🔥 HOT: Heartbreaker rpg - High Quality
HEARTBREAKER
A downloadable game
Heartbreaker is a splashy, asymmetric-maximalist rules-light love letter to fantasy roleplaying. It's designed for high-trust/high-impact play and fiction-first problem-solving, mechanized stakes and sincere emotion, and a many-pronged exploration of fantasy roleplaying archetypes.
You're a weirdo with a unique minigame, you're an itinerant therapist cult leader, an agent provocateur with a cellphone, a fighting-game character, three d20s, an economancer, a hair-splitting bishop, a magical cat with a tarot deck, a walking anime trope, an anti-wizard with a shotgun, a super-Hegelian, a genie-by-writ, a sexy werewolf, a goblin co-GM, a stressed-out grad student, a superhero druid-cop, a shadowy quest-giver (and so on).
In these 230-ish pages you'll find like a dozen (very small!) pages of core rules supporting hundreds of decision-dense, no-filler character options (plus another hundreds of OSR-adjacent toolkit-spells and like four or five magic systems)
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
It's cool, but you really need to release a bestiary or module for it or something because I have absolutely no tools to actually create obstacles for any of this.
Hi Dommy, what you've created is absolutely lovely! I'm wondering what your best practices are as to character sheets since each class plays so differently?
This is cool as shit, but it looks like entirely player options. Do you have any GM materials? Or is it all just sort of wing it as you go?
This has to be one of the freshest takes Ive seen on D&D this decade.
Btw, the rogue feature underbelly is a copy of an aspect of their main class feature.
this whole book looks so good. i would love to see any notes you have about the Wreath and/or the time in your childhood you or someone you know ate a beetle. theres just too many references to eating beetles for this to have never happened in your past.
Any plans to release something expounding on the setting? What little you've mentioned of the Wreath has me really excited to learn more, especially with the attention you've payed to the system as a whole
I'll start with: I said this on Reddit, but the experience of reading this has been so magical.
I have a couple questions:
1. The Boss Barbarian's "Heart" ability and the Reveler Warlock's "Eighth position" read "...you don't use HP." What does this mean? I presume because they get extra injury slots that they are supposed to be able to get injuries but my understanding is that you need to take HP damage to get an injury. Is the intent just that you only take injuries on hits that *would* deal 8+? I presume the GM can also make special abilities for monsters that just do injuries instead of damage but I just wanted to get some clarification in case I'm missing something.
2. For wizards and rerolling starting spells, it's not clear to me on what the rerolls should be. The sentence
> You can reroll up to five spells within your major.
Seemed to mean that if a spell is within your major, you can reroll it. But the implication of that would mean that you are unlikely to keep spells of your major because you'd reroll to anything else. With that thought in mind, is it supposed to be that you can reroll any 5 spells into a spell that's within your major?
3. For spells and "use magic" effects which require ranged attacks or otherwise seem to do damage, is there a standard for that, or is that just going to be one of those "high trust" factors?
Great questions, I'll be sure to un-ambiguify those in v1.1 :)
1: Spot on, you still take an injury if you'd be hit for 8+.
2: Yes again, you can reroll any 5 spells into a spell that's within your major (rolling d20 within your major).
Thanks!
I edited a 3rd question in, maybe after you had already answered.
3. For spells and "use magic" effects which require ranged attacks or otherwise seem to do damage, is there a standard for that (like 1d6 usually?), or is that just going to be one of those "high trust" factors?
I'm so touched you're finding magic in my little game <3
3: it's a "high trust" factor, yes! there's no explicit damage standard for spells like Acid Arrow or Fireball (though Magic Missile always deals 4)
at my table I run magic damage based a lot on context (though I don't expect everyone would run it that way): sometimes it's 4d4 Breach 2, sometimes 1d4+4 until they stop the burning, etc. Often I'll just ask the caster what feels right to them, but my considerations tend to include questions like "is the target armored, dodging, covered in oil, made of paper? what's the minimum damage this should deal? should there even be a damage roll? do I want this to maybe cause injury?" and so on :)
you've made something wonderful, I think. props.
Not sure if it's on my end, but the first three pages are blank. Though maybe it's supposed to be that way. Just flagging it in case there's meant to be a cover or something.
Thanks for the heads-up! I'll delete those blank pages in v1.1 (I mixed up my print and digital PDFs)
I love it, I can't stop reading.