Incunab­u­li is an Adven­ture Goth­ic role-play­ing game.

You are cut­ters: Tomb raiders; fringers, punks, and des­per­a­does employed by the vicious banks of a Gild­ed Age world run dry of gold—save the rich­es of antiq­ui­ty. Crack the tombs. Dis­cov­er your bro­ken world’s haunt­ing his­to­ry. Steal three mil­len­nia of guilty secrets.

It’s the most impor­tant job in the world—and the most dead­ly. Get good at it. Grow weird and pow­er­ful. Go mad. Sur­vive.

The game rules are an orig­i­nal d12 sys­tem. The world is told through short fic­tion, dic­tio­nary entries, and ency­clo­pe­dic lore pas­sages; it’s sci­ence fic­tion and sur­vival hor­ror, not fan­ta­sy.

satisfying advancement

lev­elup every ses­sion. Spend hard-earned XP to gain poten­cy and stay­ing pow­er. You’ll embody the pathet­ic aes­thet­ic at the start, but you will become a hard­ened desperado—should you live.

Enjoy a career as brief as an after­noon or long as 100+ ses­sions. Cre­ate a unique cut­ter with deep build poten­tial, free from class­es.

Approachability

Read 2 pages and play—if you’re a play­er. If you’re the Book­keep­er, the game is yours: Shape what you want from it and teach it.

The rules are medi­um-crunchy, brief, and easy to ref­er­ence. They live in this free web-book, usable on any device (even phones.)

chance and consequence

Rely on your cut­ter’s skills and your skill as a play­er. The d12 skill sys­tem sim­u­lates lim­it­ed, con­se­quen­tial actions; every­thing else—like social interactions—is up to you and the Book­keep­er.

Odds are tru­ly bound­ed. Rules leave room for rul­ings. “Swingi­ness” decreas­es as you lev­elup. OSR philoso­phies are main­tained.

verisimilitude

Weigh the stakes of a sit­u­a­tion with rea­son before rules. Out­comes for skill rolls and vio­lence are care­ful­ly con­sid­ered to reward com­mon sense, tac­tics, and cau­tion.

tactics

Get an edge. Main­tain cohe­sion. Call the shots. Dis­pense lethal blows. Feel the reward of the pike­line in a dun­geon cor­ri­dor and the thrill of the risky quick­draw. Don’t want so much detail? Rip it out.

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The Incunab­u­li set­ting is called the Coast.

It’s a tiny world frayed by ancient hubris. Bro­ken by a cat­a­clysmic error com­mit­ted by a Human­i­ty so fat­ted on con­ceit and hyper­achieve­ment that they con­fi­dent­ly broke a car­di­nal rule in real­i­ty’s book of laws.

Pic­ture a paper map of Eura­sia. Place it over sev­er­al oth­er, dif­fer­ent maps. These maps are par­al­lel to the orig­i­nal, extant in sep­a­rate planes. Dif­fer­ent worlds. Adja­cent, yet inac­ces­si­ble. Then, light the edges of the top map on fire.

It ignites. Shrink­ing and curl­ing. The bor­ders are con­sumed. Every­thing with­out is lost: Every con­ti­nent, every plan­et, every stretch of the uni­verse. Pure­ly anni­hi­lat­ed. A lone­ly coast­line remains, the sole con­tents of a bro­ken real­i­ty.

Extin­guished and viewed from above, we still see Eura­sia. How­ev­er, it’s a patched-togeth­er, holey con­ti­nent shot through with dif­fer­ent uni­vers­es, all sud­den­ly acces­si­ble to each oth­er via their charred edges and through-holes.

This burn­ing, the Inter­stic­tion of Worlds, reduced the uni­verse, con­tain­ing the world once called Nôren, down to just a sin­gle coast­line. Now, the Coast is a super­po­si­tion 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 ælves and sprig­gans, their fish­mon­ger is swad­dled in silk, and their cob­bler is small and cov­ered in hair.

The Coast is defined by human­i­ty’s sur­vival against the encroach­ing unnat­ur­al, and its inex­orable draw to a past best for­got­ten.

What about technology and Magic?

The Coast is post-Indus­tri­al Enlight­en­ment. It resem­bles the late 19th cen­tu­ry, with a few alter­ations.

Fos­sil fuels aren’t plen­ti­ful in the ground, but kerosene is plen­ti­ful in the bul­bous heads of great cachalots from anoth­er world. Coastal homes and the streets of cities are lit by immense net­works of street­lamps lit by the burn­ing of mon­strous whales.

Gun­pow­der is scarce, but odite is plen­ti­ful, and odite alloy makes gun­springs: Pow­er­ful bal­lis­tic flechette guns.

Real magic—or bet­ter put: sor­cery—is myth and mys­tery to aver­age folk. They have mys­ti­cism and sooth­say­ing of their own, but none of it amounts to much. Their reli­gion, on the oth­er hand, is very real.

Real sor­cery is the domain of the aris­tos­phere, of cut­ters, and of the stranger class­es of neosor­cer­er who yet lurk in hid­den places. A prac­ti­tion­er of these arts might well be called a sci­en­tist, for the pow­er of so-called “mag­ic” is large­ly a bio­me­chan­i­cal prod­uct. It is derived from ancient tomes of lore, and from tombs, the leav­ings of tow­er­ing empires of bygone sor­cery, which 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.

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What is Adventure Gothic?

Adven­ture Goth­ic is the milieu of cut­ters: Weird des­per­a­dos, thrust from soci­ety’s enclave of nor­mal­cy into the hor­ri­ble, the strange, and the super­nat­ur­al. It is:

• the fear in tres­pass­ing sealed com­plex­es and for­bid­den forests. Fear of what haunts them, and of how your tres­pass will change you.
• the grotes­querie of gris­ly wounds, ghast­ly mon­sters, and deranged col­leagues faced in aber­rant places—and in your­self.
• the lim­i­nal­i­ty of for­got­ten places and ill deeds done there­in, per­haps irre­deemable, com­mit­ted at the behest of ruth­less cap­i­tal­ists.
• the moral com­pro­mise required to trans­gress for these mas­ters, who care only for gold and fell occul­ta, and to breach mores in pur­suit of your own wicked goals.
• the haunt­ing past in all its deca­dence, its ornate deprav­i­ty, and its buried, guilty mys­ter­ies. Too hor­rid for the light of day, but too seduc­tive to destroy or to leave buried.
• and it is the specter of mor­tal­i­ty omnipresent in piled bones and carved icons of exalt­ed death, remind­ing you that every for­ay into insane realms may be the last—before the black skele­ton with­in you earns its turn at life.

Adven­ture Goth­ic defines the lives of cut­ters and the set­ting themes they’re engaged in. They are fringers, punks, and weirdos. They are exposed to obscure, occult, and exis­ten­tial threats that most folk will nev­er con­ceive of and be changed by wounds, trau­ma, and oth­er­world­ly and sor­cer­ous expo­sures. This sets them apart: Oth­er (nor­mal) char­ac­ters may have no point of ref­er­ence for them at all.

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