Perilous Voyage

Perilous Voyage is a sailing game of that seeks to capture both the romanticized and downright horrid aspects from the latter part of the so-called “Age of Sail.” Combining the Caltrop Core for dice mechanics, a Carta card exploration & event system, a unique character creation system, and a Tumbling Tower mechanic similar to The Wretched, Perilous Voyage pulls from a pedigree of great systems to create an intuitive game for your group. The events and social roleplay of the game encourages you to explore the social, rank, and class tensions that would have existed on a period sailing ship, especially as things get hard for the crew.

If you can't pay for the game or want to try before you buy, a text only version of the game and the character sheets can be downloaded as "demos" below!

If you don’t have a tumbling tower, you can use this dice-based simulator created by Max Kämmerer to emulate the 100d6 mechanic created by Speak the Sky!

The Character

Character Creation is designed to be simple and quick to do. It is based around the Blossom, a 5-shape Venn Diagram inspired by VEN6. 5 Keys (traits or elements of identity like past professions, hobbies, family training, etc.) are combined in pairs to create 5 Skills your character is best at. An action that falls under a Skill gets a pool of 3 four-sided dice, while a Key gets 2 four-sided dice and everything else only gets 1.

Add a Role on the ship like Lieutenant or Able Sailor, a name, and a physical description and you’re all done!

Learn more about the inspirations for Perilous Voyage!

The Full playlist of videos about Perilous Voyage can be found here!