The Fifth Season RPG

The Fifth Season Roleplaying Game is designed for you to play out adventures and stories set in the world described in the Broken Earth trilogy of novels by N.K. Jemisin—a world where constant and unstable tectonic and volcanic activity threaten all life; a world whose peoples have learned to adapt in order to survive. It is a world where everyone learns that Father Earth hates his children and is always trying to kill them, where metal rusts and even stone crumbles, and the best you can do is be prepared for the next disaster. In the world of the Broken Earth, community—the comm—is everything, because in community there is support and a chance to persevere.The Fifth Season RPG includes a Foreword by N.K. Jemisin herself! You and your fellow players take the roles of members of such a community, working to overcome internal difficulties and external threats, in order to be ready when that inevitable Fifth Season comes. Are you a lifelong native of this place, someone everyone has recognized from childhood? Maybe you’re a more recent addition to the comm, someone who’s come from a distance, contributing something to the comm that makes the possibility of your secrets and past catching up to you worth it. Or perhaps you are an orogene, one who was born to sess the movements of the tectonic plates, gifted with a forbidden power to still the shaking earth and bleed heat in your environs away until frost coats everything in a perfect circle around you. These may be times of peace and plenty, but strife and lean times are ahead, with the next Season of Death looming like a dark thunderhead on the horizon. Welcome to the Stillness. The Fifth Season RPG gives you info on the following: A guide to the Stillness, describing each region and its people, important comms, and customs. When it’s time to create your own comm, its location will inform many aspects of your settlement. Comms from regions like the Equatorials, Somidlats, Coastals, and Antarctic all have different characters. An overview of life in the Stillness, covering such topics as roles and responsibilities of the use-castes, Season Law, orogeny and oregenes, deadciv technology, the Seventh University, the Fulcrum, and stonelore, the vital wisdom of previous generations when it comes to preparing for and surviving a Fifth Season. Details on the nature of Fifth Seasons, also known as the Seasons of Death. Includes a catalog and descriptions of previous seasons, such as the Boiling Season, the Season of Teeth, the Acid Season, the Season of Yellow Seas, the Breathless Season, and more. No two seasons are alike! Before you make your characters, you will work together to create your own comm. Really, the comm is like another character in the campaign, with its own rules for generation, traits, and qualities. The story elements and recent history you decide guide the process. During play, the comm is dynamic, with seasonal turns that provide crises and opportunities that can lead to adventure. Player character action can affect the comms’ advancement or decline. This system is one of the major additions to the AGE system featured in The Fifth Season. Once the comm has been created, you can make characters. The Fifth Season uses character levels but not classes. The use-caste your character is born in, however, has a major effect on their development. Choose from use-castes such as Innovator, Strongback, and Resistant, and specializations like Geomest, Cultivator, and Hunter. Your character has Fortune (as in The Expanse RPG) to measure their ability to survive and players can use it to influence their chances of success, but spend carefully, as your character’s luck can run out! Your character will also have a Drive (such as Builder, Protector, and Rebel), Goals, Relationship Bonds, and more. Stunts are the iconic feature of all AGE Games. When your character tries to do something, you roll three 6-sided dice to make the test. Two of the dice should have one color and the third (known in as the Drama Die in The Fifth Season) a different color. If you roll doubles on any of the dice, the Drama Die determines how many stunt points you get. You can then spend them to perform various feats detailed on the stunt tables, and you narrate how your character pulled them off. There are different stunt tables for Action, Chase, Exploration, and Social encounters. Orogeny is also handled by the stunt system. The Fifth Season RPG provides robust advice on how to be a Game Moderator, covering everything from adventure and campaign planning to safety tools to practical advice about scheduling and table rules. The game also presents a variety of potential adversaries and rules to design your own. Finally, The Fifth Season RPG includes a complete adventure called False Season that you can use to kick off your campaign.