When I began diving into indie ttrpgs, I found myself really appreciating the games that managed to create big moments out of small packages. Hunt comes to mind immediately with you set as playing knights of a doomed order, and Never Going Home where you are stuck as front line infantry in WW1 fighting demons. This personal love of the ‘small package, big story potential ttrpg’ was elevated even further when I was able to play CBR+PNK by Mythwork Studios; it was a system without a book, just a package of dry-erase pamphlets that let you run single session heists in a cyberpunk dystopia. It quickly became a favorite, so easy to set up and play.
Now, that same system is back, now called the Storypak system as Mythworks hopes to expand the magic of this format. This time? It’s all about zombies and survival.
What is Breathless?
While I only learned about Breathless as part of this Kickstarter campaign, I can safely say that I would have killed for this game while I was running ttrpgs in college. Created in 2022 during a huge push towards ‘one page rpgs’, Breathless in its original form is a luxurious two page ttrpg that gives you all you need to have a thematic survival game. I’ll give a quick rundown of the basics here, but remember that if you want, you can just download a copy for yourself. It’s pay what you want, meaning you can get it for free, but feel free to throw a few dollars to the creator for making such an elegant system.
The original character sheet for the Breathless TTRPG. Remember, the base concepts of this game are able to be checked out already on itch.io!
Long story short, a virus infected everyone, and one of the first things everyone lost was their memory. Some people got it worse, and are now proper zombies. Good luck!
The great thing about zombie settings is that you don’t need a lot of pretext, and this system really capitalizes on it. You choose a former occupation, get six main stats, plus a seventh ‘loot’ stat to look for items, and start off with one important item to start your game. The GM sets up a mission, and away you go! When it comes to dice, you end up using the classic D&D dice, but in a very unique way. Let’s use your stats as an example. The six are:
- Bash
- Dash
- Sneak
- Shoot
- Think
- Sway
Pretty self explanatory, and you assign a d10, a d8, and d4 to three of them, and then you get d6 in the other three. Your ‘loot’ stat starts at the vaunted d12 no matter what. When you use a skill in this game, you roll the die to get your result:
- 1-2: Your action fails. If there’s a consequence, you get hit hard.
- 3-4: The action succeeds, but reduced effect. If there’s a consequence to this roll, it affects you, but at a lessened degree
- 5+ the action succeeds. The higher the result, the greater the effect. Consequences are avoided.
- Now for the fun bit: after the roll, your die steps down to a lower size. A d10 becomes a d8, and so on. You have items you can use and loot, but they also break down over time.
There’s situational modifiers to these of course, but what you end up with is a system where everyone has this sense of urgency. You can be heroic, but you aren’t a tireless; you really are just someone pushed to the limit and fighting for their life. Whenever you have a chance to ‘catch your breath’ or find ‘safe rest’, you can reset your dice, which is great! It also means GMs and players can end up with these tense scenarios to play out. Sure, a group of players can safely scavenge a house or two and rest regularly, but what happens if they are trapped in a hospital or apartment complex? How far can you push until the chances of failure on every roll become too strong and you are overwhelmed?
Breathless is a wonderful, concise, and thematic zombie ttrpg, with plenty of potential for additional rules and scenarios. This is where Breathless: Frightmare Edition comes in and delivers in spades.
What is Breathless: Frightmare Edition?
When I look at the Frightmare Edition that’s currently up on Kickstarter, I consider it both an expansion and a second edition. First off, it’s much bigger, now created to be a set of glossy pamphlets easily passed out around your table. If you are familiar with CBR+PNK (and our glowing review of that system), it’s in that same format, but this very different rules system. There are 12 pamphlets total, meaning there’s a lot more content, but still broken down into bite sized chunks.
...And here's a snippet of the player survival guide (Character sheet and rules) pamphlet of the Frightmare Edition version of the game.
The concise wording of the itch.io edition still exists, but now exists with fancier organization and art and entirely encased in the player survival guide pamphlets. There are 6 of these, meaning you can play with a big party, and/or lets the GM keep one for easy reference during the game. There are a few changes, the biggest being that occupations now influence your starting skills and items, while also adding a memory track; more on that later.
Of the six pamphlets still left, four of them are the newly created ‘journey’ pamphlets. Each of these is unique, working as a one-shot session guide using the new Journey system that’s included in this edition, or can be used as a starting point for a campaign. I’ve had a chance to look at a draft of the “Burning Bridges” scenario, and it’s just delightful, the rules and setting urging players to run from location to location to both find as much loot to survive, but also outpace a raging fire overtaking the city.
Back to campaigns: that’s one of the key differences in this edition. Breathless was originally a very small game meant for one shots, but by signing on with Mythworks and using the Storypak format, allows for variety and nuance. The “Journeys and Havens” Pamphlet is what will allow for that, giving you the rules to let players to run around a ‘world map’ in a fun way as well as some rules about how to set up a home base of sorts, allowing for fun campaigns with stakes.
With these concepts, now you don’t have to play just for survival, but maybe for building a home, ala one of my favorite video game guilty pleasures, State of Decay. Referring to the memory track from before: now characters aren’t just memory-less survivors, but are slowly regaining their personal history. This is a fantastic idea that I can’t wait to try out. It lets players jump right in with an archetype, and then realize more and more details as you play.
You can be a veteran who realizes they are the last one of their battle brothers left. Maybe you play as a scientist who slowly realized they were part of the problem. The potential for melodrama is fantastic.
Finally, we have the “Hazards and Factions” Pamphlet. This is essentially your ‘GM guide’, giving the player running the game some tips, tricks, and pre-made problems to throw at people. Always a great fit, and it helps round out everything else on offer.
Breathless: Frightmare Edition Is An Easy Recommend, And A Hopeful Win For Indie TTRPGS
We’ve backed away from pushing Kickstarters as much as we used to, but for this project, I’m jumping back in for a few reasons. The first is simply that I just love the theme and concept. The rules seem interesting, thematic, and quick to pick up. You can already anticipate the tension of trying to avoid conflict so you can save your better die rolls for future problems. Secondly, many of my friends really fell in love with this Storypak system for ttrpgs last year. It makes it easy to pack up and bring to a friend’s house or a cafe. There’s more information than a one page ttrpg jam, but not enough to become intimidating. Again, great for one-shot sessions or when you need to prepare quickly.
Thirdly… I want to see this Kickstarter and creator succeed. While I fully admit I am not familiar with much of the itch.io scene, it’s clear to see that Breathless as a concept is popular. There are literal hundreds of offshoots you can purchase, with people really identifying with the ‘step down’ die system. There’s a great core concept here that I want to see elevated, and Mythworks as an organization has a great track record with both Kickstarter projects and also just working with many different designers.
I haven’t been given anything by Mythworks or the creator for writing this piece - the only thing I got was some preview materials so I could be informed by the creative team, and out of the many Mythworks games I own, the only one I got a review copy for was CBR+PNK. In fact, I’ve already put down to buy my own copy of Breathless: Frightmare Edition several weeks ago I was so excited about it.
A game copy is $40, with the ability to buy only the PDFs for a modest $20. As of writing this, the game still has to raise about $8,000 to be funded, and I would love to see it get there. Both the game and the Storypak system have something special in them, and it would make me very happy to see many people at the start of 2027 running games of desperate survivors battling against hordes of zombies.
Check out the Kickstarter for yourself and make your own decision. Hopefully, I’ll be running away from the breathless alongside you.
