METTLE Core is a set of powerful and adaptable rules to help you run your own action-adventure themed Role-Playing Game (RPG). This is a social game where you and a group of friends pretend your way through an unfolding collaborative story. One person gets to play as the Guide, who runs the game world, dreams up fun scenarios, does the bulk of narration, settles arguments, and plays Non-Player Characters (NPCs). The rest get to be Players, who explore the setting as Characters like actors playing a role. The dice and rules are there to add risk, settle arguments, and inspire new events.

You can find METTLE Core at DriveThruRPG and Itch.io.

This Core game favors street-level tales of courage, mystery, and intrigue. It is well-suited for detective stories, crime dramas, B-movie mayhem, daring rescues, tense exploration, gritty post-apocalyptic survival, wild-west gunfights, Nazi-clobbering, low fantasy, and grounded science fiction. This focus on so-called “mundane” heroics caters to an underserved style of play and provides a basis for the underlying game system. Upcoming games may indulge settings reliant on magic, superpowers, or miracles of science.

To ask questions, provide feedback, or just talk about what you are doing with METTLE Core, check out our Bluesky, Discord, or Facebook sites.

Features

• Adaptable Toolkit: flexible enough to suit a wide variety of genres and power levels.
• Easy to Learn and Play: The basic rules are all you need to know. Mastery is a matter of using those basic moves in clever ways.
• Engaging Combat: Move? Attack? Block? Talk trash? Rally back into action? Grapple? Protect an ally? Your call!
• Freeform Experience: decide for yourself what your own character did to earn their advance in power.
• Hybrid Dice Pool: a novel dice pool system keeps the number of dice low, counting to a minimum, allows for direct contests between scores, and supports collaborative Twists, Raises, and other fun stunts.
• Rich Narrative: players can explicitly alter events using Twists. These add dramatic surprises and give players bargaining power in the story.
• Room to Grow: the intentional “hackability” of this ruleset leaves plenty of space for your own creative additions.
• Scalable: fits all sizes of creatures or vehicles with no tweaks or extra rules.
• Vivid Characters: Characters start out with history, goals, and personalities of their own. No need to ask, “but what’s my motivation” – it’s built right in.
• Freeform Initiative: combatants pass their turns to each other or their target, so your chance to shine can come at any time.