DAWN: The RPG
A downloadable High-action TTRPG
Basics
Create your heroes, discover truths of the world, face off against fearsome overlords or monsters, and grow in a world of your own making! Embark on an adventure with friends, coming with its highest highs and lowest lows, bearing the greatest storms to gaze upon the beautiful DAWN.
DAWN is a grid-based, combat-focused, setting-agnostic tabletop roleplaying game (or TTRPG), inspired by battle manga, anime, and tactical video games.
Cliff Notes
If you are someone who’s played a number of different TTRPGs before this, you may have some assumptions about the game’s systems or could easily recognize traits that it shares with others.
Simple Characters
Characters within DAWN are built with the intent of fun and simplicity, and for that reason the process of creating characters is incredibly streamlined, only coming in three main components.
1) Techniques
Multi-tiered abilities that build up your character, with different combinations of these determining the entirety of how they function in combat. These Techniques, and the general mechanics of combat, are meant to recreate the anime inspired action games I take inspiration from, including Wakfu, Elsword, or Guilty Gear, where characters fight dramatically to express the things their designers find cool.
2) Abilities And Skills
The actions - both supernatural and mundane - that a character is skilled in and capable of within Narrative. Each one is customized by the player, allowing for a near endless amount of personalization for each character.
3) Boons And Outlooks
And finally, your Boons, found as a part of your Outlook, a formative character feature that rewards you for engaging with your character's theme and backstory and gives you access to unique features to spice up narrative play.
Character Sheet
Printable (Downloadable with game)
Socials
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoelHappyhil
Discord: https://discord.gg/tabrf3DR6u
Updated | 16 days ago |
Status | In development |
Category | Physical game |
Rating | Rated 4.9 out of 5 stars (34 total ratings) |
Author | Joel Happyhil |
Tags | Anime, Board Game, Dice, Fantasy, Manga, Multiplayer, shonen, Tabletop, Tabletop role-playing game, Turn-based |
Average session | A few hours |
Languages | English |
Purchase
In order to download this High-action TTRPG you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $14.99 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Free Download!
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Community Copies
Development log
- 1.93 Patch Notes22 days ago
- 1.92 Patch Notes36 days ago
- 1.91 Patch Notes51 days ago
- 1.9 Hotfix66 days ago
- 1.9 Patch Notes68 days ago
- Status Update: World ArtJun 25, 2024
- Status Update: Varied Basic ActionsJun 11, 2024
- Status Update: Rounding OutJun 02, 2024
Comments
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Yo
Came here after watching this :3
Also, this could be adapted for mechas ^_^
While I like almost every approach and design decisions about this game, I think I have to make one criticism to this otherwise very well done system. You need to roll too many dice. In my humble opinion, this create two major problems 1) Challenge Rolls being very cumbersome to roll and calculate, and in unstructured play specifically it can be daunting for GMs to come by ways to justified rolls with many successes with consequences that actually matter 2) Physically speaking at some point you need to roll dice in several waves, and you then need to roll the dice that showed 6.
Mine wants to be a genuine and positive criticism, and this is not to say this game is not good, far from it. I mentioned this only because I truly think that if these problems are being addressed, the game for what it does will become almost perfect 👌
Thank you for the feedback. I do agree that a lot of dice are rolled, and I am looking into some ways to streamline it for physical play (optional or otherwise). I can't promise anything, but I'm grateful to hear your take!
Even an optional rule, so that one could choose based on their group preference, would be extremely cool!
Extremely impressed. Need time to sit down and get a better reading on this, but Dawn feels like the exact RPG I've been looking for. Thank you for such an awesome production!
And thank you for reading!
Dawn is a battlemanga themed ttrpg. Which is to say it's inhabiting a crowded genre. But to its credit, it stands apart. Way apart.
This is the freshest game I've seen in the genre.
Dawn's PDF is 108 pages, with clean layout, tons of appropriate art, good visual organization, and a sense of getting what makes battlemanga enjoyable to read.
Specifically, Dawn draws from works like Black Clover and Magi---the sort of rock-blaring, smash-your-head-against-your-problems, there's-nothing-hot-blood-and-a-can-do-attitude-can't-fix positive thinking white sheep of the genre. And this is a good choice. A lot of battlemanga rpgs try to cover *all* battlemanga with their mechanics, and there's a gulf of meaningful difference between, say, Black Butler, Dragonball, and Akane Banashi. By narrowing in, Dawn ends up being about something, and this strengthens it considerably.
Outside of its choice of tone, Dawn is slightly setting-agnostic. It has three example settings that it references, but it sort of expects you to match it with your favorite series instead.
Mechanically, Dawn uses a d6 pool with exploding 6s, a currency called Influence, open-ended Skill names, and a loose and customizable class system called Archetypes. Relationships are skills, which you can break for currency. There's no granular resource tracking, but combat is tactical and grid-based and cares about positioning, and it's built on a very solid foundation. There are also narrative-y elements like scenes and clocks that aren't oversaturated, which might make players used to Blades In The Dark or Fate more comfortable.
Dawn manages the split between combat and non-combat a little weirdly, having abilities for each that don't carry over into the other. As an example the book gives, if you can time-stop outside of combat, you can't necessarily time-stop inside of combat. However, on the flipside, Dawn's out of combat abilities use a Verb + Noun + Condition system that makes them *really* flexible and interesting to create---you can breathe ghosts while holding a certain memory in your head, or double the heat of any object you made yourself, and the system doesn't break under the sheer variety of options.
For players, Dawn is very clearly explained and full of resources and advance---both for navigating mechanical and non-mechanical parts of play.
For GMs, you'll probably have to do a little work on the setting, but there's a worldbuilding toolkit and a thorough GMing section and a complete bestiary. You'll be well supported.
Overall, I think Dawn is a gem. I've seen battlemanga ttrpgs get very mechanically intensive, and I've seem them get very high-minded and deconstructive, but Dawn hits a rare sweet spot in the middle where it's fun and breezy and still has *plenty* of tactical meat. This is a *good* game. If the phrase shounen manga ttrpg makes you groan, this might genuinely be the system that un-burns you out on the concept.
Thank you so much! I really wanted to get the feeling that this isn't parodying the genre it's based on, a trap I feel a lot of other battle manga TTRPGs fall in to. I'm really glad you like it and that you feel it's a good example.
Yeah! It feels really earnestly written, and like it gets the genre at a not just superficial level (an issue I had with BESM and some other stuff). It's super good!
I read this and I love it. It makes so much things very well.
Tysm! I feel like I've done pretty well when it comes to representing the stuff I like.