How far will you go?
No magic. No superpowers. Just ordinary people thrown into extraordinary circumstances, and the desperate choices they make to survive.
You've been in the movies. The car breaks down outside the abandoned farm. The lights go out in the building. The stranger's story doesn't add up. And you think: I wouldn't do what they're doing.
Shadows & Sixes is the tabletop RPG that puts you in those moments. Not as a hero with spells and powers, but as yourself. A mechanic, a nurse, a retired cop. Someone with skills but no magic armor. Someone who has to decide how far they're willing to go.
Built around a single question that changes everything at the table: What would I actually do?
No elves, no wizards. Characters are defined by real skills: medical training, street smarts, mechanical knowledge. What you know matters. What you don't know will haunt you.
Roll d6s. Fail. Then decide: accept the outcome, or spend Composure to push harder, knowing failure now hits harder. Every roll is a decision point.
Horror. Thriller. Survival. The system bends to fit the story. Three dice, one question, and a table holding its breath.
One type of dice. A handful of stats. Rules you can explain in five minutes. The simplicity is intentional: the less time you spend on mechanics, the more time you spend on the story. Pick up a new scenario, drop into a new world, and play the same night.
The mechanic that turns every dice roll into a story moment.
When you attempt something difficult, you roll dice. How many depends on your skill level. Roll equal to or above the Difficulty Class (DC) for a success.
But here's where Shadows & Sixes gets interesting: if you fail, you don't just accept it. You can spend Composure Points (CP), your character's mental reserve, to roll an additional die and try again. You can push up to three times.
Each push costs more CP. Each failure after a push carries heavier consequences. The first push in any combat encounter is free, a small mercy in a brutal world. But Composure is finite. Spend it chasing the wrong fight, and you'll have nothing left when everything falls apart.
The setting is just the backdrop. The story is always about the people.
Shadows & Sixes works in any setting where regular people face extraordinary pressure. The mechanics don't care whether you're in a roadside diner or a derelict spaceship. What they care about is that your character is human, that the stakes are real, and that nobody gets out clean without making hard choices. The game lives or dies on that one question every player eventually asks themselves: What would I actually do?
Survivors in a storm shelter. A diner off the interstate that nobody seems able to leave. A valley where people keep disappearing and the roads wash out every time someone tries to get help.
Medieval villagers scraping through a brutal winter. Frontier settlers cut off from the nearest town. Sailors on a ship the officers refuse to turn back, even as the fog closes in.
Salvage crew aboard a derelict ship with valuable cargo and something else still onboard. Colony workers when the supply chain breaks down. Ordinary people in extraordinary futures, with ordinary problems that got a lot worse.
If there are people under pressure, Shadows & Sixes has a place for it. The system is built around human decision-making under stress, not around genre. You bring the world. The dice handle the rest.
Before the Kickstarter launches, we're releasing a complete standalone quickstart adventure so you can get Shadows & Sixes to the table with no purchase required.
The Last Stop Diner is a self-contained scenario for 2 to 5 players. Everything you need is included: a condensed rulebook, pre-generated characters, and a full adventure ready to run in a single session.
No prior experience with the game needed. Just grab some d6s and find out if your group can handle what's waiting at the diner.
It's three in the morning, the highway is dead quiet, and a woman just burst through the door asking for help. She says a drunk man attacked her down at the gas station. She says she just needs a phone, just needs to sit down for a minute, just needs to catch her breath. Then she looks toward the window and stops talking. The thing pressing its face against the glass used to be a man. She screams. It's the last quiet moment any of you will have tonight. She's not the one you should be worried about.
You stay engaged through the whole thing, even when you're not the one taking action. It's my new favorite RPG game.
I like that we were real people. I felt like I was actually "Mary the waitress", I was more invested in my character and the decisions she had to make.
I like the problem solving, the spur of the moment quick decisions that you have to make under pressure. It's just real people in crazy situations and you have to think fast, and I like that.
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