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. The new-school gamer will love that this is not a mere goblin-slaying simulator, but a game about deep and meaningful social change. The old-school gamer will love using a horse pistol or a hand-cranked mini-cannon that shoots square bullets (100% historical!) to slay goblins wearing lobster-tailed helmets.
The result is a game in which the social backdrop across much of the world is a tapestry of decades-long wars between shifting alliances of powers; monsters and witches are real; the world is small thanks to age-of-sail capitalism, but travel still takes weeks, keeping the scope of play intimate; and the rich and powerful—whether of the ancien regime or the nouveau riche—are always villains.
That momentous link again, dear reader, remains:
PlusOneExp.com/Products/PICARO
Wythe Marschall (founder and lead game designer, Stillfleet Studio) is an experienced writer and game designer. He created the sci-fi RPG Stillfleet and the underlying Grit System. He is the co-developer of Blister Critters by Anthony Grasso and the cohost of Why We Roll with Christopher Pickett. Players can head over to the Stillfleet Studio Discord server to berate the modernizer about his choice to cut the original game’s beautiful but mechanically inelegant alligator–crocodile size comparison charts.
