Playtest Documents
Click the Guide cover to download.
Print as “booklet” on A3/Tabloid/Ledger, or save on ink and just print the pages you want on A4/Letter. Don’t forget to print an Adventurer Profile for each player, and possibly the position aids, as well.
You’ll also need a pencil and some paper.
Best game you ever played? Suckiest time of your life? Be sure to tell us – take a survey.
Consider Corona before playing as a group!
Got Dice?
Bastardium is playable with one of each of the following dice:
Four-sided (d4),
Six-sided (d6),
Eight-sided (d8),
Ten-sided (d10),
Twelve-sided (d12),
Twenty-sided (d20).
BUT for a speedier game we absolutely recommend that each player has two of each die, and on occasion as many as five six-sided dice.
Alternatively, use a polyhedral dice app. Some players actually prefer an app when flying solo.
Future Plans
The playtest Guide includes a significant part of the Bastardium system, enough that you should get a good feel for many of the possibilities available in the game. However, as we are very much looking for feedback on the tutorial, at this point, we haven’t included the basic rules pages. Also, seeing as this is a digital download, physical components are obviously not available.
The current layout is very basic and will be changed, but the position cards and the Guide cover should give you some small idea of the visual style we have in mind for Bastardium.
Ultimately, our plan is to use crowdfunding to make a physical box a reality, including modular cards, tokens, counters, a board and other useful stuff.
Playtimes
A Good Cause 2 hour tutorial.
Dungeonette 1-2 hour intro.
The Aviary 2-4 optional hours arena.
Chronicle X optional hours narrative.
Design Philosophy
- Variable Difficulty – Only worry about the basics or add complexity through an advanced persona.
- Equal Opportunities – Optimize and mold your persona, but do not underestimate new ones.
- No-show? No problem! – No need for all players to show up every time (unless you’re campaigning).
- DIY – The final, boxed version will allow you to design your own games with the included universal components. This playtest version contains no components!
I've got questions!
Yes, but plural. Bastardium games can have vastly different mechanisms, the common denominator being your persona and the battle system.
The playtest Guide includes a narrative game, Chronicle, which has one or more Plotters fashioning a story for the players. (Note that Plotters can run their own personas too.)
Fantasy, in a semi-modernized but pre-industrial way. You’ve got newspapers and schools, music cafés and doctors, and there’s an occult “science” called demesnycs which is the linchpin of human civilization.
Yup, d20+d12 for conflict resolution and various dice for other stuff. The games in the Guide (except Chronicle) are fairly dice heavy, but not all Bastardium games need to be.
You can’t! At least, not yet. It would kind of defeat a big part of the purpose of this playtest – which is to see if people can pick up the game from the Guide.