Bring Down the Mary Rose

Bring Down the Mary Rose is a light-weight roleplaying system about taking down a group of antagonists aboard a passenger vessel—whilst determining who your allies and enemies are before it’s too late. A game about dis(trust), acting before thinking, mystery, and exploration, Bring Down the Mary Rose is designed for short, 1-3 session games with a gamemaster and 2-5 players.

The system encourages fast paced gameplay, giving an advantage to players who build on what has happened before in the scene. This is done through a conveyor belt of conditions which can be used by any of the characters. As the turns progress, conditions move off the conveyer belt as new ones join, some becoming permanent, some disappearing.

Whilst BdtMR offers a standard format for running games, with the players having to take down a number of specific NPCs with whom the group have a grievance, feel free to go further than this, modifying the system into a longer running campaign. Progression mechanics are also not included, but can be improvised by giving players new abilities or items after a climactic moment in the story. Examples and advice are included in the items section.

As a gamemaster, you are tasked with setting up and running the game for the players: determining the tone, deciding who the non-player characters are, inventing what’s in each room, and, ultimately, roleplaying and describing everyone and everything, mediating how the players’ actions affect the world around them. Each player is also given one character on the ship that they have a relationship with. This might give them a reason to want to save them or to leave them behind, affecting their decision-making.

Bring Down the Mary Rose is a system that hopes to achieve the following:

• Innovative rules-light combat
• Creative, teamwork-oriented gameplay
• Simple but satisfying clue-finding to help take down an evil group of antagonists
• Short, one-to-three-shot length games
• Easy rules for a group to pick up

If you like what I do please check out my other game jams and reach out if you’d like to collaborate or chat about RPGs!

https://sambell.itch.io/

Thank you to Dice Exploder for the jam, character names, and the theme: Pregenerated Characters - I'm very happy for it to be discussed on the podcast as well. Was great fun to do this and hope to release a full version soon - hopefully with all the typos removed!