The Boneyard Wake

The train engine screams, exhaling industry and aggression.

Made for DURFJam 2023, The Boneyard Wake is a TTRPG that uses a modified version of the DURF system by Emiel Boven. Characters are defined by three core statistics, an evolving background, a skill ladder and the objects they carry.

Players navigate a wasteland, the Boneyard, sparsely populated with farming and mining villages. The resources from the Boneyard are taken by rail to the Cities, where endless committees hold sway and oppress while keeping their people fed, housed and safe from the threats of the Yard. Threats may be as mundane as raiders or as bizarre as vicious swarms of feral industry that bloom in corners of the wasteland. Dangerous as they are, these blooms can also be harvested for profit and wondrous objects.

But this is not an empty land. Strange and haunted trains crawl along the rail lines that stretch across the Boneyard like a net. They run out from the City and back again, full of ore and people to work the City foundries and factory farms. 

There are lost divinities here who have fallen into the Boneyard through its frayed reality, gods that blend in with the villagers and the workers of the cities. Sometimes the divine forget who they are or even where they have stored their power, safe from the Yard, in the mundane objects that surround them.

Above everything are the bright coloured thousand eyed angels who gently, catastrophically drift to the ground to blast and then replenish the earth of the Boneyard.

Currently the game is under development and play testing will start soon. Updates will include further details regarding the setting, adjustments based on the playtest and tables for randomly generating items and locations.  And way more details on about the trains. 

We’ll keep everything free until the project gets further along.  Comments are  encouraged and welcome.

And a final thank-you to Emiel Boven for making DURF! It’s a fun little system and a wonderful foundation for building on.