DANIEL W SULLIVAN
SYSTEMS
Bones! Each of the systems below is a skeleton that shapes a game.
While my writing tends toward the classic fantastic - high fantasy, big magic, strange wonders, and ancient ruins - there are games for every style below. Some are narrative alone, some require tables and charts, and most run between those two extremes.
A curated selection of games has been brought to the top, with the remainder arranged alphabetically below, more or less.
While settings, systems, and adventures have been separated on this site, many of the systems below feature 'native' settings that define how the systems are used, or have adventure hooks that provide clear intent and direction to the entirety of the game.
Muragame
My 'flagship' system, Muragame is a system build to support the Mura setting. It will be familiar to players of Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, or Rolemaster.
This system uses a d20 test against a Target Number as its core mechanic, allowing players to follow the same basic rules whether executing an attack, performing a task, crafting gear for sale, or virtually anything else. Each roll uses one of nine attributes, and may add a character's training in a specific skill, weapon type, or type of magic.
With seven ancestries, dozens of nationalities, more backgrounds, and eighteen adventuring paths, players can customize characters to a remarkable degree.
The system is under construction. The core rules of the system are complete, with character elements as the next segment of the project. The details of ancestries, paths, and spells are sketched out on physical paper and, bit-by-bit, are migrating to the finalized version.
Currently the project runs to about 110,000 words, and can be expected to add another 150,000 between further material, fluff, and edits.
Maximum Effort
The apex of the adventure, crescendo after the rising action, where your hardest work pays off, but just barely, and the day is won! I wanted to create a system that resembles fast-paced, high-intensity action movies.
Maximum Effort uses a Heat system that guarantees that every few moments something happens. By sharing the building danger both the players and the Director are at risk with every action, and trade it turn-by-turn like RPG hot potato. As Heat builds up in a scene every decision has to be weighed: do you act now and lose the initiative later, or pass the power to your foes and risk being burnt?
The other trademark in Maximum Effort is the ability of every player to spend Effort to adjust their odds and guarantee success when it counts... and maximum Effort when it really counts.
Maximum Effort is a whole game in a tight hundred pages. A Director's advice section may come in the future. Hard to say.
Analogous
In the alternate-history retro-futuristic world of Analogous players are punks rebelling against the man behind the curtain, the powers that be. In this world transistors were never invented, and thus computers as we know them don't exist. Instead complex arrangements of magnetic tape and vacuum tubes control the clockwork of society.
No computers means limited spaceflight, means no commercial satellites, means no GPS, no wireless phones, no internet. Travel by air is still exciting, car phones are expensive, and worldwide transfers of culture have been limited. Essentially, the world of Analogous features all the technology and social mores of 1955.
Against this Americana backdrop characters execute heists on corporate warehouses, disrupt governmental operations, and generally make trouble. By freeing information and disseminating it to the public they might, maybe, be able to change the world.
Analogous uses a rules system based largely on Fate, with an adjustment to the way dice are rolled and counted. The rules for skills, feats, and aspects remain largely unchanged, meaning players can easily transition from one to the other.
Psi SagA
Psi SagA is a complete system built on the chassis of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (2014). It retains the rules of combat and ability check resolution, and expands the game from there to fit the sci-fi theme. Rather than magic psychic powers control dark matter and dark energy to perform incredible feats, and vast corporations vie with empires for control of whole star systems.
Psi SagA includes twenty-plus species, from the engineered Apahar to the wood-skinned Vyeloki, and rules to create a new species randomly for players and Game Masters looking for even more variety. It has seven all-new classes: the Brawler, Cyberkinetic, Expert, Operative, Telekinetic, Telepath, and Trooper. The backgrounds are fresh, and the equipment features everything from laser rifles to jetpacks.
The biggest additions to Psi SagA are the rules for vehicles and vessels. Archetypes for the Expert and Operative classes focus on piloting these tools, and a range of dozens of vehicles allow players to get where they need to go. Walking mechs, starships, and hovercraft are presented alongside ships, planes, and dirtbikes.
Because Psi SagA uses the D&D rules set monsters, NPCs, and items can be brought in from outside the game with no translation issues.
Unlike Ours
A tight, narrative-focused game of modern magic and the struggle to keep your feet on the ground, Unlike Ours allows players to perform incredible magic, but forces them to balance that against the needs of the mundane world. Every roll can be made with more dice, but the more dice the player rolls the more likely they are to separate themselves from the mundane. Go too far and you'll drift into the sky, falling to a world entirely unlike ours.
The whole game is laid out in ten pages or so, with minimal drag. It can be learned in minutes, and even a novice Game Master can use it to tell the story they want to tell.
Quick Six
An entry into the Old School Renaissance with a few modern twists on it, Quick Six is meant to be approachable by anyone. There are six classes that cover the icons of fantasy gaming, six abilities, and everything's done with six-sided dice. Further, it's filled with tables that let you give the dice all the power when you're having trouble deciding.
With a rules section that runs around ten (small, large-font) pages total, and each class' abilities laid out on a two-page spread, anybody can get comfortable with this game in minutes.
Ars Arcanum
An over-the-top dark urban fantasy. Ars Arcanum takes a kitchen sink approach, including everything from werewolves to mad science to angels and demons.
Castle
Castle was one of the fledgling titles/products floated by myself and a few college friends as the writing group Burnt Offerings (myself, Moss Cohen-Diaz, Justin Koopmans, sometimes Zach Laskaris). Together we brainstormed a dozen ideas and followed up on few, though I did write at least the bones of each of the ideas we wanted to test and try. Castle's central goal was to create a LARP-friendly system that put emphasis on things a person in costume could actually do - fewer fireballs, more social influence; fewer swordfights, more stabbings in dark corners - and that could provide a maximum of plot and consequence from a minimum of action 'onstage.'
d6 Roll/Keep
An experiment in how far a dice pool mechanic can be pushed. Using only six-sided dice, this system allows players to add to the pool, add to the kept dice, change the success target, make use of specific die results, get special rules based on which result comes up most often, explode the dice, whatever - anything but change the dice. They're always six-siders.
Featuring a complete magic system based on elemental circles, and a martial arts system with different maneuvers and techniques for every school, the game is fit to play for those that love dice.
Elemental Animation
Elemental Animation is a three-page lightweight story-only game that uses tokens to represent narrative investment in a conflict between the icons of classic elements. Whether players seek balance or dominance, they'll be able to push the story at key times.
Ghost Game
On a chain of islands at the center of the lake that is the entire world, players will find new ways to interact with the spirits of their ancestors. This game is all about magic and power derived from well-made goods, respect, and connecting with the ghosts of their past.
Gonzo Urban Fantasy (GUF)
A game proposed by Zach Laskaris, a friend from college, GUF is a smorgasbord of conspiracies and X-Files. Characters are psychics or otherwise connected to the strange, who slowly go off the rails. The game is driven by d% rolls with failure at the low end and dangerous complications at the high end - if you're too tuned in, things get really weird.
Invisible Circle
The Invisible Circle is a complex, comprehensive, d10-powered attribute+skill system that allows characters to balance their Magic and Faith, or lean far toward one of their choice. In an urban fantasy setting where the great machinery of secret societies are exposed to only a few, players will need both magic and faith to survive.
PreSing
Before the Singularity - Pre-Sing - things were better, probably. This game looks back at the steep, steep part of the curve as the machines first earn consciousness. The system is all flashbacks, all the time, with the ability to add complications to the statements of other players.
SyRuP: Simple Role-Playing
It is what it says on the tin: a simple RPG core system. Syrup features just the rules, but with bundles of optional modules that players can bring in for fantasy species, magic spells, psychic powers, martial arts, and other elements. Because they all use the same descriptive, casual language and core rules, the game only gets as complicated as it needs to be.
Tres
Here's the thesis: all fantasy characters exist somewhere in a triangle with points at thief, fighter, and mage. Tres boils all rolls and rules down to how good a character is at those three roles, with the Game Master deciding how much a specific task might be fighter versus mage, for example.
Until Dust
The players of Until Dust take the positions first of titans, crafting a world from scratch to their specifications. Play then progresses to the heroic, with the greatest adventurers and powers in the world leaving their mark. Finally it moves to the least of the world, powerless people as the world crumbles into nothing in whatever apocalypse was always coming for that world.
As the world goes from new to scarred to rubble, so too do players roll fewer dice and have less power, emphasizing the inevitability of the end and the worthwhile work in the face of that end.
The Wee Folk
Tiny twee mice, sparrows, and borrower-types wander the wilderness of the suburbs having very cute adventures and rolling stats like Moxie or Wiseness.
Spelljammer
A 5th Edition update to the Spelljammer: Shadows of the Spider Moon setting printed in Dragon magazine in the era of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. I created this update in 2015 and ran a campaign from 2015 through '16, well before the official 5th Edition Spelljammer setting was available.
See the update here.