Befriend talking rats to take on monstrous gods using Scrabble tiles in RPG The Far Roofs

As a voracious reader of Redwall growing up, the ongoing trend of tabletop RPGs starring plucky rodents on big adventures is a continual delight to me. Upcoming rat-venture RPG The Far Roofs looks to be an especially promising addition to the genre, as players join forces with a part of talking rats to clamber across the rooftops of a secret world on a quest to take on their god-monsters - armed with Scrabble tiles.

The Far Roofs is built on an evolution of designer Jenna Moran’s Laputa-esque Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, adding a pool of five six-sided dice (5d6) to that game’s diceless system of powers and story structure.

On top of the dice-rolling, players will obtain letter tiles - such as those found in Scrabble - and cards. While rolling dice resolves smaller tasks, the letter tiles are used to find outcomes to larger ongoing projects and mysteries, with the players forming words to answer question prompts from the GM that then influence the outcome of events. Collected cards are instead formed into poker hands, measuring the level of success attained by the group.

The players’ adventures play out against a setting that mixes the fantasy of a mysterious land ruled by rodents with the realistic grounding of our own world. The game’s title refers to a world formed by rooftops and electricity poles above our own streetlife, with the introduction of fantastical elements and even magic usually hidden from human sight.

Those otherworldly elements will include god-monsters, ghosts and other eldritch spiritual beings that the players’ ‘Big Folk’ will encounter while journeying with their ratfolk companions, ultimately facing them in order to protect their human world.

The Far Roofs will crowdfund a physical rulebook via a Kickstarter launching on March 3rd. The game is designed to span a multi-year campaign for up to six players as they explore its world accompanied by their talking rat pals.