Grim Fronteira - no dice in this RPG, you play your hand

It wasn't a war, just the land giving in and the sky dying up. What’s left over there ain’t much: just ghouls and lunatics picking through the bones.

So now the civilized from the West saddle up.
Whiskey in one hand, cards in the other.
Heading East, not for glory, but for loot and greed.

You won’t be tossing around shiny dice in this tabletop RPG book, you’ll be dealing cards, same as in a crooked saloon, the same Blackjack or Poker cards you know.

Your skills? They’re tied to how you play the hand: bluff, draw, twist the odds, and pray they don’t turn on you. Grit, charm, guts, cruelty: they all show up in how you play your hand.

Get ready to ride into withered lands

Grim Fronteira isn’t some half-baked fever dream. It’s built, tested, mean, and ready to ride. As this campaign launches, we finalized game design and finalized the book. We're almost ready to send the book to a pro editor, unless one of us decides it's time to learn a new skill.

This ain’t some far-flung planet or fairy-tale kingdom. Grim Fronteira is our Earth, but it’s cracked and gutted, like in a history tale written by a wannabe Bukowski.

This run drags you into the first wave of Western scavengers, riding out with foul breaths and empty pockets, hunting art and spoils in the wasteland that used to be called Europe. They think it’s just bones and dust. They’re wrong.

This account starts around 300 years after the drought started, in the early 1900's. Australia? Japan? Ghost stories. Nobody’s heard a thing in decades. Maybe someone lit up electricity, maybe someone didn’t. Maybe the telephone exists, maybe it’s smoke signals and prayer. Where do you want your adventure to start?

A squalid bar in Boston with sticky floors?

A coffin-tight berth on a ship crawling east?

A rat-hole underground settlement clawing to hold its ground against the invaders?

Your call, make it count.

Can't wait? A free ashcan version is already available on our website, so every backer will see exactly how deep the grit goes as soon as the campaign ends.

Grim Fronteira is a lean, mean, easy to digest tabletop RPG book, not your usual bloated manuals. No sacred rules, just enough meat to get your game rolling.

Character creation here runs deep enough to carve out all the grit, scars, and rotten charm your party needs. We wrote it that way on purpose.

You’ve got ethnicities on one side, professions on the other. Shuffle, mix & match, and don’t sweat if it looks off-kilter or downright wrong. If you want to march out as a West Indian noblewoman flanked by white servants on a revenge tour against the slavers’ forts, do it. We can jam with that.

Your crew can be a pack of gutter-runners stitched together by greed and desperation. Maybe you roll wholesome and call yourselves a family of trailblazers, with oxen dragging wagons, kids singing hymns, crucifixes dangling from every neck, a rifle or two just in case. It’ll still end with a nice funeral.

The point is simple: the frontier doesn’t care what banner you fly under. Ragged mercenaries, devout pilgrims, liars, thieves, saints. Build what you want.

Sample Fight Scene

Jess Ueleh, a bounty hunter with a dust-stained hat and dead-true aim, has finally cornered Opossum (not a typo), a Creole fighter infamous for his machete and a face that looks like a bad mistake. 

The two face off in a narrow alley of Malopasso, the low sun dragging long shadows along the walls. 

First Exchange – the Gunshot.  Jess yanks out the flintlock and fires before Opossum can close the gap. 

Trait used: Eye A (3). That’s 1 base card + 3 extra cards: 8♠, 5♥, 4♣, 3♠ → Total 20. Opossum tries to slip away with Animal R (2), pulling 1+2 cards: 9♥, 7♦, 4♣ → Total 20. A tie! 

The bullet sings past his earlobe, grazing the skin and landing just 1 point of damage. Opossum won’t be wearing matching earrings anytime soon. 

Second Exchange – the Machete Rush. Opossum (again, not a typo) charges, rusty blade flashing. Trait used: Fire A (2). He draws 1+2 cards: 9♠, 8♦, 3♥ → Total 20, like a pro. 

Jess stumbles back, trying to dodge with Fire R (1): 1+1 card → 10♥, 6♦ → Total 16. The weapon connects. For damage, 2 cards get pulled: 7♠ and 6♠. 

With a standard blade strike, she takes the higher card: 7 damage. Jess started with 14 Tough Skin points, so now she’s down to 7. Not dead yet, but close.

Third Exchange – The Close Shot (Clean Hit). Opossum is right on top of her with the machete. Jess shoves her spare flintlock into her side and fires a point-blank shot. 

To hit, she draws Fire A (3): pulling 10♦, 9♣, 2♥. Total 21. She stops there, no fourth card. Opossum tries to wriggle out with Fire R (2), draws 8♣, 7♥, 4♥ → Total 19. 

Jess’s shot lands. No decisive card rule here, nobody got busted: that only kicks in when the hand breaks past 21. Point-blank means devastating damage. Two cards get pulled, values added together. 9♦ + 6♥ = 15 damage. 

Opossum, who’d already dropped to 14 Tough Skin points after the first scrape, crashes to –1. He’s out cold, and he’ll need to make a save roll (or choke on whatever grim fate the Marshal dictates) to keep breathing. No jokers, no blackjack in the damage draw. No fireworks, just the brutal punch of the shot. 

Quick Epilogue. The machete clangs against the stones, Opossum stumbles back, and then drops in the alley dust. Jess holds still a beat, thin smoke rising off the flintlock’s barrel, then steps in to strip him and tie him down. The sun over Malopasso doesn’t shine for heroes. Only for whoever’s still standing

Stretch Goals

$ 15,000: Three new professions and one extra ethnicity

First ride out, the map takes you through Gibraltar, Portugal, and Spain. Lands sun-cracked and heavy with tears.
But if the pot hits five grand, we’ll peel back the veil on another stretch of bad country: Southern France, Corsica, and Sardinia. More roads to ride, more shadows to chase, more tribes under the dirt.

We'll also toss in three fresh trades, one new bloodline. Maybe you’ll swagger in as a hulking caveman with knuckles like hammers, or maybe you’ll keep to the shadows, a nervous dog-sitter who knows more than they let on.

$ 25,000: Custom-design deck of French-suited cards

The Defenders Deck will be pulling up to the table.

Packed with 12 new face cards and 2 extra Jokers, this set brings to life the stubborn bastards who didn't run when the Old World boiled to bone: the locals sitting on the withered ruins, ready to gut any Western scavenger bold enough to carve out their dirt.

We’ve locked in the very same illustrator who inked the Invaders Deck to draw these thirsty souls with the exact same blood-and-ink grit.  Fancy a peek at what’s coming off the top of the pile before the shuffle? Feast your eyes with the first one: 

Timeline

We’re aiming to deliver by April 2027. No long waits or broken promises, just cards and stories that bite.

The ride ends come October 31st, 2026. That’s when we count the loot, tip our hats, and every backer gets the word. Maybe some of us will crack a bottle.

Lead hits the presses by early 2027, and the Digital Version sails out alongside it.

By April, backers in the US, CA, EU, and the UK will have their copies in hand. As for the three Full Dread Haul folks, name your patch of earth, and we’ll get the books to you, no matter how far the trail runs.

We’re four stubborn RPG junkies and we started hacking our way through Middle Earth with a bootleg Rolemaster sheet and too much red wine on the table.

Since then, we’ve rewritten everything from barbarians to pirates, just to squeeze one more night of chaos out of every campaign.

We have spent years abroad, but make no mistake, we’re very Italian: loud debates, long dinners, big feelings, and a deep love for creative work. The Invaders deck and Grim Fronteira are our first runs as publishers.

Check our Reddit and Instagram accounts to see how our project evolves, and join our Substack, where we will write about world creation and how we learn how to run this business while we sail West.

Come ride with us: get the deck, get the book.

Check our website to see our upcoming projects.

Listen to our Playlist

Yes, we also created a playlist on Spotify, so you can headbang to it while shooting at stuff.

Extra Credits

Illustrations by Simone Cossu (Digital Portfolio).

Special thanks to Ehtron T. Young III (Digital Portfolio) for his early interest in our project.

No AI Assistants, LLMs, Generative AI, or other devilries were used to create any kind of content for this project. We’re adults.