What is Epic Buddies?
Epic Buddies is a Fiction-First tabletop roleplaying game system.
What does this mean? It means that the person running the game is a Storyteller, they are in charge of crafting a narrative that is compelling and fun to play. Traditionally time-consuming mechanics (calculations and such) are reduced in favour of spinning a good yarn. Our system is built to accommodate flexibility, and to prevent the flow of a story getting bogged down by number crunching and constant referencing.
Why play Epic Buddies?
In short, because it’s fun!
Epic Buddies is made for anyone to experience any type of story; from first-time roleplayers, to experienced dungeoneers and everything in-between. The Epic Buddies system can be used to tell the kinds of stories you enjoy, be it homebrew, adapted from the campaign books of other tabletop games, or even lifted from your favourite novel, movie, TV show, or video game.
With many great tabletop game systems out there, it can be time-consuming to learn, or to teach newcomers complicated rulesets. Epic Buddies is pick-up-and-play: It’s quick to learn, easy to take with you, and can be as in-depth or as simple as you like.
Who are we?
We are avid gamers, storytellers, and creative folx.
During the 2020 pandemic we desired a tabletop game to share long-distance that maximised play time over set-up. We have each been actively playing roleplay and boardgames for many years and have experienced different rules, universes, and playstyles.
Whilst not being able to meet in person, it became apparent how often the narrative flow was broken by rule-checking, juggling different PDFs and websites, or immersion-breaking roll results, on top of the common delays and issues inherent in online communication. We think we may have solved these problems (except your internet speeds, I’m sorry I don’t know what to tell you), and following months of playtesting, balancing, and reworking, we have boiled down core gameplay elements, trimmed the fat, and handed control to Storytellers.
Can I play?
We would love you to!
We have created a one-sheet that includes character creation, player rules, and Storyteller rules. We have a full gamebook in the works that provides much more detail, FAQs, tips, suggestions, and nice artwork (this will be available as soon as we’ve closed the public beta playtesting, and have given it one last layer of polish). Until this is available, see the Quick Rules provided in the Play section to get started for free!
We are playing the game ourselves, and have plenty of sessions recorded to share our tales with the world, and we would love to hear what adventures you undertake. If you have recorded sessions and want to share them, send us some links to add to our Campaigns page. If you have any feedback or questions, please drop us a line via our Contact page.