No Stone Unturned

Adventure in a Recovering World

No Stone Unturned is a GM-less tabletop roleplaying game set long after an apocalyptic collapse of society. Learn who you really are by venturing into the broken and recovering world, turning over stones, and seeing what happens. Track the changes your adventures incur on the fragile environment, and experience how the world changes you in turn.

No Stone Unturned comes as a 56 page book in four parts. Part 1 takes you through worldbuilding and character creation, part 2 explains the rules of the game, part 3 contains the framework for downtime between adventures, and part 4 teaches the agenda & principles of gameplay and offers some alternate rules. 

Detailed Overview

The game starts with a worldbuilding phase. Together, all of the players will come up with a broad setting, and then define the settlement that their characters are living in and working to help grow. Then, each player privately creates other locations in the world using the holy grail of indie tabletop RPG tech, the blank notecard. These are then shuffled and spread out face down on the table as a map of unknown locations for the players to explore.

With the world build, each player creates a character. Characters in No Stone Unturned are made up of stats, moods, skills, and sentiments. Each of these get everyone on the table on the same page as to who each character is, what they're good at doing, and what they care about.

Then the game plays out in a cycle of adventure and downtime. On adventures, you'll be exploring the locations on the map you've built out. These locations are full of other burgeoning societies, wildlife, and unstable ecosystems. Any careless move can have drastic impacts on what already lives in the world.

At any point on the adventure, a character might perform an action that endangers them or the world around them. That's when you roll dice and bring in those stats, moods, and sentiments that you built in character creation to determine the outcome and add details to the world around you.

In downtime, the players reckon with the consequences of their adventure and try to make use of whatever they found by addressing their wounds, making plans to repair any collateral damage they did to the world, and taking time to reflect on how they are feeling. After some time, head out to somewhere new for another adventure.

52 page, 6 x 8.5 inch, black & white, perfect-bound softcover book

Includes download links for digital version