(Crowdfund Quest) Children of Time: The Roleplaying Game

If you love sci-fi then hopefully you’ll be familiar with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s absolutely epic and fabulous series Childern of Time, which charts humanity’s last chance of survival as they flee Earth’s ruins in search of a new home. If you love sci-fi and haven’t read atleast the first book, 2015’s Children of Time, then I highly recommend picking a copy up.

Award-winning publishers Rowan, Rook and Decard have taken on the mammoth, and exciting, task of creating a tailored made system for the Children of Time Roleplaying Game. You can actually download, and join in, the Beta Playtest of the rules here if you’d like a look. If you do, then please head over to their Discord community if you’d like to discuss the rules with other players and the development team.

Children of Time: The Roleplaying Game is a tabletop roleplaying game based on Adrian Tchaikovsky's award winning science fiction novels, where societies embark on epic, era-spanning journeys of growth, endurance, and self-discovery.
In the wake of global annihilation, the last remnants of humanity abandon a dying Earth on colossal ark ships, in a desperate bid to find a new home among the stars. Their journey will last thousands of years: they follow ancient star charts that promise terraformed paradise worlds, just waiting for humanity to claim.
But paradise is already occupied. Unknown to humanity, the terraforming process deployed millennia ago had unforeseen consequences – an animal species imported from a pre-collapse Earth has gained sentience and seeks to master their home planet.

In the Children of Time RPG, you become the authors of this grand tale. Construct an ark ship of your own and embark on an uncharted exodus towards a planet of your own making, all while you uplift and nurture animals of your own choosing. Or retell the epic saga of the ark ship Gilgamesh and the evolution of the Portiid spiders on Kern’s World. The choice is yours.
Build your legacy of twinned societies across millenia, switching focus from your ailing ark, ship to your evolving planet, and back again as you face existential crises that forever alter the course of history. All to answer the greatest question imaginable: when your beaten ark ship limps into orbit around your history-rich planet, what will your two civilisations do when they finally meet?
Time and fate are in your hands.

Designed in partnership with Adrian Tchaikovsky, the game's systems work to tell generation-spanning stories of entropy and evolution:
Everyone at the table claims different roles to suit the story they're writing together: the Viewpoint main character, the Crowd of assembled locals, the Ship who speaks for the creaking ancient vessel itself, or even the Guide who facilitates the group's use of the game's rules. Whenever you start a scene, players pick up roles and characters as they wish – and put them down once they've served their purpose.
Gameplay flows from the writer's-room speculation on events and culture, to viewpoint action focusing on the personal drama of one or two characters, to the background schemes others got up to during that zoomed-in action.
Stories unfold over multiple chapters. Each chapter, a specific crisis hits your society: a fire or plague, war or mutiny, a rare opportunity or terrible omen, each with their own mechanics. A character's story might continue from chapter to chapter, but they'll always bear the marks of the events they've witnessed.
Action resolution focuses on the approach a character is taking to a problem, and the consequences their actions bring for them, this place, and their peers. Dice rolls are quick, but their consequences linger.
The game is an evolution of various systems from previous Rowan, Rook, and Decard titles. The sci-fi worldbuilding and multi-generational storytelling of Legacy: Life Among The Ruins are combined with the beloved fallouts and beats systems from Heart: The City Beneath, which center player agency and turn failure into a dramatic storytelling moment.

The core Children of Time RPG comes as a three book slipcase set. Each of the books, “Your Future”, “Your Ship”, and “Your World”, focuses on a different facet of your play. Each book is also made with different layout styles, and from different materials, so they feel like a relic from differing cultures.

YOUR FUTURE: Play as ancient terraformers deep in space, pick a p[lanet you want to make your own, and experience the downfall of your people, as you scramble to savwe what you can before it’s too late. The book feels like a high-gloss prospectus from a culture at its technological peak, and holds the core rules of the game and a gameplay tutorial set during the time of the Old Empire.
YOUR SHIP: Provides everything you need to play as the desperate post-apocalyptic descendants of humanity. Build your own ark ship and flee the dying ruins of Earth as you embark upon your perilous journey across the stars. The book is designed to look and feel like a well-worn technical manual, with texture and notes from previous users spalttered throughout its pages.

YOUR WORLD: Hands you the reins of evolution on a world long abandoned by the Old Empire terraformers. Choose which animal species to uplift and move through cemnturies as they evolve, build their own culture, and face incredible strife. The book is bound in vegan leather, with a naturalistic layout style that makes it feel like a history book from an alien culture.

In additional to the rules slipcase, the campaign is also offering The Time Capsule (a box bursting with playaids), a Quickstart, an innovative Group Reference Screen, Demo Kit, custom dice, and a Project Coin.