About
Incunabuli is a Gothic-fairytale RPG setting told through prose. It's a developing and increasingly-usable reference for campaigns inspired by or set in the Incunabuli setting: The fairytale land of the Coast.
Twitter was and remains Incunabuli's original home. Follow @Incunabuli for updates and microfiction from the Coast.
Incunabuli content is written by Benton, a freelance writer from the US. It's playtested and influenced by friends and fellow creators, who have graciously suffered many a wanton whim of design.
Incunabuli is made possible by the generous readers who support it on Patreon. Such support is supremely meaningful.
What RPG System is Incunabuli For?
Incunabuli possesses its own system, one inspired by OSR gameplay philosophy and purpose-made to suit the setting's themes. It is in active development.
Otherwise, the author has found Incunabuli best fits RuneQuest 6th Edition, AD&D, and the grittier variety of OD&D retroclone, albeit with ample hacking required.
What is The Coast?
The Coast is a tiny, dark world, damaged and frayed by ancient hubris.
What happened to it, precisely, is troublesome to explain. *
Imagine taking a paper map of, say, a weird version of Europe, and placing it over several other maps. These maps are parallel to the original, extant in separate realities. Different worlds. Adjacent, yet inaccessible. Now, imagine lighting the edges of the top map on fire.
It ignites. It begins to shrink and curl, consumed, eventually reduced to only a single coastline (say, Norway to Spain) before extinguishing. The maps underneath catch fire in different spots, opening holes into the slightly different maps beneath them. Now, if we extinguish this mess and view it from above, we still see a weird Europe. However, it's a patched-together, holey Europe made of different realities, all suddenly accessible to each other. This is what happened to the Coast. A long time ago, something happened which burned the world, once called Noren, down to just a single Coast. Now, it floats between worlds, awash with the influence of adjacent others. Between the worlds of monsters, of wicked souls, of endless snow, of a thousand trackless shores.
Of course, few Coastal people know this. They just know the forest is full of älves and spriggans, and their cobbler is small and covered in hair.
The Coast is an anthropocentric setting filled with horror overtones. It's defined by humanity's survival against the encroaching unnatural.
Technology and "Magic"
The Coast's technology is on par with the mid 19th century, with a few alterations and advances. Due to metallurgical peculiarities, gunpowder is rare. As are fossil fuels. Instead, the people of the Coast rely on a combination of advanced clockwork and whale oil. The streets of cities are lit by immense networks of oil-fueled streetlamps. War is made with a combination of melee arms and powerful torsion-basedgunsprings, though cutters, the principle adventurers of the setting, are apt to use more archaic and varied means.
On the Coast, a magician might well be called a scientist, as the power of so-called "magic" is largely a biomechanical product. Ancient tomes of lore, the leavings of towering empires of bygone sorcery, teach magicians to swap the bones of their hands for magic knucklebones, and to command great energies using the dire potency of mechanism and chemistry.
You know the art of Dishonored? It's a good reference point.
Posting Schedule
Incunabuli updates as its author creates new content; deeply inconsistently. The Twitter page @Incunabuli updates with microfiction and updates. The subreddit r/Incunabuli is a fine place to get updates, too.
Exclusive articles, dungeons, and sandbox modules are released as created for Patrons. For expedient updates and more delicious content, support Incunabuli on Patreon.
Footnotes
* What this event was is unclear. Most people don't even know about it, and it'd be a pretty big spoiler to put a definite version here, anyway. It's encouraged you make it up.