A free browser tool for running the Skill-Based Narrative RPG core loop. Use it to build a character, choose difficulty, calculate DCs, enter physical d20 rolls, track scene actions, manage XP, and export play notes. This is a play aid, not a replacement for the full rules.
Enter the Dead Spectrum
A narrative-first tabletop roleplaying system for exploring Solace through real dice, player choice, and stories that change as you play.
Dead Spectrum is not only a world to read about, listen to, or look at. It is a world you can enter.
SBN RPG, short for Skill-Based Narrative RPG, is the tabletop roleplaying system built to turn the world of Dead Spectrum into playable stories. It is designed for characters who make dangerous choices, survive impossible systems, uncover hidden truths, and become shaped by what they do in play.
At the table, the rules stay simple so the story can stay alive. You describe what your character does. When the outcome is uncertain and failure would matter, you roll a twenty-sided die, add the relevant attribute, and let the result change the scene. The focus is not on memorizing rules or building perfect characters before the story begins. The focus is on entering a situation, making choices, taking risks, and watching the fiction respond.
SBN RPG can be played solo, with a group, with a traditional Game Master, or with Gen AI support. It was built for flexibility because Dead Spectrum is not one kind of story. A session might follow an escaped vat-born asset hiding in the Sprawl, a Pureline heir questioning the Crown, an Acolyte protecting a Blackline node, a Naval officer carrying forbidden knowledge from beyond the wall, or an Enforcer ordered to retrieve someone the city wants erased.
The system is skill-based, but characters do not begin as fixed bundles of pre-selected abilities. They grow by doing. A character who survives repeated pressure develops the marks of that survival. A character who repairs broken systems under danger may become known for it. A character who lies to the Crown, fights through the Crawl, studies forbidden signals, or holds steady under interrogation changes because those actions mattered.
Your character sheet becomes a record of lived experience rather than a cage. The attributes describe how your character approaches the world: physical force, speed, technical reasoning, social pressure, emotional endurance, or strange affinity with powers outside normal life. Skill Focuses emerge as specialties when the story gives them weight.
Solace is the primary setting for Dead Spectrum play: a sealed coastal megacity built on hierarchy, surveillance, engineered bodies, controlled truth, and the promise of safety through obedience. Above the city, the Crown shines in white and gold. Beneath it, the Subspires climb toward power but never reach it. The Sprawl carries the registered millions. The Crawl hides those the system forgot, abandoned, hunted, or failed to erase.
This is where SBN RPG begins.
Not with a chosen hero.
Not with a perfect plan.
With a character, a problem, a die, and a city that does not want the truth to move.
You can use SBN RPG to tell intimate survival stories, political thrillers, underground resistance stories, mystery investigations, corporate horror, biopunk drama, or dangerous journeys through the lower city. The rules give you enough structure to resolve risk, consequence, injury, growth, and uncertainty without taking control away from the player.
The player drives the character. The dice resolve uncertainty. The fiction moves forward.
To start, you need a character, a twenty-sided die, a character sheet, and a situation worth entering. Optional tools like oracles, random tables, and Gen AI can help create surprises, frame scenes, and keep the world moving, but they are not the heart of the game.
The heart of the game is choice.
The moment your character acts, Solace responds.
The moment the die lands, the story changes.
Enter the Dead Spectrum. Roll the die. See what the city does next.
SBN RPG is currently in development and playtesting. Early materials will be released as the system becomes ready for public testing.
