World of Dungeons: Turbo–Breakers

Wow. That’s a mouthful. The long name is especially funny when you realize that the rules of the roleplaying game with that name is just 4 pages long. And the last page consists mainly of the names of Patreon patrons who helped fund the project.

So what is WoD: Turbo – Breakers (I’ll call it just Breakers from here on out) all about? It’s a roleplaying game written by John Harper based on World of Dungeons also written by John Harper which was a streamlined version of the popular game Dungeon World which itself is based on both D&D and Apocalypse World. Breakers is also pretty awesome. The setting can be summed up in a few sentences: our world and a fantasy world are colliding at various places all over the world and the so-called Breakers are sent into these zones to destroy the crystal which binds the alien reality to ours and while doing so they try to find valuable artifacts and kill monsters.

Like in Dungeon World (and other games with similar mechanics) Breakers makes use of Moves, or rather in this case of one Move. Whenever you try something risky, you roll 2d6 and add the relevant attribute. Results of 6 and below are failures, 7 – 9 means, you were partially successful and 10 or higher is a success. Bam!

If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you download Breakers right now (I did mention that it’s free, right?) and check it out. I could write countless words on how much I love the game, but since it’s just four pages long, I guess it makes more sense to just point it out to you. You should also have a look at John Harper’s other work. He has created quite a few exciting roleplaying games, some of them are also available for free.

Breakers is probably not for everyone, but I just love it because of its awesome concept, the simple rules, and its hackability (is this a word?). I am pretty sure we’ll see quite a few Breakers hacks in the future, and I already have a couple of ideas myself.

P.S.: Thanks to my friend Marcus for telling me about this game in the first place!

Michael Wolf is a German games designer and enthusiast best known for his English language role-playing games blog, Stargazer's World, and for creating the free rules-light medieval fantasy adventure game Warrior, Rogue & Mage. He has also worked as an English translator on the German-language Dungeonslayers role-playing game and was part of its editorial team. In addition to his work on Warrior, Rogue & Mage and Dungeonslayers, he has created several self-published games and also performed layout services and published other independent role-playing games such as A Wanderer's Romance, Badass, and the Wyrm System derivative Resolute, Adventurer & Genius, all released through his imprint Stargazer Games. Professionally, he works as a video technician and information technologies specialist. Stargazer's World was started by Michael in August 2008.

3 comments

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Peter R.

I am hackability most certainly should be a word. The setting reminded me of the TV series Fringe and the clash of parallel universes.

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    Stargazer

    Same here. When reading this I was immediately reminded of buildings encased in Amber. 🙂

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Chaosmeister

You are welcome! 🙂