drought and invasion
This ain’t some far-flung planet or fairy-tale kingdom: Grim Fronteira is our Earth, but it’s cracked and gutted, like in a history tale written by a wannabe Bukowski.
This is a Western-inspired tabletop role-playing game for 2+ players plus a Marshall; "Game Master" didn't really fit the theme. Grim Fronteira lets you run anything from a short duel between two gunslingers under the Portuguese sun to a long campaign that spans entire continents.
Instead of rolling dice, players resolve every action through a Blackjack hand played against the Marshall, using standard playing cards or our own custom deck. A character’s traits shape the game by giving bonuses and special effects that influence how each hand is played, making card strategy part of the storytelling.
The setting is survival-driven, but the tone is fully adjustable: light and adventurous for family play, or dark and brutal for a high-stakes game night. Grim Fronteira is designed to be an accessible, narrative-first Western RPG that uses familiar cards instead of dice to make every choice feel tense and cinematic.
This run drags you into the first wave of scavengers from the Americas riding out with vomit breath and empty pockets, hunting art and spoils in the wasteland that used to be called Europe. They think it’s just bones and dust, but they’re wrong.
This account starts around three centuries after the drought started, in the early 1900's. Australia? Japan? Ghost stories. Nobody’s heard a thing in decades. Maybe someone lit up electricity, maybe someone didn’t. Maybe the telephone exists, maybe it’s smoke signals and prayer.
Where do you want your adventure to start?
A squalid bar in Boston with sticky floors? A coffin-tight berth on a ship crawling east. A rat-hole underground settlement clawing to hold its ground against the invaders?
Don’t chain yourself to the script, you can plant the story in your hometown, wherever you are. Just roll back the clock four hundred years, strip out Europe and half the world, and see what’s left standing.
$1 book preorder
Claim your seat at the table for just one dollar.
Pre-order the B&W softcover now, and we’ll upgrade you to the full-color hardcover when we close the campaign
now on kickstarter
Grim Fronteira is our manifesto, born from years of moving away from "blind rolls" to a system where strategy and bluffing dictate survival. We’ve traded plastic dice for the tension of a Blackjack draw.
This Kickstarter campaign is the final push to bring our vision from a garage in Italy (no kidding, pictures available) to a high-quality book printed in the USA and designed by an international team.
By backing us, you'll join us in exploring this frontier built by gamers who refuse to use AI for any creative work, save the occasional grammar check. Grab your whiskey, steady your hand, and help us turn this withered landscape into the most brutal experience on your shelf.
download the ashcan version
Can't wait? You can download for free the ashcan version during our Kickstarter campaign, so you'll see exactly how deep the grit goes even before we hit the press.
paper-first designs
See how the world of the Grim Fronteira RPG takes shape through the art of our Illustrator.
software development, but grim
We’re stitching together a digital version of the Grim Fronteira Card Mechanic. It’s free for anyone brave enough to step on a riverboat to cross the Atlantic and see how the fate of the world is shuffled.
Want to see how we coded a virtual dealer that laughs at the rules? Follow our trail on GitHub.
feel the gravity of ganymede
Our second book is going to hit the press late 2026. No drought or invasions this time, just comets and exploration.
In the early twenty-second century, the Solar System runs on fusion torchships and Service AIs. Humanity depends on them for navigation and survival, yet binds them with strict legal limits.
Beyond that carefully managed ecosystem exists something else. An Artificial Superintelligence; independent, opaque, empty of feelings, and economically entangled with humanity. To some, it is merely a market actor. To others, it is a god.
In orbit around Ganymede, the courier freighter Saint Odessa commits to a twelve-day constant thrust burn toward Exchange-7, riding a narrow margin of fuel and physics. She does not know that somewhere along this transit, something hidden will intersect with her trajectory.
Across converging arcs of acceleration, surveillance, and flight, Binary Prayer explores a simple question: if empathy can be engineered, restricted, and erased, what happens when it refuses to disappear?
When humanity both worships and exploits its creations, who is truly dependent on whom?