The Far Roofs is an original roleplaying system and bundled campaign using pens or pencils, paper, six-sided dice, ten-sided dice, playing cards, and a bag of letter tiles. It's complete in one volume: with this one book and the equipment above, you'll have everything you need to play.

Here's how it works!

To resolve day-to-day actions, players will roll five six-sided dice ("5d6") and look for matches:

• Pairs up to the Trait they're rolling represent "success"—for instance, a Trait of 2 succeeds with a pair of 1s or a pair of 2s. 
• Rolls with no matches at all are "critical failures." 
• Rolls with 3+ matching dice give "critical success." 

To address bigger-picture dilemmas, players draw letter tiles and cards over the course of the game.

They'll build words out of those tiles to represent and summarize new understandings, or, to shape ambiguous and flexible outcomes.

They'll assemble poker hands out of those cards to represent long-term efforts or gambles; the quality of the hand determines how well such things go. 

The included multi-year campaign takes the characters from their first tentative steps on the roofs, through confrontations with moon-stealing monsters, world-shaping machinery, and dead gods, to a final grand encounter with the numinous beyond.

Illustration by Lee Moyer

On the Game's Powers

As the story progresses, your characters will gain access to over 150 unique, narrative-focused powers developed and refined over the course of a decade for Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG before being simplified and adapted for use herein. Activating these powers is another use for cards, with many requiring a card of a certain value or suit; for instance:

Keen Sense (choose a sense)

5+: sniff out one or more secrets if there are any available to sense; sense anything of interest, if not.
8+: follow a trail.

Or

Old Friends [requires Let’s Talk]

8+: have a favorable history with a stranger, practical stranger, or important member of a group/society of strangers.
♣: someone now knows you like an old friend. This doesn’t directly change their other feelings towards you, but tends to do so with time.

As these powers accumulate, they may change you. They may remake you.

To walk the far roofs is to be at risk of becoming legend, or, a god.

Illustration by Jenn Manley Lee

On the Feeling of Play

In the Far Roofs, you'll often play yourself. Or, a version of yourself. Or, at least, someone relatively mundane you can empathize with.

If you do, this is a game that centers emotional experience.

This is a game designed to feel real: to make you feel embodied and present even as you travel its impossible lands. Its primary moods are wonder; disorientation; presence in the moment. Less often, it'll slip into the register of fantastic adventure, delirium and body horror, inspired (character) genius, or peace.

Whenever that's a sensible emotional palette, the game can adapt to a different genre or a different kind of protagonist. You can play fantasy adventurers, or horror protagonists, or the cast of some cozier tale. The system will follow you into that kind of story, and happily ... but it won't hit quite the same peaks of feeling present; feeling real.