Spooky scary skeletons live under the sea in the tabletop RPG Bones Deep
A watery grave.
Become a band of skeletons roaming in the seafloor in Bones Deep, a tabletop RPG about underwater adventures.
An upcoming roleplaying game, Bones Deep sees three to six players taking control of a bunch of skeletons who have left their fleshy prisons to walk the bottom of the oceans. Designed to be used with the sci-fi tabletop RPG Troika – which has players embarking on bizarre adventures across different universes – Bones Deep keeps things straightforward by focusing on the journey of its band of skeletons.
As walking bones, the player characters are restricted to travelling across the seabed and cannot use whatever limbs they have left to swim in the water. Throughout their journey, the player characters will experience various random encounters from stumbling across battles fought by warring factions, to finding clues to hidden treasures to falling into the traps of dangerous foes. The book for Bones Deep features five separate quests for game masters to run for their players, with a collection of encounters to draw upon thereafter.
Players will have different options as to what their characters can do in the tabletop RPG depending on the kind of skeleton they’ve chosen. Carvers are covered in elaborate runes, newborns are freshly made skeletons, junkers can invent things, keepers collect sea life, shifters can alter their skeletal form and the infested are forced to struggle for control over their bodies. Besides their skeletons’ innate abilities, players can also empower their characters with a variety of different spells to aid them throughout their quests.
The many creatures and locations that players can expect their characters to encounter were inspired by real-life examples of seabeds found across the world’s oceans. The team behind Bones Deep includes a boat captain – called Andrew Harrison – and an underwater educator specialising in ocean ecosystems. Other co-creators behind Bones Deep are Lauren and David Schirduan, accessibility consultant Jacob Wood, John Gregory, Evey Lockhart, Jared Sinclair, Laura Ketcham and physician Joannes Jonstonus, alongside the author behind the book’s dungeon crawl Scott Stolarski.
The Kickstarter campaign for Bones Deep is live until April 25th, with a pledge of $12 (£9) getting backers a PDF version of the RPG as soon as the campaign ends. Alternatively, a hardcover physical version is available for a pledge of $30 (£22), which is set to arrive in August.