Uneasy Lies the Head RPG (GDR)

Royal Court Roleplaying Uneasy Lies the Head is a tabletop roleplaying game about royal court intrigue for 2-5 players. It comes as an 80 page book that contains all the rules you need to play. No game-master is required to play. The game can be played as a one-session game, or as multiple sessions linked into a campaign where everyone will: Plot and scheme as the antagonistic members of a royal court. Embody titles that let you rule as the monarch, love as the paramour, wage war as the claimant, pray as the absolve, and more. Prepare divisive plans to spread rumors, enact laws, or host festivities, and then bide your time until they unfold. Uneasy Lies the Head is a whole new game system designed from the ground up to give players a framework for highly interactive political roleplaying. Unlike many tabletop RPGs, the game is at its best when the player characters are at odds with one another. You'll make alliances in one scene, and break them in the next. That all begins with the first phase of the game, known as the prologue. Once the prologue wraps up, each player will have a main character and a bunch of notecards filled with all of the things they find important. They'll also probably have a few grudges left over from, say, that time in the prologue when the king passed a selfish law and took your most valued advisor into his own court. That advisor and all the other notecards are called assets, and they play a key role in the plans and scenes that make up the rest of the game. Assets flesh out the world we're playing in and shed light on what's important to our characters. They're not just set dressing though! Throughout the game, you might: Pass laws and introduce new peers to court to add assets to your retinue. Challenge your rivals to a duel, or clandestinely liaise with them to steal assets from other players. Spread rumors and start wars to rip the margins off of assets to break them, fundamentally changing their nature. Winning duels, spreading rumors, and passing laws won't be easy feats to accomplish, so it's important to plan things out ahead of time. The characters in our game may be some of the most powerful and esteemed individuals in the entire realm, but they still have each other to contend with. The game's 12 plans provide a framework for resolving these big sweeping actions, sitting mechanically somewhere between a move from Apocalypse World and a mini-game from Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands. We manage the flow of our plans and scenes using a sheet called the public record. It's essentially a calendar or timeline that tracks our story beats. As you play the game, you'll step through the rows of the public record, setting scenes to roleplay tense moments and meetings between characters. Each scene ends with a character preparing one of the plans by adding it to a future row on the public record. While your character works on that plan in the background, other players have time to gather their assets and prepare themselves for what you're cooking up. When the game progresses to a row on the public record with a plan, we resolve it to see what shakes out. Typically, that involves a dice roll. All players get a chance to join in on every dice roll, leveraging their various assets to get dice to help or interfere with the plan's success. Each roll is thus a political game of its own, with players combing through their assets to figure out if their castle can help prevent a rumor being spread, or if their dominion over the throne itself can disrupt the way new peers arrive at court.