itch.io

Hey thank you so much! I'm really enjoying this final stretch of design and yours and others' support is keeping my enthusiasm high. Thanks for your support :)

Hi Mudslingar! Thank you so much for checking out the game and for your kind comment. Sorry to hear you missed the release but never fear, we'll get a copy in your hands- I just refilled community copies moments ago, but if you can't snag one in time and you are part of the Discord, reach out to me and I'll send you a copy! 

I highly recommend the new version because the 2.0.x action and movement economies were fairly troubled. The new version is getting a much better player response. 2.1.1 will actually be coming this Saturday with typo fixes and some rebalances/language changes etc (those major updates like 2.1 always need a good bit of tweaking), and it'll of course be free if you already own the game. 

Thanks again for your post! Be sure to drop by the Discord, I'd love to hear some stories about your campaign! 

Thank you for your kind words, but don't stop designing on my account! Take the good ideas from my game and fix the bad ones with your own work 😁 I would like to play your take on it

Thanks! Lots of fixes to typos like this one will be coming soon!

Yes and yes! The discords been very active recently since I've been posting about the next version, which has an ETA of 2-3 weeks! Link is in the main page. 

Hi there Pteren, I'm so sorry to miss this comment earlier. Thank you for your feedback- can I ask, what was the initiative score of the bugs, and did you follow the "group check" rules on page 16? Retreat only requires half the party to be successful on their rolls, so it seems like very bad luck for them to fail three times in a row! I could definitely see this happening, though- in which case, I think that's a good mercy rule to implement! Maybe i'll consider letting each player reroll their retreat attempt at the cost of 1 endurance per, to make sure the party can really scramble when they need to.

And to add just a little more context, I started out making this game for my table, who always felt that OSR didn't have enough to grab on to to keep them interested. We all really like picking character options and moving miniatures around a table, but I wanted to try and prove that you could still enjoy that in the context of a player-driven, old school style game! 

This is a great point! You've arrived at the conventional wisdom that I am trying to challenge with the project. Conventional wisdom says that "combat as sport" a la 4E and "combat as war" a la OSR are fundamentally at odds, and I think you've articulated that very well. 

I don't necessarily think that is the case. Even in OSR games, combat is not always avoidable. Engaging with the combat system is necessary for progression: treasure and experience are often locked behind nasty encounters, enemies will rise up to present themselves as an existential threat that will need to be dealt with, etc. So I'd say, OSR isn't telling you not to fight, it's telling you to choose your battles wisely and try to give yourself every advantage before the dice start flying.

Trespasser is trying to do the same. Even victorious battles are costly, and victory should be carefully weighed against the benefits of avoiding a fight entirely. it doesn't expect you never to fight, it expects you to have discernment about when you engage, instructing you to choose your battles carefully. It even provides a retreat mechanic to facilitate this.

I think the paragraph you reference is intended for players coming to the game from 5E or other more heroic games, where they are expected to say yes to whatever battle the DM puts in front of them and fight it to the finish. That advice to pick your fights carefully is meant to be a clue that in a player-driven game, not every battle will be meaningful or necessary, and the party will have to be judicious about when it is worth it to fight. The Judge and the game will not make that decision for them. 

This is often the first thing people wonder when they look at Trespasser, so I'm glad you've given me an opportunity to talk about it a bit! I often describe the goal of combining tactical combat with OSR principles as a "peanut butter and tuna fish" sandwich. My goal is to make that sandwich delicious, as stupid an idea as it is! 😁 It's been a great design problem at the heart of this experiment that has kept me interested in it a lot longer than I thought I would be! But I think Trespasser has struck a good chord in the current edition. 

Thank you for checking out the game and for pointing this out- that definitely needs a clarification! Rules as intended, you are only meant to attempt one deed per turn; the Wait action is meant to let you put your turn 'on hold' and then finish it in the late phase, not grant you another turn- the language of that action is currently misleading! I'll try to catch it in the next update.

Hello! There is a patch coming tomorrow that will address a lot of the typos and inconsistencies, so I recommend you redownload the PDFs after that! 

Thanks very much for checking it out, and I hope you and your group enjoy it! 

Some pieces are my edits or variations on public domain pieces. AI was not used in any capacity. 

Aaron Lawrance is responsible for the cover art and some interior pieces (the Marauder, the knight at the start of the Callings chapter). The rest is public domain art.

Hi, there are actually a couple pages about running the First Day that I forgot to put back in. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, I will add them to the document in the next hotfix!

In general, if players are running multiple characters, they do bring all of them into combat and control all of them. Level ones can only make weapon attacks and take default actions, so it gives everyone a chance to practice using the fundamentals of the game before the other layers of complexity kick in. 

Drat I forgot this one XD

Kudos to you- I've also moved between career paths before, and I've worked in logistics too! I'm glad the game spoke to you, and thank you for the post!

Thank you! There will be a small hot fix tomorrow to address the typos, so you may need to redownload your PDF :)

Metal 🤘

Thank you! Long time coming, feels good to share it. 

Also, the cage of talking firebats on a stick is amazing 🔥 sounds like a fun campaign 

Thank you so much for your review! I really appreciate your feedback and hope you will get a chance to check out the new version, coming soon!

By the end of the year, hopefully! So I can say merry Tres-mas in my post.

Yeah actually my life situation changed big time over the summer, and I've had time to work on it steadily. Playtest Version 2.0 will be a big overhaul of core systems. It will retain use of the d20, but attributes, skills, fatigue, effort and other derived stats are all being retooled. There are full procedural rules now for governing the four timeframes of play (combat, dungeon exploration, travel/camping, and stronghold turns). The combat system has been reworked in a number of important ways, too, with a three-action system to clarify and simplify turns, a new peril system to create escalating tension in combat, reworked conditions to speed the game up, and a lot more. 

I'm most excited for the introduction of Sparks and Shadows, effects that illustrate check successes and failures to give players and the Judge more narrative control and variability than simple pass/fail or success/great success/crit success. It's a simple system, but elegant, and the people I've tried it with like it a lot. 

In general, the game is moving away from "Old School/New School Smashed Together," and more toward a "Old School Playstyle/New School Mechanics" arrangement, dispensing with a lot of nostalgic but ultimately ineffective nods to the past (like score/modifier, for example).

Contradictory, definitely! Two great tastes that go questionably together. It's a wacky experiment and I never expected it to find an audience, but I'm happy to learn there are others like me! New version is coming soon, keep an eye out :) 

Hello! Sorry for the late reply. Yes the game is still being worked on, though I do operate on ADHD time. 😁 All the recent events tactical ttrpg world have lit a fire in me to get the next update out soon, and it will be a big one!

Hi! Monster creation guidelines will be added in the next update, v1.21, coming very soon! There will also be a few more monsters added  

Hi Morgan! Thanks for asking- peasants can do both of those things! The new versions mentions maneuvers but fails to specify the opportunity attacks, so thanks for bringing that to my attention!

Thanks for asking and for checking out the game! :) To use an action, you must be wielding an implement with a matching keyword. So Melee/Conjury actions could be used as either a melee action with a melee weapon, or a conjury action with a conjury weapon. To improve clarity, the language is being revised in the next version to "Melee or Conjury."

Thanks for asking! It's a turn-based combat system, you have a pool of d10s that you spend to perform different actions on your turn, and you can also bank them to perform reactions in response to triggers outside your turn (like shielding yourself from an attack). There are rules for taking cover, area-of-effect attacks... the usual for tactical combat. And the combat takes place on a hex grid.

The game has complete rules for skirmish combat, that is, ground combat between small groups of characters. It has a less fleshed out ruleset for starship battles based on the same system as ground combat, and starship battles also use a hex grid. Hope that clears things up! 

Thank you! There's still a long way to go, but I'm getting lots of great feedback.

i get what you mean- the PDFs are bookmarked if that helps at all!

thank you so much! maybe you can homebrew your own initiative system. it would be a little tricky, because the structure of the combat round ties into a couple other systems, like Peril, but I bet you could make it work. If you do, I'd love to see it!

Thanks for giving it a look- yeah VTT is something I have no experience with, but I'm eager to learn, it seems like a must for a game like this!

Hi all, the free playtest version of my rules-medium tactical TTRPG is out!
https://tundalus.itch.io/trespasser

Trespasser is a game about peasants-turned-adventurers carving out safe refuge amid the long collapse of their dying world. Designed for player-driven, sandbox-style campaigns of survival and dungeon crawling, Trespasser borrows themes of early tabletop and pairs them with a robust tactical combat system inspired by 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. If you admire the principles of old school gaming but also enjoy picking character options and pushing miniatures around a grid, Trespasser might be for you.