TTRPG Playtest: Cantica

Cantica, a new sci-fi tabletop RPG, has a free playtest edition out now on itch.io.

For 814 cycles, the generation ship Cantica has been looking for a home. It has found plenty of candidates. Chorus has rejected every one. Chorus is the ship’s governing intelligence, a bottled divine servant of Order, enforcing a habitability checklist written by founders who had just watched their own world fall apart. The docks stay latched. Life goes on.

The tone is dry, kind, and faintly sad. Players are residents: engineers, clerks, hospice nurses, Proctors. Many of them are Touched, carrying a sliver of divine power that’s useful, inconvenient, or both. The stakes are small and personal: a frightened recycler, a feud on the market floor, the right form filed at exactly the right moment.

The playtest is two free PDFs, about 40 pages together:

• The Playtest Primer, for everyone: the setting, the core d10 dice-pool rules (the amber Margin die, Stamps, and violet dice that call on the bottled Bound who keep the ship running, sometimes at a cost), a cheat sheet, and ten ready-to-play Station Briefs.
• The GM Primer: how to run the ship, plus Hurting on Deck 22, a four-hour opening adventure about thinning air, a frightened god in the walls, and a jump in six hours.

It’s free or pay-what-you-want at https://kenamun.itch.io/cantica. Donations go toward commissioning art from human artists. Run it, break it, and tell us what broke.Cantica, a new sci-fi tabletop RPG, has a free playtest edition out now on itch.io.

For 814 cycles, the generation ship Cantica has been looking for a home. It has found plenty of candidates. Chorus has rejected every one. Chorus is the ship’s governing intelligence, a bottled divine servant of Order, enforcing a habitability checklist written by founders who had just watched their own world fall apart. The docks stay latched. Life goes on.

The tone is dry, kind, and faintly sad. Players are residents: engineers, clerks, hospice nurses, Proctors. Many of them are Touched, carrying a sliver of divine power that’s useful, inconvenient, or both. The stakes are small and personal: a frightened recycler, a feud on the market floor, the right form filed at exactly the right moment.

At a glance

• Players: one GM and 3–5 players. Traditional GM-led play; not solo or GMless.
• Length: one-shots of about 4 hours. Campaign rules are coming in the full game.
• You need: a handful of ten-sided dice in three colors (white, amber and violet), the free PDFs, and very little prep.
• System: roll a pool of d10s; each die showing 7 or higher is a success. One amber die, the Margin, adds a twist that helps or hurts: a Margin of Grace or a Margin of Error. Violet dice draw on the bottled Bound who run the ship, and when they misfire, something strange happens in the world. Players spend Stamps for rerolls and edge. The GM never rolls; they spend Scrutiny, the ship pushing back.
• What’s unusual: paperwork, argument and social conflict are as central as any danger. Group challenges are run as Dockets, shared progress tracks raced against a deadline. The GM’s prep is a loose pool of people and places, built for improvising.

The playtest is two free PDFs, about 40 pages together:

• The Playtest Primer, for everyone: the setting, the core rules, a cheat sheet, and ten ready-to-play Station Briefs.
• The GM Primer: how to run the ship, plus Hurting on Deck 22, a four-hour opening adventure about thinning air, a frightened god in the walls, and a jump in six hours.

It’s free or pay-what-you-want at https://kenamun.itch.io/cantica. Donations go toward commissioning art from human artists. Run it, break it, and tell us what broke.