In Ruins is a GM-less roleplaying game for 1 to 6 players. Together, players will construct a castle, let it fall into ruin, and then populate the resulting dungeon with factions competing for control of the Throne Room, the dungeon's core.
Part cooperative storytelling game and part competitive network-building game, In Ruins begins as a collaborative exercise in which the players tell the story of The Castle, the focus of the game. Using a standard deck of playing cards, players work together to build the castle, adding rooms to create the physical location in which the rest of the game will play out.
Over the ensuing centuries, the castle will fall into ruins. Rooms will be destroyed, changed, and occasionally rebuilt. In the second phase of the game, the players will tell the story of how the rooms of the castle change and degrade, and what sorts of catastrophes the castle faces over its lifetime.
The crumbling ruin of the castle is now a dungeon, and an empty dungeon is a power vacuum. All sorts of creatures will want to fill it. In the third and final phase of In Ruins, each player takes control of a different faction. Each faction has their own entrance to the castle — and their own special ability — and the players take turns claiming rooms to expand their factions' territories.
Each room has a point value determined by what type of room it started as in the first phase of the game and how badly it was ruined in the second phase of the game. Once all of the rooms have been claimed, the players add up the total point values of their territories; the highest score wins control of the dungeon's core, the Throne Room.
Even when the game is finished, the dungeon doesn't have to be. Take your dungeon, now fully stocked with competing factions and a healthy supply of lore, traps, monsters, and other characters, and bring it back to the table to be explored using your favorite fantasy roleplaying game.
40 page color zine
