Game designer momatoes and Exalted Funeral has launched the Kickstarter for ARC: Doom Tabletop RPG. I swear I clicked on the Kickstarter alert the very minute it came in. The project is already more than 40% funded. There are rockets on this one!
ARC is a game in which the characters battle against the ticking clock to stop the apocalypse. It’s designed for relatively short campaigns, and there really is that time pressure. Play it often, and you’ll get used to losing. You can see the current figures for ARC on the pitch page.
You can get another look at the art of ARC in Geek Native’s exclusive reveal of the game’s alternative cover. More on how to get that special edition in just a bit.
ARC is a rules-light but tension-heavy game.
Stories you make and play in ARC run against a timer. While heroes navigate and transform the world around them, the real-time Doomsday Clock ticks to an irreversibly cataclysmic event. That doom is up to you. It could be an explosive battle, the literal end of the world—or something more intimate: the departure of beloved spirits, the farewell of an era.
There are OSR bits in here, which Exalted Funeral describes as “rulings over rules”, and we can park the debate as to whether that’s OSRy or not.
There are also narrative bits in here as the game nudges you towards subplots and character motivations.
I think this is a fair description and there’s a quick start (PDF link) available for free.
In ARC, it’s not just action that comes with consequences, but inaction too.
It’s a pledge of just $10 to unlock the PDF and stretch goals. That makes offering $20 to also get a copy donated to the community an attractive karma-earner.
The softcover requires a pledge of $30 and also brings a community copy. The hardcover needs $40, which also comes with a community copy.
Therefore, that limited-edition and Kickstarter-exclusive Scarlet edition are $60.
However, there’s one better, and at the time of writing, it can be yours. There’s one “bimted edition” which is signed and described as;
Only one copy will ever be printed, then we shall never speak of this again.
Someone will find $500 for that and also donate 10 PDFs to the gaming community.
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