Bone Machines

Collect what you can. Replace what is lost. Hunt flaunted valuables. Your body is temporary—it must be refined. Feed the machine—the Bone Machine.

BONE MACHINES is a simplistic toolkit for the adventures of collection-based evolving skeletons in a relic-littered landscape that fight to overthrow the opulent ruling class. It is adapted by Somnus Grey from Ben Milton’s KNAVE. Its features include:

Inventory is everything. Your character abilities and traits sit right next to any other items you find. You are literally defined by what you carry in your inventory. These could take on physical, emotional, or mental forms. It is all a part of your skeletal body. You will be constantly changing, swapping, and losing these parts.

No classes and extreme character customisation. What is in your inventory defines your specialties. Every PC is a Bone Machine that is constantly redefining themselves—reusing, replacing, stealing, and hunting for parts. This is an ideal system for those who will want to switch up their focus a lot and are constantly open to customising their abilities when finding loot.

Inventory positioning and management. Items higher in your inventory are more protected from damage and being stolen. You must decide what is more important to you.

No reader, I expect you to design. There is intended white-space. I wanted to experiment with a looser game. I created this toolkit to practise writing prompts to inspire readers to take what they like and tweak these guidelines to their own vision.

BONE MACHINES is created by Somnus Grey. Some text is sourced from KNAVE by Ben Milton. Images sourced from Pixabay. Title font is Cinzel and the body font is Bitter. All text here has the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License: You are free to share and adapt this material for any purpose, including commercially, as long as you give attribution.

Disclaimer

This game was part of a three week design challenge—I made this in three-ish days. This is the bone dry draft version, so while it is a 'complete' game, it lacks depth, clarity, and guidance that I normally like to add but I cut it due to time constraints.

I did not design this with the intention of it being your first TTRPG, but more if you've played with KNAVE hacks and other loose TTRPGs.

I am posting this to combat my perfectionism. If I want to—and I do—I'll come back to this and clean it up, add more to it, redo it, or reimagine it. Whatever the case, I enjoyed my time fucking about with this skeleton game.