A hopeful dark fantasy roleplaying game about coming home from a war you were forced to fight.
The war is over, but the weapons it made are still around.Touchstone: Rambo: First Blood, a post-war homecoming story.
By Karl Otto Kristoffersen. Art and maps by Joe Porkio. KR1 Publishing, BackerKit 2027.
The Dark Lord ruled for a thousand years. His agents hunted the best warriors of every kin and snatched them from their homes. They were dragged to the Darklands, drowned in magic pools called the Black Mirrors, and rebuilt as weapons of war. They became the Ashborn.
Five years ago he fell. The war was brutal, and it took all the free folk of the world to end him. The world is healing, but the scars of the war are everywhere.
The dark veil has lifted from your mind. But you still look like what you were made to be, a monster rebuilt to do the Dark Lord's work. People keep their distance and shut the door on you until you give them a reason to open it.
If you know Ironsworn, you already know most of it: the same two ten-sided Challenge Dice and the same Strong Hit, Weak Hit and Miss. Ashborn drops moves, assets and vows, and puts a growing action die and Berserk in their place.
Say what you do and what you want from it. Roll your Rage Die, add one of five Abilities, and compare the total with two ten-sided Challenge Dice. Beat both for a Strong Hit, one for a Weak Hit, neither for a Miss. The system is player-facing, so the GM never rolls in combat.
Every point of Harm moves the Rage Die one step up. A bigger die wins more rolls, but it also gets harder to control. If the bare die ever beats both Challenge Dice added together, you go Berserk and attack whatever set you off, without a roll and without choosing the target. At a D4 that happens about once in a hundred rolls, and at a D20 almost every other roll. To bring the die back down, you can breathe and give up the blow you were about to strike, or camp for a night far away from everyone.
Humanity goes up when you hold back. Standing shows what one town thinks of you. It grows slowly, job by job, and you can lose it in a single bad night. When you think a town is ready, you roll both against the dice and ask to be taken in. If you beat both, you are home, and you choose when to ask.
An evening of Ashborn can go like this. You reach the gate of Rivermoot without a letter, and the guards refuse to let you in. But a farmer's son has gone missing nearby, and they would rather send a monster to deal with it than risk one of their own. You find him in the hills with the bandits who took him hostage. Your Rage Die is already a D10 from the last fight with the wolves, and you could slaughter them and end the fight with a single swing. This is your chance to be more than a weapon. If you let them run instead, you mark Humanity, and Rivermoot hears about it.
You get no experience for killing. You mark Humanity when you hold back, protect someone, make amends or help someone at a cost to yourself. Every level gives you back a piece of yourself from before the war, and the first is your name. You are no longer just a serial number made to serve the Dark Lord.
There are five Molds, one for each kin he harvested. Each comes with a Gift, a Skill, a weapon, a kit and a Dark Secret from the war. Until you reach the first level of Humanity, a serial number is the only name you have.
Answer eight questions to find out which of the five you are, and share the result.
The map has five lands. Stonehold in the mountains, the Vale in the valley at the heart of it, the Aeonwoods, the Hearthlands, and the Darklands in the north, where the Black Mirrors still stand.
Each land has one central city, built by one of the kin the Dark Lord harvested, and every one of those cities starts you at zero. They remember what the Ashborn did, so you have to earn their trust one job at a time before the gates open for good. The free quickstart runs in the Vale, with Rivermoot as the first town that has to decide what you are. Rivermoot and Silvarion are inked, and Joe is drawing the other three.
The world, ink on paper by Joe Porkio.
The human free city, where a letter of approval counts for more than a sword. Nobody passes the gate without one from someone who will vouch for them.
The most beautiful city you have seen, and the saddest. Half of it burned, and the leaves turn toward you as you pass.
This is a complete game in its own right. Download it, run it on a Friday with three friends, and see if the game is for you.
Quickstart Rules teaches the whole system in one read. The Stolen Relic is a complete adventure for one evening. Five ready characters, one for each Mold. Free as PDF, set in A5 so you can print them as booklets.
Out now, free on DriveThruRPG. Follow on BackerKit to get the code to the Ledger.
A free companion in the browser for the quickstart. Roll with the Berserk check built in, keep the five character sheets, run The Stolen Relic scene by scene, and move the Ashborn across the map.
The Ledger is locked. You get the code when you follow Ashborn on BackerKit.
Ashborn started as one page in a notebook in 2019, under the working title Bloodfury. It describes a creature bred for war in a world that fears it. The rage die is there already, and so is the question at the bottom of the page. What do you do?
The page stayed in a drawer until 2025, when I took it out again. In 2026 it went to the table through multiple playtests, and what the players told us shaped the Molds, the Dark Secrets and the character sheets you play with today. In 2027 the full book sees the light of day.
Ashborn is written and designed by Karl Otto Kristoffersen and published by KR1 Publishing in Norway, the press behind the bestselling West Marches and Hexcrawl series. Nearly 16,000 copies of KR1 books have been sold on DriveThruRPG.
The goal of the campaign is an exclusive hardcover of more than 150 pages, with the complete rules for players and GMs, a starter adventure, a toolkit for building your own game with tables for everything, and Joe's art throughout. We also want to grow the Ashborn Ledger from its beta into a complete digital portal.
Follow Ashborn on BackerKit and the code to the Ledger is in the first message you get. We will also tell you when the campaign goes live, and when the Ledger gets a new version.
Art and maps by Joe Porkio, ink on paper. No AI images, anywhere.