The Whispering Road will be a storytelling game of cooperation and exploration, inspired by the films of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.

The system uses d6's and d8's to tell a Hero's Journey about a people who are spirited away to a strange world, find allies and face antagonists, and at the end, may (or may not) return home. The mechanics explicitly reward cooperation and selflessness.

Your character is made of three things:

1. An Archetype (Ordinary Hero, Special One, or Mentor)
2. A strong Need that's regularly thwarted by another character (“I want to turn back into a young woman, but the wizard keeps giving me other things to do”)
3. A set of character Traits (“Everybody's Friend”, “Amazing Durability”, “Power of Flight”).

Conflicts are always framed in terms of which characters' needs are in jeopardy. You then play your traits to get dice, which you roll to try to satisfy needs. What you roll is added to your good karma if it satisfies another characters' need, or your bad karma if it satisfies your own need.

The story is laid out in a series of acts along the lines of the Hero's Journey: the characters travel to a new world (actual or metaphorical), face antagonists, gain allies, and neutralize the antagonists. During the final acts, a high bad karma relative to good karma gets you more bad karma, and if your bad karma ends up higher than your good karma, you remain exiled in the new world.

Will be released after I've done a few playtests. Want to try it out? Email me!

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This is a single, two-hour session where we tested the 3-act rules.

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