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Godbound: A Game of Divine Heroes
The Throne stands empty. Heaven has fallen, and the Words of Creation thunder from new throats. Undestined, unfettered, unchosen, you are Godbound, and your will is writ with fire. Godbound is a tabletop role-playing game of divine heroes in a broken world, men and women who have seized the tools that have slipped from an absent God's hands. Bound by seeming chance to the Words of Creation, these new-forged titans face a world ravaged by the mad ambitions of men and the cruel legacy of human folly. Their foes are the jealous parasite gods that suck at the wounds of the world, the furious Angelic Host that once held Heaven against the armies of men, and the endless legions of sorcerers, god-monsters, mortal tyrants, and eldritch relicts that scourge the shattered realms. The Godbound stand against these horrors, determined to forge a better world from the fragments of the old. Still, not all these newborn divinities have a hero's soul, and some nurture red dreams of glory and unfettered rule. Will you be a merciful god to your people, or will you make them dread your holy name? Godbound does more than simply give you the tools to create these wielders of the Words. Within these pages, a GM will find the guidelines they need to challenge the mightiest of heroes and mark tremendous deeds on the face of their world. Inside this book, you'll find… * Everything you need to take a Godbound hero from their first uncertain awakening to the pinnacle of divine supremacy, with mighty Words of Creation, divine gifts, and enormous works of celestial Dominion. * Fearsome god-monsters and terrifying foes to tax even a pantheon of Godbound. More than that, you'll find specific instructions and advice for matching martial challenges with situations and groups. * Sine Nomine-style system-neutral tools for building demigod-worthy adventures and Former Empire ruins. Create noble courts, lost shards of Heaven, hidden ruins, and dire perils for your heroes to overcome. Play a different game? Lift these tools out and use them with your system of choice! * A system-neutral Dominion and faction mechanic that lets heroic deeds have mechanically-supported effects on the campaign world. Your hero wants to build a fortress in her native village, or ward an allied nation from the scourge of a Host-spawned disease? These rules show you how to do so, and how to make it count in play. Need to find out what happens when the pantheon's holy nation declares war on an insidious empire of evil? The rules here will give you an answer you can use. * Mortal player character creation, whether as desperate dirt farmers-turned-adventurers or as budding mortal heroes who dare the perils of this dark world. Can your PCs survive and prosper in a world blighted by the past? * Cybernetics and clockwork prostheses, for those GMs that want to add in a high-tech or steampunk-flavored note to their worlds. * Divine Supremacy and Paradises, citadels and divine strongholds to shelter the souls of the Godbound's faithful. * Godwalkers, titanic engines of ruin built by the Former Empires to face divine foes. Salvage them from forgotten ruins or build your own with the creation system here. * The Martial Strifes, divine martial arts that channel the natural conflicts of the mundane world into fearsome feats of destructive prowess. * And not least, Themed Godbound that allow you to customize and flavor the demi-deities of your campaign to fit your own ideas about how they should work- with five worked examples to show you how to create superhuman Exemplars, shapeshifting Proteans, fate-thwarting Undestined, elemental Scions, and patchwork Arrayed. So get it now! Godbound gives you what you need to run a fast, smooth, easy-to-learn system for bringing the light of a new age to a world too long plunged into Uncreated Night!
- GenresRole Playing Games
242 pages, Paperback
Published June 25, 2016
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March 28, 2024How? It's (a) a Bundle of Holding purchase and (b) by Kevin Crawford, who does all those OSR-style random tables and sandbox-style play.
What? In the past, wizard-priests perfected using godly energy to make utopia -- and then decided to storm heaven, which revealed that there was no god. This ushered in some bad times, where people created their own imperfect gods, the natural order started to breakdown, and some hell dimensions invaded. (I believe there's something about how this world shattered and was cast into a plane with a bunch of other shattered worlds, but not much is made of that.) But now, sparks of divinity are awakening in some people, who get to choose some of the Words that they are godlings of.
This bundle included
* the core book
* Ancalia, a region setting
* Lexicon of the Throne, new Words of power
* Sixteen Sorrows, about bad events that might happen
* Storms of Yizhao and Ten Buried Blades, two adventures.
Yeah, so? Like Crawford's other works, this is OSR in mechanical skeleton -- 6 stats, d20; and I was curious to see Crawford include the "fray" die that he has in the solitaire/one-on-one game Scarlet Heroes. (There the fray die was to help the solo hero defeat monsters; here it's partly to show how your Godbound is a near-mythical hero who can defeat mobs.)
There's rules in the core book for playing regular folk, but, come on, the core of this game is "If you had the power of a god, how would you use it?" The mechanics behind that don't seem overwhelming to me (and philosophically, it reminds me of Nobilis, with different people being the god of X or Y), and Crawford both sketches out what sort of world-changing your PCs can do, and also how that affects how adventures might go. (A whole heist adventure might be taken care of in a sentence by a PC with powers of Night, Stealth, Speed, etc.)
(That said, there's also magic here besides the Words of Creation that the Godbound master, which feels like it muddies the water a bit.)
Now, I think this is also a really great mesh of setting and mechanics, with the shattered lands matching the PCs with powers. And I do really love the idea of the Made Gods, some of whom remain in pieces, and the Night Roads and the hellish abominations that might come in. The fact that the world here is sort of Earth-like, with one country having a tsar, and one country being a bunch of Italianate city-states, etc., well, that's OK, but it doesn't exactly excite me the way I was excited by the big sweeping ideas about invading heaven, etc. (What would this look like if it was literally placed on Earth?)
(Also: I almost dislocated an eye they rolled so hard when I read about the land where Reason is the only allowed religion, but which is also secretly run by angels.)
And I'm a little let down by the supplements: Ancalia is a land that used to be ruled by some human families with superpowers, but now it has a zombie plague. That's... OK, but it doesn't scream out to me "This is what Godbound is about." Lexicon of the Throne includes new Words, some of which are good for a sci-fi setting, but, uh, that's not what Godbound is about, so is there some plan for something like that? I do like the religion description system here; and I also like how Crawford takes something he had described before -- bad events that can happen to a region -- and expands on those in Sixteen Sorrows. (That is, what was at most a quarter page in the core book becomes two pages here. It's enough space to let the ideas breathe and help foster the reader's imagination, I think.)
Now, if you were thinking "Godbound sounds interesting, but what would an adventure be like here?", well, then, I regret to inform you that the two included adventures don't entirely help. Both "Storms" and "Blades" take place in the Chinese-analogue country (and are both illustrated with public domain Chinese art); and calling both adventures might give the wrong impression: these are sandboxes. We hear about a problem, we hear about some town, we hear about the NPCs, and there are some notes on events or clues for the big story. Maybe this is what an adventure has to be in Godbound since you cannot know ahead of time what the PCs super/god-powers are, but I was still disappointed that both adventures take place in one region, and deal with things that--more or less--would fit in a wuxia fantasy. For Godbound, I want to see something about vengeful angels and monsters from the Night Roads or Made Gods that are still trying to hold on to their people.
What? In the past, wizard-priests perfected using godly energy to make utopia -- and then decided to storm heaven, which revealed that there was no god. This ushered in some bad times, where people created their own imperfect gods, the natural order started to breakdown, and some hell dimensions invaded. (I believe there's something about how this world shattered and was cast into a plane with a bunch of other shattered worlds, but not much is made of that.) But now, sparks of divinity are awakening in some people, who get to choose some of the Words that they are godlings of.
This bundle included
* the core book
* Ancalia, a region setting
* Lexicon of the Throne, new Words of power
* Sixteen Sorrows, about bad events that might happen
* Storms of Yizhao and Ten Buried Blades, two adventures.
Yeah, so? Like Crawford's other works, this is OSR in mechanical skeleton -- 6 stats, d20; and I was curious to see Crawford include the "fray" die that he has in the solitaire/one-on-one game Scarlet Heroes. (There the fray die was to help the solo hero defeat monsters; here it's partly to show how your Godbound is a near-mythical hero who can defeat mobs.)
There's rules in the core book for playing regular folk, but, come on, the core of this game is "If you had the power of a god, how would you use it?" The mechanics behind that don't seem overwhelming to me (and philosophically, it reminds me of Nobilis, with different people being the god of X or Y), and Crawford both sketches out what sort of world-changing your PCs can do, and also how that affects how adventures might go. (A whole heist adventure might be taken care of in a sentence by a PC with powers of Night, Stealth, Speed, etc.)
(That said, there's also magic here besides the Words of Creation that the Godbound master, which feels like it muddies the water a bit.)
Now, I think this is also a really great mesh of setting and mechanics, with the shattered lands matching the PCs with powers. And I do really love the idea of the Made Gods, some of whom remain in pieces, and the Night Roads and the hellish abominations that might come in. The fact that the world here is sort of Earth-like, with one country having a tsar, and one country being a bunch of Italianate city-states, etc., well, that's OK, but it doesn't exactly excite me the way I was excited by the big sweeping ideas about invading heaven, etc. (What would this look like if it was literally placed on Earth?)
(Also: I almost dislocated an eye they rolled so hard when I read about the land where Reason is the only allowed religion, but which is also secretly run by angels.)
And I'm a little let down by the supplements: Ancalia is a land that used to be ruled by some human families with superpowers, but now it has a zombie plague. That's... OK, but it doesn't scream out to me "This is what Godbound is about." Lexicon of the Throne includes new Words, some of which are good for a sci-fi setting, but, uh, that's not what Godbound is about, so is there some plan for something like that? I do like the religion description system here; and I also like how Crawford takes something he had described before -- bad events that can happen to a region -- and expands on those in Sixteen Sorrows. (That is, what was at most a quarter page in the core book becomes two pages here. It's enough space to let the ideas breathe and help foster the reader's imagination, I think.)
Now, if you were thinking "Godbound sounds interesting, but what would an adventure be like here?", well, then, I regret to inform you that the two included adventures don't entirely help. Both "Storms" and "Blades" take place in the Chinese-analogue country (and are both illustrated with public domain Chinese art); and calling both adventures might give the wrong impression: these are sandboxes. We hear about a problem, we hear about some town, we hear about the NPCs, and there are some notes on events or clues for the big story. Maybe this is what an adventure has to be in Godbound since you cannot know ahead of time what the PCs super/god-powers are, but I was still disappointed that both adventures take place in one region, and deal with things that--more or less--would fit in a wuxia fantasy. For Godbound, I want to see something about vengeful angels and monsters from the Night Roads or Made Gods that are still trying to hold on to their people.
May 3, 2020
Ever since TSR came out with the Immortals rule set I have always wanted to run a campaign where players played god-like being and used their powers to shape (for good or bad) the world they lived in. And while I never did go forward with my Immortals campaign, despite some preliminary work up, the vision I had for this type of campaign never went away. Enter the year 2020 and my seeming by coincidence (or fated) discovery of the Godbound RPG. My long-ago vision of running an immortal-themed campaign came back with gusto, so much that I pitched the campaign to one of my gaming groups and they agreed to suspend the current campaign to play demi-gods in Godbound.
Godbound is an OSR-style RPG where players play mortals that have been given god-like powers. While they can still be killed by powerful foes or large forces of normal people, Godbound are significantly more powerful and resilient than their mortal counterparts. They are able to shrug off wounds that would kill a normal person. They can kill a group of enemies with a single swipe of a sword. Playing a Godbound is about using your power to take on powerful enemies and cause change on a massive scale, shaping villages, cities and the world itself. Choosing to us one’s power for good or bad and the consequences of using that power is what Godbound is about. This means that it might not be a game for players looking for the more traditional fantasy-style RPG.
The system is fairly simple, but great for depicting god-like powers. Players select Words for their characters to show their area of influence and power and each of these Words has an automatic ability for having the Word and a list of lesser and greater gifts that characters can purchase as they go up in level which will give them more powers associated with their Word. You want to make a deity similar to the Norse god Thor, you can do that with Godbound- just pick the Words Sky (for the power over storms and the ability to throw lightning), Bow (to gain powers to throw your hammer with devastating effects) and Sword (to gain a variety of melee abilities). You want to make a deity based on God of War video game franchise’s Kratos- just pick the words Might (to illustrate Kratos’ massive strength), Endurance (for his near-unstoppable ability to take damage) and Sword (to demonstrate his power in melee combat).
The gifts you gain from Words are more than just a collection of dice roll modifiers (mundane enemies are usually killed with one hit from a Godbound or don’t have the chance to resist an effect), but are instead brief descriptions of things a power does, some will cause extra damage, certain effects to happen or create conditions that opponents might be able to save against. They provide a lot of opportunity for players to narratively express how their powers manifest. A Godbound of Death might use one of their gifts to slay their enemies with a look. Another one might choose to be traditional and cut them down with a scythe.
The dice mechanics are simple, using D20s with modifiers based on attributes to make attacks and saving throws. While not always calculated exactly like their older counterparts, older (and some new) RPG players will recognize some of the terms, such as Armor Class (AC), Hit Dice (HD) and the standard array of six attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma). Because of these similarities, the ruleset can easily convert older editions of D&D for use (and the ruleset provides guidance on how to do so).
I have only mentioned some of the things in Godbound and there is much more content that might be intriguing depending on the type of campaign you want to play. You want powerful machines that can unleash the power of the heavens (like celestial Gundam), you can. You want to play mortal characters in a world with Godbound, you can. You want your Godbound characters to eventually rule as the pantheon of the world, you can.
Godbound is an OSR-style RPG where players play mortals that have been given god-like powers. While they can still be killed by powerful foes or large forces of normal people, Godbound are significantly more powerful and resilient than their mortal counterparts. They are able to shrug off wounds that would kill a normal person. They can kill a group of enemies with a single swipe of a sword. Playing a Godbound is about using your power to take on powerful enemies and cause change on a massive scale, shaping villages, cities and the world itself. Choosing to us one’s power for good or bad and the consequences of using that power is what Godbound is about. This means that it might not be a game for players looking for the more traditional fantasy-style RPG.
The system is fairly simple, but great for depicting god-like powers. Players select Words for their characters to show their area of influence and power and each of these Words has an automatic ability for having the Word and a list of lesser and greater gifts that characters can purchase as they go up in level which will give them more powers associated with their Word. You want to make a deity similar to the Norse god Thor, you can do that with Godbound- just pick the Words Sky (for the power over storms and the ability to throw lightning), Bow (to gain powers to throw your hammer with devastating effects) and Sword (to gain a variety of melee abilities). You want to make a deity based on God of War video game franchise’s Kratos- just pick the words Might (to illustrate Kratos’ massive strength), Endurance (for his near-unstoppable ability to take damage) and Sword (to demonstrate his power in melee combat).
The gifts you gain from Words are more than just a collection of dice roll modifiers (mundane enemies are usually killed with one hit from a Godbound or don’t have the chance to resist an effect), but are instead brief descriptions of things a power does, some will cause extra damage, certain effects to happen or create conditions that opponents might be able to save against. They provide a lot of opportunity for players to narratively express how their powers manifest. A Godbound of Death might use one of their gifts to slay their enemies with a look. Another one might choose to be traditional and cut them down with a scythe.
The dice mechanics are simple, using D20s with modifiers based on attributes to make attacks and saving throws. While not always calculated exactly like their older counterparts, older (and some new) RPG players will recognize some of the terms, such as Armor Class (AC), Hit Dice (HD) and the standard array of six attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma). Because of these similarities, the ruleset can easily convert older editions of D&D for use (and the ruleset provides guidance on how to do so).
I have only mentioned some of the things in Godbound and there is much more content that might be intriguing depending on the type of campaign you want to play. You want powerful machines that can unleash the power of the heavens (like celestial Gundam), you can. You want to play mortal characters in a world with Godbound, you can. You want your Godbound characters to eventually rule as the pantheon of the world, you can.
October 19, 2021
Godbound is a game of divine heroes in a broken world, men and women who have seized the tools that have escaped the hands of an absent God. Tied by seeming chance to the Words of Creation, these newly forged titans face a world ravaged by the mad ambitions of men and the cruel legacy of human madness.
Godbound: A Game of Divine Heroes (PDF-Online Reading-Download-Summary-Review): https://www.toevolution.com/blog/view...
Godbound: A Game of Divine Heroes (PDF-Online Reading-Download-Summary-Review): https://www.toevolution.com/blog/view...
October 13, 2022
Godbound is perhaps the best TTRPG I have played and one I consistently find myself returning to. The simplicity of the rules complements the fact that the setting and the roles of the players within it are both imaginative and inspiring. I have a soft-spot for pen and paper games and even games in general around God, and of them, Godbound is the one that is the most fun for me. I've run it several times before and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.
January 10, 2019
Stunned. This is really god. I really could almost see doing Mazalan Bookmof the fallen with these rules. So many interesting ideas. Amazing read.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews