Aspirant

Aspirant: Souls-Like Grimhope TTRPG

The King Proclaims Himself Dead, Long Live The King

We have suffered through this slow and beautiful apocalypse, and with the earth itself in chains we watched the hungry city grow. 

Woe be upon Storsten! 

Cyprian’s legions of glass and stymied flesh march blindly, welcoming the husks of dissenters into their ranks. The sealed gates of Mar Abator crawl ever closer, and edicts still carry out from the dead king’s lips. But Mar Abator’s gates will open for royal blood, and through a millennium of the licentious king Cyprian’s rule, royal blood flows freely. 

Arise ye Aspirant many! 

Mar Abator rots from within! The atelier’s clockwork grinds, and the fleshmade machines run wild in their factories. The inner streets flood with goblin song, and their scabious blood pools deepen by the day. Niche ratmen scheme within those towering walls, gnawing at the bones of the city and its people.

The city is dead and yet it labors, each man a broken cogwheel turning for nothing.

These wonders are not ours! They are the whims of Cyprian, stone not set but wished, conjured by the enslaved earth. A labyrinth of ego, built without purpose by beings we can scarcely know.

The shackled nations beyond those gates chafe at their yokes, ripe for revolution! 

You must lead them! 

Explore the ever changing labyrinth of Mar Abator, cut the chains from our necks and the world itself. Drive a blade into the hungry city’s beating heart, and then take the dead king’s head!

Come ye Aspirants in your tin and silver crowns from every corner of the world. The challenge is yours by birthright! Climb the king’s mountain of hubris and cleave Cyprian’s crown from his brow. 

This world is yours, should you only aspire to take it. 

Grand Aspirations

Evil won long ago and half the world has been consumed by the hungry city. You play as Aspirants, fools of bravery or greed who aim to claim their birthright and take the dead king's crown along with his head. To do this they must delve through grand structures manifested by whims in full defiance of sense and natural law. They must triumph against the loyal and mad where so many have failed. And they must rally the shackled nations subsumed behind Mar Abator's walls. The engines of war are long cooled, the city rots from within, but perhaps with the right words and deeds the shackled nations can be rallied, and the dead king finally buried.

What Do We Mean By Souls-Like?

That feeling of reaching a panoramic vista and seeing wonderful and terrible things in the distance you have the power to explore, knowing each landmark is not only reachable but filled and surrounded by intrigue, danger, and reward. The challenge of fighting a skilled opponent or a monstrous horror and truly dueling them, learning their patterns and finding the safe openings to punish. This is what we mean when we say souls-like, and this is what we aim to create in your table top experiences.

We aren't attempting to make a one-to-one recreation of a souls game in a TTRPG, there are a lot of mechanics that just don't translate well. But we do aim to capture the feeling of a souls-like game, both in atmosphere and in game play.
 

What Do We Mean By Grimhope?

Aspirant's setting is an equal mix of Elden Ring and Jim Henson's Labyrinth. The world of Aspirant is dark, but by your very nature as Aspirants you believe it is worth saving. You will encounter ancient horrors twisted by time and madness, but you will also encounter muppety little goobers who are happy to make your acquaintance. People and people-adjacent things still find life and love amid Mar Abator's unending chaos, and there are just as many curious friends to make as there are mad monsters to put down.

The chances are grim but this is not a setting of hopelessness, YOU are the hope that others put their trust in, and only a trail by fire will show if their hopes were well placed. 

The Aspirant Game System

Mortals have three powers they can use to shape the world around them, Stamina, Will, and Wit. In game, you will spend these powers to perform abilities, and regain some but not all of your power back each turn.

This ebb and flow of your power and the power of your foes creates something woefully missing from most TTRPGs, timing. Do you spend all your points now in a flurry of attacks, even if it leaves you with nothing left to defend yourself with? Do you take the offensive or do you wait for your foe to make the first move? Do you sprint to the treasure as fast as possible, even if it leaves you winded? Make decisions based on the encounter you're in now, not on rationing power for potential encounters in the future.  

Reactive Combat

The draconic failure lurches forward snapping its malformed jaws, what do you do about it? Aspirant is dice-lite and strategy heavy, focusing on action and reaction.  In Aspirant, you don't wait for a dice result to find out what happens, when an attack is made, it is happening, and the target has to decide how they react. Each move is a back and forth, creating the feeling of actually fighting rather than simply rolling until one side's numbers hit zero. Correctly predict your enemies and parry their strike, raise your shield and block most but possibly not all of their blow, or if you have the stamina remaining, dodge roll your way out of danger all together. Feint out a dodge with a lighter attack before following up with your finishing move, or create an opening or expose a weak point for your allies to exploit.

So often in TTRPGs, we spend so long rolling dice back and forth only to then finally describe the action, letting the dice tell our story for us. In Aspirant, you and the Gamemaster describe the actions and reactions first, only rolling dice once the dust settles. Story and strategy first, dice second. 

Panoramic Exploration

If we're honest, exploration in a lot of TTRPGs is just not fun. Low preparation exploring gets reduced to boring mini-game for wasting resources with random encounters in between the planned content, or just skipped altogether. Or with high preparation exploration you get the opposite problem, where there IS a huge amount of content to explore, but now you've front loaded a pile of work for the Gamemaster as they are forced to prepare for everything their players might encounter.  

In Aspirant, we aim to give the players that same feeling from a souls-game of seeing wonders on the horizon they can simply head towards and explore to find a deep and interconnected world, all while giving the Gamemaster as little work to do as possible.

We call it "panoramic" exploration, because each new region starts with a vista that gives the players a big panoramic view of the area and its major landmarks. These landmarks, chosen by the GM from hundreds we've created, have their own quests, lore, challenges and characters all arranged by difficulty tier. They each have their own simple instructions for the GM to follow that connect them to each other, branch off into new locations, and even tie into the players' backstory quests to pull their characters into your narrative.

From the players' perspective, they get to explore a meticulously crafted world made just for them, and from the Gamemaster's perspective all they had to do is pick out their favorite bits from the book and follow a few instructions. 

Each Weapon is a Strategy

In Aspirant the tools in your hands are just as important as your training on using them. Each of the over 40 armaments in Aspirant provide their own unique set of abilities and wielding a different weapon can feel like playing a different character. With even further possibilities found in the eldritch relics the Aspirants might discover on their journey.

For example, the satyrine aspirant pictured above is armed with a spear and a soul echo bell, granting her these following abilities:

@@@Placeholder for Spear and Soul Echo Bell stats in nice frames.@@@

Guided Creative Spellcasting

When you cast a spell in Aspirant, you are stealing a little of the willpower of one of the Elder Forces, the eldritch entities whose intents manifest existence. Thus, magic is an innately creative force, letting you come up with your own uses for the Elder Force's power which you can then jot down and use again as spells.

Mechanically, you are given a large table of examples of ways to use your power, and how much Willpower it takes to do it. But these examples aren't exhaustive, they're merely guidelines for you and your gamemaster to go by.

For example, say you are a Tragian mage who has stolen power from Trage, the Elder Force of gravity, and you want to levitate a bunch of stones to create a stairway for your friends. There isn't an example that does exactly that, but there is one for levitating a larger object at 6 Willpower, and the Gamemaster agrees that levitating the same weight in smaller chunks as a staircase should cost the same. Now the mage gets to jot down their "magic staircase" spell at a 6 Willpower cost in their spellbook to be used again in the future.