STRAIN

STRAIN Tactical Survival · No Magic · No Safety

STRAIN is a grounded, magic-free tabletop RPG built around tension, consequence, and the cost of staying alive. You don't level up. You endure. Every injury lingers, every decision compounds, and stress doesn't just flavor a scene — it actively degrades what your character can do. The world doesn't care about your arc. You need food, rest, medicine, and working gear, and running short on any of them follows you into the next scene.

Not heroes. Not legends. People — capable, resourceful, and fallible — operating in situations that tighten around them.

What STRAIN is about

• Survival — Food, rest, medicine, gear. Preparation is how you stay in the fight long enough for anything else to matter.
• Pressure — Stress degrades performance and the Round Tracker is a ticking clock. The game is built around the feeling of things closing in.
• Consequence — Injuries and decisions carry forward. There's no reset between scenes that erases what happened.
• Judgment — It rewards reading a situation accurately and knowing when to push, when to hold, and when going further costs more than you can pay.

Core systems

• d20 + attribute vs. a GM-set Target Number — simple to resolve; the systems around the roll are where the game lives.
• Stress — a penalty, not a resource. The worse things get, the harder everything becomes.
• The Burst mechanic — push past your limits for a bonus, but Burst Load accumulates. Push too hard and you break.
• The Round Tracker — a shared combat clock that fills with pressure each round. When it fills, something gives.
• Eight skill trees, three tiers each — active tools with triggers and costs, not passive bonuses. Tier 3 End Skills reshape how a character operates.
• Social scenes — negotiation, interrogation, and deception carry the same mechanical weight as combat.
• Injury system — wounds vary in severity and have lingering, mechanical effects — not just hit-point loss.

What's in development

- artwork 

- Character Sheet — an interactive sheet with synced trackers, full skill database, inventory, and ration tracking, plus a print version.

- Box Set — all physical components designed to ship together.

Follow the development STRAIN is being built in public. Follow here for release updates, devlogs, and free downloads, and join the Discord to ask questions, give feedback, and find players. Discord: discord.gg/97aCugM7B

STRAIN is free and built in the open. If you give it a read, a quick rating or a line of feedback genuinely helps it find the right players — and tells me what's working before the physical release. Questions, thoughts, or want to playtest? The Discord's the best place: discord.gg/97aCugM7B