Introducing Stain - The Icarus Games TTRPG

“There are worlds beyond the one you call home; they exist at the periphery of your vision, and if you are very unlucky, you might just see something from one of them out of the corner of your eye.”

For years, years, I've been telling people, and myself, that I don't want to write a TTRPG, don't need to write a TTRPG.

And then recently, ideas started swirling in my head, as they often do, but these ones refused to leave. I became a man possessed, and I knew the only way to find a measure of peace was to put pen to paper and get these ideas out of my head.

When the dust cleared after that first frantic writing session this weekend, I knew that this idea was one that wasn't going to be banished so easily, and so here we are.

Stain - A Roleplaying Game of Horror & Intrigue

I have started very, very early work on a TTRPG. I have no idea whether it has the legs to be a real product yet, but it's consuming my thoughts in the way that any of you who create will be familiar with - that ever present gnawing - and I need to get it out of my head and onto the page, so I figured while there is steam in this engine, I may as well share the process with you and document what making a TTRPG from scratch looks like. At this stage, absolutely everything is subject to change, including the name, which is just a working title.

Why Are You Doing This?

A reasonable question, dear reader, and one I've asked myself dozens of times over the last few days. Whenever I see an announcement of a new TTRPG system I ask this question. Why this system, why not X or Y, what is it that has possessed you in this day and age to attempt to build a game from scratch and try and eek out a living in the shadow of the dragon?

For me, the answer is that no one system is doing exactly what I wanted for this type of storytelling. There are half a dozen systems that I could hack to get close to the fantasy I have in my head, but nothing I've found yet that does everything I want in the way I want for this kind of storytelling.

I've known for years that I had no interest in making a high-fantasy swords and sorcery game akin to D&D. That is a space that already has multiple systems that I enjoy playing, and making a new game in that space is always going to be a case of justifying your existence next to D&D. I also find most systems in that space to be reactionary (I don't like parts A and B about D&D, so I've made my own system which changes those elements but still uses parts C-Z)

So, what is Stain?

Stain is a tabletop roleplaying game set in an alternative history 1800’s where twisted mirror worlds; dark reflections of our own world that are home to cryptic monsters and dark magics, bleed into our world causing chaos and destruction.

The mirror worlds are real, and those touched by them are stained.

Players assume the role of characters who have already been stained by these mirror worlds, and now work to try and hunt the creatures from the worlds beyond and repair the cracks through which they slipped into our world.

Stain is a story-driven game where players will always be describing what they wish to accomplish within the fiction first, and rolling dice to help tell that story second. When a character attempts to do something that is dangerous or has a reasonable chance of failure, they will be required to make an action roll.

Rolling the Dice

Stain uses six-sided dice. You roll several at once (called the dice-pool) and read the single highest result.

• If the highest die is a 6, it’s a full success—things go your way and you achieve your goals.
• If you roll more than one 6, it’s a critical success—you gain some kind of additional advantage.
• If the highest die is a 4 or 5, that’s a partial success—you do what you were trying to do, but there are consequences: trouble, harm, story effects, etc.
• If the highest die is 1-3, you fail to achieve your goal.
• If you roll more than one 1, that means something interesting happens.

Stain Dice

Stain represents a character’s contact with the mirror worlds and the trauma that they have received as a result.

Every player character begins the game with 1 Stain dice assigned to one of their attributes, and they can accumulate more over the course of their journey.

When a character makes an action roll using an attribute that is stained, use the appropriate number of stain dice in the dice-pool, and roll them as normal.

Stain dice that match the facing of other dice remove those dice from the pool, making them not count towards success or failure. You otherwise read the results of the dice-pool as normal.

Example: Frank is fighting for his life against the creature that has possessed the local surgeon. He makes an action roll to try to knock the surgeon out, building a dice-pool from his Body attribute and his Brawling skill. However, due to his initial encounter with the mirror worlds, Frank has a stain on his body.

Frank builds a dice-pool of 4 total dice (2 for his Body attribute and 2 for his Brawling skill) and rolls a 1, 3, 6, and 6 on his stain dice. Under normal circumstances, two 6s would make this action roll a critical success, meaning Frank would achieve his goal of knocking out the surgeon and potentially gain some extra benefit. However, because Frank has a stain on his body, the 6 he rolled cancels out any other 6s rolled, meaning his highest dice result in the pool is a 3 - a failure!

That is the basics of the resolution mechanic as it exists right now, and there are a couple of really important elements to it that build on the fiction of this world, which is dark and full of terrors.

First of all, success is difficult, the most common result you're going to get is a partial success, meaning you will achieve your goals, but there will be consequences, drawbacks, problems, or drama as a result. You are playing as a group of regular people dealing with the extraordinary; the deck is always stacked against you.

Secondly, from the very first session, you are marked by these dark forces you are working against. No character will ever need to struggle for a complex motivation for why they are on this journey; they have been touched by the mirror worlds, and it has changed them. They know what's out there now, and they can't just go back to their old life while monsters and dark forces work at the fringes of society.

A simple Character Sheet

TTRPGs of all stripes are built around the character sheet, even ones like Stain where the goal is for the players to be thinking about the fantasy of the story first, and the mechanics second.

The core pillars of the character sheet are the Attributes, Skills, and Vitality, which is represented by Stamina, Health, and Stain.

Whenever you want to do something that has a chance of failure, you'll make an action roll by building a dice-pool of one of your attributes and a skill. This will result in a pool of 1-4 dice to roll to determine success or failure.

But, if you're doing something that is particularly important, you might choose to burn some of your stamina to add an extra die to your pool, increasing your chances of success.

Stamina is like your "armor". It's a resource that replenishes with each adventure and you lose it first when you suffer any kind of damage.

Once your stamina is gone, harm will directly affect your health, which is much more difficult to recover - it takes a long period of rest, or serious medical facilities to restore health.

When you hit 0 health, you are stained and your stain counter goes up. You choose an attribute to add a stain to, representing a long term affliction or injury as a result of the damage you took.  These then become stain dice in your action roll dice pool and impact the way you roll dice for the rest of your journey.

What I love about the stain dice is that they are not just a negative. If you had an action roll where your dice-pool result was 1, 3, 6, and your stain dice was a 6, it would wipe out your other 6 and turn what would have otherwise been a critical success into a failure. But if the pool was 1, 1, 6, and the stain dice was also a 1, it would wipe out those other 1s, and remove the Something Interesting rider from your success (Something Interesting is almost always something negative for the characters, if not the players, it is a horror game after all).

Stain dice add drama to your dice rolls independent of any other context from the very first session. If you've got some d6s handy in two colors, grab 3-4 of them and add in 1-2 of a different color to represent the stain dice and just roll some and you'll see the drama that comes from it pretty quickly. While I was testing out the concept, I built the following dice pool for a character with 2 stain who had spent some stamina to get a 5th die.

What a devastating roll. To go from such monumental success with all those 6s, to having them wiped out by your stain only to be left with a 3 and fail!

Some Other Thoughts!

All about the Vibes. Stain is a vibes-forward game. Despite most of this post talking about dice mechanics, what is really important to me is the feeling of the game and evoking the fantasy of the story through play mechanics. Horror and intrigue are elements that I don't think can be represented fully in mechanics, so a lot of the game will rely on the back and forth between the players and the GM, and their roleplay among each other. It's still important to me that the absolute core of the mechanics be solid, but the ephemera; it's all vibes, man! In practice, this will likely mean a very simple character sheet (great for onboarding new players), but a shit ton of support of GMs to make sure that the GM-fiat, good vibes only, approach doesn't leave them in the lurch with no clue on how to resolve situations. So lots and lots of tables and examples and support to help the GM run an easy-breezy game.

Why Not Use System X? Like I said, there are several systems that do some of what I want Stain to be. For a while, I considered making a Forged in the Dark system, because the core of the dice pool system in Blades in the Dark is almost identical to what I ended up with in Stain. But there's a lot of other elements in that system, which is geared heavily towards heists/scores, that I didn't want. Plus I ended up adding elements to the action roll which move it away from the core FitD resolution. Tonally, alternative history Victorian era can be covered really well by Call of Cthulhu, but while I love horror, CoC is a very special breed of horror that is a level of intensity that isn't for me as a player.

Why Alternative History Victorian Age? To say it's because of the clothes is too simple an answer. The clothes account for probably 40% of it, for sure, but in reality, I find alt history to be such an interesting place to play TTRPGs because you've got a whole real world of references to draw upon. Maybe in your games of Stain, Jack the Ripper wasn't just some bloke in jolly ol' London, but was actually a cryptic from one of the mirror worlds? Maybe Stoker got the inspiration for Dracula from his own encounter with a mirror monster that left him stained? Adding the new context to historical events is a lot of fun to me. And the clothes are sweet.

Why Horror? I am fascinated by horror. Always have been. I don't have any phobias, so I rarely feel fear in a way that a lot of people I know do. Most horror media will at best get a cheap jump scare out of me, but anyone can make a loud noise and have something move quickly, but there's something so interesting to me about stories that fill me with dread. Monsters that are not quite human, just alien enough to trigger that part of the brain that tells you you should be running but you don't know why so all the hairs stand up on the back of your neck - that's my jam!

How will magic work? I have no interest in writing out a list of 200 prescriptive spells. Plus, it runs counter to the fantasy-first, mechanics second approach to the design. Instead, magic will work like any other action roll, which I personally find super exciting because it empowers the players to get freakin' weird! Let's say your character wants to throw a fireball, well they could build a dice pool from their magic attribute and their science skill, drawing on their knowledge of oxygen in the air and using their magic to condense and ignite that oxygen into a ball of flames. Or if someone was about to attack them and they wanted to defend themselves, they might roll Magic and Etiquette, invading their attacker's mind to tell them how very bad form it would be to start a fight here and now. Want to use your character's knowledge of medicine to make someone's amygdala explode and drive them into a frenzy? Cool, go for it!

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So yeah, I'm writing a TTRPG, and I've love to hear your thoughts, answer your questions, and share more of my progress with you in the coming months as I work through things.

I've also set up a channel over on discord where I'll be posting more frequent minor updates.

But for now, pay attention to the edge of your vision. There are worlds other than this one, and the things that live there are hungry.

Much love
Anto