I am pleased to announce that my next game, Race the Sand, has been published on Itch and can be found at this link. Race the Sand is free. In fact, I have it set not to allow payment. (If you somehow felt compelled to pay, you can always hop over to Dextra which is also free but still allows the option of paying.)

Race the Sand is a collaborative, cooperative storytelling RPG system set around trying to achieve the most fantastic, absurd, creative, difficult or otherwise noteworthy feats in adventures, because that is the only way to even temporarily save your entire world from destruction. The ultimate powers of the universe responsible for all existence have grown bored and are leaving, and with them reality is crumbling. Only by doing the amazing or unheard of can your heroes (or villains) hope to entice them to remain just a little bit longer.

The game is rules-light (only 15 pages), and features both quick character creation (even faster than Dextra's) and an easy to understand dice system, using two six-sided dice and a static, easy difficulty for all actions -- at least until others at the table modify your circumstances to make your effort both more impressive and harder to pull off. And you want them to! That's the only way to catch the attention of the almighty powers. By spending influence tokens, players can make dragons hungry, set rope bridges on fire, reinforce closed doors, make enemy wizards summon reinforcements, and more. If the action succeeds, your group gets to keep the tokens; fail and the universe remains unimpressed. Only through amassing enough tokens by the end of the session can your group succeed in their task, but you can get a good story out of it either way.

Race the Sand was written over the summer and represents a general acknowledgement of the distressing world in which many of us find ourselves today. Between rising international tensions, economic stagnation, climate change and other concerns, things can sometimes feel hopeless. But playing Race the Sand will hopefully remind us all that, unlike the world expressed within the game, we are not without hope. Also, it's a grand excuse to go absolutely big on your adventures. And it's free. I hope you will enjoy.