Windrunners TTRPG

Out now! $8 will get you the 51-page playkit with watercolor cover art by Kieran Pierre, 35 pages of setting information for the factions and history of Estìr, 9 printable character sheets and 6 crew sheets, a 4K map of Estìr, and a bonus playbook - the Balladeer! Version 1.3 has tweaked downtime activities and minor formatting fixes!

Windrunners by Violet Blitz is a roleplaying game about a daring pirate crew navigating a dangerous world of flying ships, cruel authorities, and endless magical possibilities. The game is situated in the custom-made world of Estìr, a collection of sky islands built to explore the relationships between culture, imperialism, and capitalism, but it can easily be adapted into any setting with a focus on naval trade. 

As a Forged in the Dark game, Windrunners borrows a lot of mechanics from John Harper’s Blades in the Dark, Stras Acimovic and John LeBoeuf-Little’s Scum and Villainy, and Austin Ramsay’s Beam Saber and combines them with a hacked version of the Resource system from Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor’s Spire: The City Must Fall and Heart: The City Beneath. The point of the resource system is to add a bit more quantitative crunch to the game, especially in downtime. This playstyle of resource management is not for everyone, but hopefully, it bolsters the scrappy, making-ends-meet feeling of Forged in the Dark games and makes picking up random items feel fun and rewarding. 

This document is mostly meant to be a reference guide for playing the game. While I attempt to include understandable explanations of all the rules, it does not have comprehensive advice for running the game, especially for players new to roleplaying games or new to the Forged in the Dark system. If you’d like more advice than this provides, I’d highly recommend picking up a copy of Blades in the Dark for more detailed explanations. If you’re interested in a more comprehensive rulebook for Windrunners or a set of detailed mission ideas, please let me know! You can contact me at violetblitzsound@gmail.com or leave a comment on this itch.io page.

Also check out Velocity Fair! It's a smaller, 25-page prep-less game about a high-stakes science expo that's set in the same world of Estìr.