The Rapture Roleplay System, simply known as Rapture, or even (jokingly) as Rappture, started as a failed attempt to hack the d100 (d%) systems found in legacy roleplaying games like TSR’s short-lived Star Frontiers and bring those d100 systems into conversation with narrative-centric games like Fudge, Fate, and many others.

 

Three years later, exhausted by the mathematical crunch and heavy weight of the project, I was looking for a breakthrough, and I stumbled upon the Breathless system designed, developed, and authored by René-Pier Deshaies-Gélinas, whose minimalist game design got me thinking about Rapture in a whole new light: What if games could achieve depth narratively without being bogged down by esoteric rules? 

 

Rapture, as it stands now, is an amalgamation of lightweight, mechanically simple games combined with the narrative-focused toolkits of story games. The game starts with Session Zero, carrying onward into character creation and into the core gameplay and collaborative worldbuilding that takes place at the table. 

 

At its heart, Rapture is an ongoing conversation, one between a group of players who are working together rather than against one another. Through meaningful collaboration, the game, its story, and its world or universe are owned and made by all at the table. 

 

While Rapture is (technically speaking) setting agnostic, it is supported by over a dozen official settings covering different speculative fiction sub-genres, such as urban fantasy, fantasy, space opera, cyberpunk, and post-apocalyptic worlds and universes. The variety and modularity offered by Rapture push past the bland and tiresome setting-agnostic games we all know. 

We are planning to release a revamped Rapture, Big Red Ugly Two, in digital and print formats. The crowdfunding campaign will include a single rulebook broken into three large parts: 1) Core Ruleset, 2)  Rapture Toolkits, and 3) Rapture Campaigns.

If you'd like to check out the previous edition of Rapture, known as the Big Red Ugly Edition, you can find it on Itch.io (link here). There are plenty of free community copies up for grabs, so consider getting a copy of the game before launch to see if this is something for you.

Also: Check out our rough draft character sheet for Rapture's Big Red Ugly Two release as seen below:

Artwork Credits: Cover made possible with licensed artwork from the following sources: The Public Domain, Canva (licensed art), Unsplash (various artists), OpenClipArt, @Chaoclypse, Felipe da Silva Faria, Stéphane Richard, and @ciberaerts.

The Dicier Typeface, designed and developed by Speak the Sky, has been used in this rulebook and any associated handouts, cheat sheets, and game system references. The Dicier Typeface is licensed under the CC-BY 4.0 International License for our use within this project.