Deep Sky Ballad - For a Fistful of Seeds

Welcome to the New Frontier: distant planets, wild lands, isolated settlements, and the freedom from the interference of a distant government, with its strengths and weaknesses. But there is not only the violence of the lawless and the drifters. In Deep Sky Ballad – For a Fistful of Seeds, you won’t play wandering mercenaries or bounty-hunting gunslingers. You’ll play something rarer… and more fragile:  

👉 Settlers. Owners of a rural Court. Families armed to defend their land and their loved ones. Laborers drenched in sweat as they wrest the fruits from the earth.

Against harsh nature. Against strangers' greed. Against the horrors of the forgotten past.

The frontier isn't just about duels... but about toil, sweat, and difficult choices. Your Court is your refuge, your home, and your wealth. But it's also the perfect target for those who want to take it all.

Inspired by the atmosphere of classic westerns (Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman), but contaminated by the horror and brutality of Deep Sky Ballad's New Frontier, this supplement takes the game in a new direction: the management of a farm on an alien world. The rural survival amid drought, frost, and predators. The fights against criminals of the Eight Syndicates and mercenaries hired by greedy capitalists. The dangers of Soulless (corrupted automatons), mutant creatures from the space and other threats impossible to explain. The development of a stable community... that can collapse overnight

If you want to know more about the setting of the New Frontier, visit the Gamefound page of the Core Book of Deep Sky Ballad.

In A Fistful of Seeds, the spaceship gives way to something more challenging: the Court. A collection of buildings, structures, and resources that represent your settlement.

The Court is composed of Structures (Residences, Generators, Stables, Fields, Security Systems, etc.) and Settlers (Non-player characters who live with you and work for the community), but also key parameters as Energy, Housing, Wear, and other. Every expansion or investment choice truly changes the future of your Settlement. The expansion includes optional Cards representing each Court Structure; bring your Court to life aesthetically, too, instead of reducing it to mere numbers on a sheet!

The game uses the proven Blackjack System from Deep Sky Ballad and Arcana Familia, a poker-card resolution system (1-10, without face cards or jokers). Every challenge is a calculated risk: You draw cards up to your Attributes limit, you eliminate excessive cards using Skills. You try to reach the difficulty... without going over 21. It's a simple, straightforward, and incredibly cinematic system.

You can learn its basic rules in the Deep Sky Ballad core book Quickstarter, which you can download for free here.

The big new feature in A Fistful of Seeds is a mechanic that transforms each game season into a narrative management challenge, the Cycle; a phase representing approximately 90 days of work, events, and unexpected events. During a Cycle, your Settlement will Invest Resources to build or improve Structures, deal with Accidents (theft, sabotage, work injuries), assign Settlers to strategic tasks and conduct Challenges for Tasks like work the fields, repair equipment, design more efficient agricultural protocols. It will Suffer from Setbacks Events (bad weather, plagues, disasters) and manage Wear and tear on Structures. At the end you'll calculate Harvest and sell it at the market and finally... transform everything into Resources, the currency that fuels the growth of your community (and the evolution of the Characters)

Each Cycle is a chapter in your story: a mix of strategy, role-play, and tension.

You can read an example of a Court Cycle by downloading the free Deep Sky Ballad - For a Fistful of Seeds Game Example here!

Resources no longer come from contracts or plunder... but from your work. Selling a crop Batch means choosing whether to sell immediately or keep for the future, hoping for a favorable market, deciding whether to risk everything for a greater profit, protecting your produce from those who would steal it; and if something goes wrong... it's back to taking up arms.

Because in the New Frontier, the farm is wealth. And wealth attracts blood.

Deep Sky Ballad - For a Fistful of Seeds is more than just an expansion: it's a new way to play the TTRPG Deep Sky Ballad.

✔ Rural experience; your characters can divide their time between frenetic adventures and cozy everyday life Stardew Valley-like

✔ Integrated management system, easy to use yet deep

✔ Emergent narrative: every event generates stories

✔ Western + Sci-Fi + Horror threats... or not, if you don't like them

✔ Concrete progression: every building constructed is an achievement, and any damage suffered by your Court can be recovered, with some good work.

✔ Western-style atmosphere, but on alien planets

The Deep Sky Ballad – For a Fistful of Seeds rulebook will include:

-Complete rules for the Cycle

-Setting expansion on the flora and fauna of the New Frontier

-An introductory adventure

-Complete Court management sheet

Everything is designed to make the game fluid, physical, and immediate during play.

This game is perfect if you love: Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, The Mandalorian but also Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman.

It includes dirty and human borderlands, whose inhabitants are united in survival and chronicles where home and community really matter. There are also adventures where economic and social choices have consequences and narrative management games (but without losing the soul of the TTRPG).

If you want a campaign where the enemy isn't just a bandit... but also the cold, hunger, and the wrong season... this is your frontier.

Got nothing to do at home, want to roleplay but your friends are all busy? Problem solved!

Deep Sky Ballad - Kowtown & Associates Chronicles is a procedural adventure generator for Deep Sky Ballad and for its variant For A Fistful of Seeds, specifically designed not only to ease the burden on Game Masters but also to allow for masterless and solo play thanks to a system inspired by journaling role-playing games.

It's free! You can download it here. Requires the Deep Sky Ballad core rulebook to play.

In addition to the various rewards, all digital and physical pledges will include the .stl files needed to 3D print the official Deep Sky Ballad – For a Fistful of Seeds meeples. This allows you to physically represent your Structures and Settlers on the map and the cards of your Court.

While using meeples is entirely optional and not required for the game mechanics, we recommend them to enhance immersion and overall experience.

Additionally, .stl files will be included for 3D printing the spaceship modules for the space combat described in the Deep Sky Ballad Core Book. Build your own custom models and battle against all kinds of opponents in exciting and frenetic space duels!

Deep Sky Ballad - For a Fistful of Seeds, ad all Winged Lion Games games, is Dyslexia Friendly; all our digital documents are text files that can be easily oriented in the various sections and read by PDF reading applications with Text-To-Speech functions, so as to easily allow even players affected by dyslexia to easily understand their content and enjoy the games described in our books.

Because DSB - For a Fistful of Seeds is a project that unites two souls:

🔥 the tension and action of the Wild West

🌾 the slow, exciting buildup and the sense of community of colonial life

Every contribution will help make the rulebook richer, more illustrated, more complete, and filled with ready-to-play content.

And above all... to give your Court a future.

Deep Sky Ballad - For a Fistful of Seeds requires the Deep Sky Ballad Core Rulebook to play.

For the Gamefound campaign only, you'll have the opportunity to purchase both DSB - For a Fistful of Seeds (50 pages) and the Deep Sky Ballad Core Rulebook (167 pages), both in Full Color, at a specially discounted price!

Plus, pre-campaign followers will have access to an additional 33% discount on these bundles (Bloodline and Settler Rewards only)! (This discount will be counted during the Pledge Manager, in the form of a refund).