Ambition

O the Fool is dead, the Mother sleeps, the Father is infinite, and the continents ache to be shaped by your hands! You are the Ambitious, a dreamer with a blade sharp enough to reshape Imbrier, a voice cunning enough to redefine it, or magics expressive enough to reimagine it. The perpetual cutting motion of your Ambition is desperate to shear the wool of Imbrier, overgrown from complacency, and tangled by ennui at the forefront of this new age. Will your Ambition carve the rivers of fate, or will you be swept away by their current?

Ambition is a fantasy role playing game steeped in Daoist philosophy and shaped by the storytelling principles of Tarot. Ambition exists to satiate a need for introspective journeys, where the story within shapes the story without. 

Ambition is a game that offers: 

• A Living Subconscious. The River acts as the disposition and voices of the Ambitious, collaboratively building their character by coloring their perceptions and guiding their fixations.
• Bespoke World and Designs. Play as a Human, Sphinx, Satyr, Harpy, Pookah, or Dustborne. Each Bloodline, Archetype, and Expression is rooted deeply in cultural storytelling. 
• Player Choice. The Ambitious are not set dressing to an underlying system; they are the underlying system. Two characters of the same disposition, archetype, bloodline, and culture have enough player choice to be completely mechanically distinct at 1st level.
• Three Modes of Play. Engagements, Tribunals, and Tales: each system with its own unique ruleset, transition from one to another by the ebb and flow of narrative tension or by the will of the Ambitious.
• Stories Built by Fate. Each pursuit is guided by a Tarot Deck, arrayed in a spread shaping the shared story. The Ambitious alter fate with their Arcana, guiding it into the familiar rhythm of their archetype.
• Steeped in Daoist Themes. The Mother in Her kindness named 10000 things each after their kind. The current of this world is the Dao in every metaphor. This book is my Lathe of Heaven.

What is Ambition?

Ambition is a tales & tactics TTRPG with three modes of play for 2-4 Ambitious and a River. Tales is a rules-light mode of play facilitating the buildup of narrative tension until the story cascades into an Engagement or Tribunal; rules-heavy, turn-based modes of play. Engagements are an arena where tension is resolved through violence on a battlemap. While Tribunals are a clock-based system for social battles of protecting secrets and exposing truth, where tension is resolved through manipulation, cunning, and wile.

One player serves as the River while the rest play as the Ambitious. The River guides the story forward, draws cards from the tarot deck to divine the fate of the Ambitious, and narrates the subconscious fixations, compulsions, and advice of the Ambitious as their Voices. The Ambitious control the conscious actions of their character, change fate with their Arcana, and decide how they respond to the River’s narration of their Voices.