Cantica

Cantica: Playtest Edition

The Cantica is a generation ark that will not land. A quarter of a million people live aboard, and the ship is kept running by the Bound: divine beings, bottled into its infrastructure. Everything else runs on forms.

You play ordinary residents: engineers, Proctors, nurses, Liturgists, traders, clerks. You solve problems that matter to the people around you. A recycler is frightened. A permit is technically in order. The jump is in six hours.

It's a game about kindness, competence and paperwork, played dry and straight. Nobody is the chosen one. Someone still has to fix the air.

It starts small. It doesn't stay small. The ship jumps between stars, and most jumps lose a day or two that no one aboard ever lived. The Lottery sends crews down to worlds that might be home. The Navigators are less certain of the course than they let on. And the Bound, who carry all of it, have feelings about it. Fix enough recyclers and you start asking where the ship is going, and who decided.

What Is In The Download:

• Playtest Primer: the world, the rules, a cheat sheet, and ten Station Briefs to build a character from.
• GM Primer: running the ship, NPCs in thirty seconds, Dockets, Scrutiny, and a complete one-shot, Hurting on Deck 22.

What You Need:

• A GM and 3–5 players
• A handful of ten-sided dice, ideally several white, one amber and two violet
• About four hours

How it plays
Cantica is about telling stories together. When the outcome is uncertain, you roll a pool of ten-sided dice built from the character you've made: what they're good at, and who they are. The rest, including what the violet dice do, is in the Primer.

This is a playtest
The rules will change, and some of them are wrong. Play it, break it, and tell us what you broke. "This part was boring" is the most useful sentence a playtester can write.

About the price
Free, or pay what you like. Everything you give goes to the art budget, to pay real illustrators properly. This edition has no art yet. That's where you come in.

Coming Soon

A foundry module for those that would like to use it.

A couple of more one shots.

Likely a mini-series: a 3-4 session story.