A downloadable RPG

Buy Now$6.00 USD or more

Fever Dreams is a GM-driven tabletop roleplaying game for 2-3 players, presented in a 40 page zine with beautiful hand-drawn art. It was funded on Kickstarter as part of Zine Quest 3 and is now available for purchase here. The soundtrack is available separately at https://curtisfalkingham.bandcamp.com/releases. Physical copies are available for purchase at https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/TallinRiverPrints.

The world is haunted. Humanity’s collective consciousness has broken, and through the cracks come Calamities: bizarre, otherworldly entities which infest anywhere that people live and twist their lives. They might be dreams made manifest, or nightmares; they are united by little except their unreality, and the infectious way they warp the world around them.

But if they can be understood, they can be confronted. Lucid Dreamers employed by the crumbling remains of the government are trained to make use of the latest cutting edge innovations in Parapsychology, a science developed to make sense of the strangeness that now threatens to overwhelm the world.

This research has produced a ritual called Spirit Therapy, a procedure which can banish a Calamity by sacrificing whatever will fulfil the unsolved human needs which brought it into being. The price may be steep; part of the cost must always be paid from your own humanity.

You will investigate the circumstances that lead to a Calamity’s generation, explore the unearthly locations they twist around themselves like cocoons and invoke your brightest human values to reach into the suffering at the heart of a haunting and undo it.

Fever Dreams is designed to be played in a single session lasting a few hours to a whole evening. The zine includes rules, setting information and a bestiary of 10 Calamities for you to build scenarios around. While it could be adapted for use in a detective RPG system like Gumshoe, as a stand-alone game Fever Dreams uses a simple resolution system based on d6 rolls. The outcome of a roll may be influenced by invoking your character’s Aspects, or personality traits. You may decide to succeed when your roll has failed in exchange for gaining Fever counters, which escalate the intensity of the threat facing the players as they accumulate.

Purchase

Buy Now$6.00 USD or more

In order to download this RPG you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $6 USD. You will get access to the following files:

Fever Dreams - Digital.pdf 27 MB
Fever Dreams - For Printing.pdf 27 MB

Download demo

Download
Character Sheet 363 kB
Download
Calamity Sheet 337 kB
Download
Investigation Sheet 415 kB

Development log

Comments

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(2 edits)

Are characters only meant to have one aspect, or can they have more than one? Page 7 states  that a player can "argue that one of their Aspects gives them an advantage." To me this implies that there can be more than one, but then in page 9 it states to "choose one" in character creation.
Btw, is that line between the aspects in the character supposed to be there instead of at the bottom?

Oops, you caught me out on a misprint. In an earlier draft, there was a wider list of Aspects and players chose several each, but I decided it felt more meaningful to narrow them down and go with one each. Looks like I forgot to edit that line!

And yep I'll have to check with Tallin but I believe the line is intentional.

Hope you enjoy the game!