Stillfleet
Villager
Stillfleet is a genre-vaporizing work of science fiction that you can hack apart and make your own. It is an acid-trip of a good time, built on a foundation of political tension between the Worshipful Company of Stillfleeters (the Co.) and its medieval market-worlds, as well as many advanced aliens and extradimensional entities with obscure agendas… All while being rules-light and bursting with customization options.
This Kickstarter campaign, starting on August 1st and going for 30 days, aims to fund the production of Stillfleet's long-awaited Core Rulebook. Here are its main features:
- An original rules system that takes only minutes to learn and ratchets up the drama.
- Your base scores—combat, movement, reason, will, and charm—are different sizes of dice, from a d4 to a d12. You roll them against someone else, or to beat 6.
- Your main resource is grit, which you can burn to boost specific rolls.
- 10 classes of Co. voidminers.
- 22 playable sapient species.
- Hundreds of powers including nanotech "blooder" powers and deeply Weird hell science powers.
- An entire chapter full of strange archaetech (weapons, cooking utensils, nanotech body modifications…)
- Settings on major and minor provinces as well as the floating hulks of dead spaceshi.
- 20 full encounters with dangerous aliens.
Stillfleet, much like Supergiant's Hades roguelike video game, has years of open-access playtesting by a dedicated community, many of them Patreon supporters. Notably, part of this playtesting process came from a year-long series on the popular actual play podcast Fun City. The core team bringing this game to life is:
- Wythe Marschall (writer, lead game designer): is an anthropologist and science communicator—you may know him as the writer of Crash Course: History of Science—who spends a lot of time "thinking about the future of living things on our dying planet through the lens of work and organizations." You can reach him on Twitter.
- Ethan Gould (artist, game designer): makes art—drawing, Illustration, writing, puppetry, video, and costume design—for clients in a broad range of fields. You can reach him on Instagram.
- Erich Lazar (designer, layout): is a graphic designer with experience in print, branding, digital design, and publishing. You can check out his work on his site.
- Stephen Aubrey (editor, game designer): is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, dramaturg, lecturer, storyteller, recovering medievalist, and lifelong gamer. You can learn more about him via his site.
- Aaron H. (banshee, game designer): is a professional developer and DJ. He made the official Stillfleet app, STRINGS. You can learn more about him via his site.
- Sunaree "Kae" Paiwong (animator, layout): is a professional animator who has worked in advertising for over a decade. You can check out her personal photography on Instagram.
Wrapping up: Anyone can get the free quickstart version of Stillfleet on itch.io and Drive-Thru RPG (now available in Brazilian Portuguese, too) alongside paid products
