Rapture (Big Red Ugly Edition)

• Create characters.
•  Play fantastic worlds.
• Explore new universes.
• Don't get stuck on the rules. You've got better things to do!

Rapture offers players a compromise between rules-light, exciting action, and conceptually crunchier story-centric games, with deeper characters without resorting to hundreds of pages of rules, overly complex mechanics, and dozen-page character sheets. While this game does offer a system for tabletop roleplaying, Rapture also offers several specific gameplay opportunities: Sandbox philosophies, balanced roleplaying opportunities, and collaboration between players and their referee.

Before you is a Breathless-inspired roleplaying game system, known to me and a few others as (simply) Rapture. Some of the baseline mechanics for Rapture first came to me when I designed my first Brealthess-inspired tabletop roleplaying game for the Breathless Game Jam hosted on Itch back in 2022. This game was Bella Ciao!. Then, after a few more months of working through drafts and tinkering with mechanics, I developed a second game, Dragontown: City of a Billion Souls, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the game’s initial results. I went back to the drawing board, so to speak, and I put together a hack of Jim Parkin’s Galaxy Far Away: Ultralite Star Wars roleplaying game, called No One Owns the Sky. This hack broke another mental barrier for me and allowed me to see the beginnings of a truly independent fork of Breathless, something I’d eventually call Rapture. 

You might be asking yourself, "Why should I adopt Rapture for my group and gaming table?" The answer is easy: Doing so will open your table (and your group) up to a new style of play that carefully balances storytelling, character development, and quick, exciting action in-game. At the time of Rapture's initial release, it will come with twelve (12) fully supported settings, along with toolkits for players and their referees. The Rapture Quick-Play Edition (jokingly called Small Red Ugly) will also be available to help the adoption process. We plan to release regular content on our official website and here on Itch.

Itch Project Page Background Image Credit: Image by liuzishan on Freepik