Libreté

The city is dead. The grown-ups are gone. And the rain never, ever stops.

Libreté is a tabletop role-playing game that invites you to assume the lives of children trying to survive in a world without adults. To survive in The City you’ll need to come together to form a community with other refugee children, overcome the gangs that seek to take what is yours and avoid being devoured by the sirens of the storm that lurk in every drop and puddle.

Finding your way home is an absurd fantasy—in The City everything is a struggle. Whether you’re a newcomer, the head of a powerful faction or an established outcast, you’ll quickly learn that nobody is coming to save you and that sometimes the only way to survive immediate danger is to embrace long-lasting trauma. How you cope with this stress and how it affects your future decisions, determines the success of your isolated group.

Libreté uses a modified Powered By The Apocalypse system with the crucial addition of a new mechanic: bile, a measure of the characters’ susceptibility to the dark instincts that inhabit us all. Bile is rage: the same violence that drives a child to pick up a rock in a schoolyard fight can also be used to power through the fear that would otherwise paralyze them in the face of horrible death.

Is your child a pacifist or a coward? A warrior or a sociopath? Is this minor squabble going to better prepare you for the horrors to come or drive a knife through the tenuous fabric of your found community? Will you show mercy when given the chance? Will they?

At it’s heart the system is designed to encourage earnest roleplaying while minimizing unnecessary mechanical tests. Class archetypes help you quickly create and flesh out a character and the flow of the game means that each skill check—successful or not—introduces new facets of the story.

Originally released to a French audience in 2016, this Kickstarter marks the first English translation of Vivien Féasson’s Libreté. The original was well-received for its story and rules. For the English language version, we’ve brought on Ennie-award winning editors Fiona Geist and Jarrett Crader (MOTHERSHIP, Ultraviolet Grasslands, Fever Swamp, Silent Titans) to give the entire book a thorough re-working to impart clarity and ease-of-use. The layout is being redesigned from the ground up by David Shugars, with interior art by Mathieu Chevalier and cover art by Lauren Bryce.