A story rich, zero prep RPG in which you play asteroid miners surviving and holding their community together in the grim desolation of space.
A game about community that helps players tell stories AS a community.
This game began in 2020 as an idea: what would it take to make a game that FELT like the pandemic, but hopeful? A game about community, in which the act of play would bring people together - help them create and fall in love with not just a group of characters, but the community they're struggling to support?
Holdfast Station is what @ashyfeetdotcom and I created, and with the help of the layout and editorial work of Jason Lutes of Lampblack and Brimstone and the genius art of @mumblingmynah, it's now available.
As part of play, you create your Holdfast - a mine in the depths of space in which there's nowhere else to go - and people it. Your characters then create and face challenges to the Trust, Health, and Station that support you. Designed during the pandemic, it comes with digital tools to make online play collaborative and easy, and can be played as a one-shot or a three-session arc (with options for Legacy Play after, taking on the identity of the descendants OR predecessors of your crew!).
I've run this game and seen it generate holdfasts with weirdly precognitive AI, gambling rings of bot fighters, Romeo and Juliet plotlines between warring mining families, Futurama-esque company conflict shenanigans, and everything in between. Every session is as unique and memorable as the communities of storytellers that created it, and as a designer, I'm incredibly proud of how effective it is as a tool to help people create genuinely moving, powerful art together.
Here's the link for the itch.io page!
And here's the link for the DTRPG page.