Drown Your Heroes

The stories we tell are often not of gallant survivors but of the hard-pressed, star-crossed crestfallen. They are the poetry of the broken and the inhuman breakers: haunting things, deep and dark and bellowing things, unfathomable things that consume all that edges to their precipice.

Sunken is a tabletop roleplaying game about these things.

It is a tabletop roleplaying game about these things and the sea.

It is a tabletop roleplaying game about how your characters find their doom among these things while at sea.

Sunken shifts the focus of the world of Trophy onto – and below – the vast and treacherous Salt Sea, expanding "That Silent Howl" from Codex: Void into a full stand alone system that remains rooted in the mechanics of Trophy Dark.

What's It Like?

Return of the Obra Dinn, The Terror, Alien, Bioshock, Sunless Sea, Rime of the Ancient Mariner ... Sunken frames naval and sci-fi horror in a world of dark fantasy.

How Does It Play?

As a Rooted in Trophy game, Sunken heels toward evocative storytelling over a simple framework – perfect for dramatic one-shot sessions. The original Trophy ruleset has been modified to put emphasis on the themes of dreadful ocean expeditions while keeping the overall structure lean and straightforward.

Character creation is a simple spin of the cypher: Choose your background, your job, your faction, and – if you choose to believe in that kind of thing – a patron saint.

You might be the estranged heir of a great family, turned marine under the black-skull flag, hoping to regain the worth of your heredity. Or maybe you're secretly a Company automaton, stationed as a surgeon with that crew of vagabonds, ensuring through subterfuge that valuable secrets stay within corporate hulls.

Each voyage is divided into five tides, a series of distinct acts that uniquely raise the stakes and tension of your adventure. As you take risks to weather these tidal terrors, you'll roll dice to determine outcomes. Accumulate dice across three pools:

The Flesh – For each skill you're able to utilize from your background and occupation, roll a die from this pool.
The Deep – Decide how much the power of the sea drives your action, but with each die you take, increase the chances that you lose some sanity. As your mind succumbs to the depths, find yourself steered more and more by the call of the sea.
The Heavens – An icon of hope amidst the torrent. Your fellow players can offer you divine intervention: extra effect applied to a success. If the Heavens rolls low, lose some faith in a higher power and hasten your descent into the deep.
Sunken's design heightens the feeling of navigating a capsizing character, encouraging you to pull power from the void while sliding you down an accelerating slope to your doom.

What's Included?

You get:

• Rules – A standalone nautical hack of Trophy.
• Voyages – Three in total. Inky beasts, bred with dark magic. A utopia built within the carcass of a leviathan. A fateful run-in with a cursed hive mind.
• Shanties & Lore – Splinters of the history and lore of the Salt Sea, useful bits to fill your own voyages with.

Plus:

• The Drowning Scriptures - A bonus zine with more lore, character options, and a voyage, all based on the gothic faith of the game's setting.

Notes

Sunken was released in 2020. It was one of the top-backed projects in Zine Quest 2 and received a nomination for Best Art at the Indie Groundbreakers Awards in 2021.

This is the complete first edition of the game. Remastered versions of the 3 included voyages plus That Silent Howl (part of Trophy Dark) will be included in your purchase when those become available.