Vivid

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What’s Waiting Out There,
Beyond the Next Hill?

Fifty years ago we lost our ability to do magic, and the world has become dark and dangerous, yet curious and wonderous. As enterprising heroes, go into the world in search of old powers and new treasures, to bring back and make things better for all!

Venturers help their communities, defeat dangers, forge alliances, fight corruption, and celebrate their successes.

Explorers go into distant lands, discover ancient people and curious places, fight evils and return with amazing stories.

Vivid is an optimistic wonder-fantasy game of action-adventure for 3 to 5 players, emulating the feel of modern day animated shows (Dragon Prince, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin) with mechanics inspired by Slay the Spire, City of Mist, Blades in the Dark and others.

Vivid uses regular playing cards, and is designed to be simple to run, turning spoken language into mechanics. The rules fit in 15 pages. The final version is meant to be a gateway for newcomers into the hobby, and include a full tutorial. 

What Makes Vivid Special

• Immediate resolution: Draw cards from your deck, you only need one red (diamond or heart) to overcome the challenge. But…
• Maximal flexibility: For each relevant difficulty you need an additional red. Difficulties can be any adjective: the foe might be quick, the ground could be muddy, your sword is too heavy. It only affects the check if it's relevant to the action; a quick orc is not difficult to bargain with, but a cunning one is.
• Simple damage: You have “guard” and “composure”, each taking the first incoming hit, whatever it is. Once they’re used up, though, you’ll need to renew them by spending reds. Without them you’re going to get injuries and mindsets, which are personal difficulties: bruised arm, constant buzzing, furious, confused.
• Easy teamwork: When you make a check, you can give your reds to someone else. It must make sense and be relevant to their upcoming action. 
• Only skills: Your character has 16 skills, and no other statistics. A skill’s rank (0 to 5) tells you how many cards you can draw on a check, but you might not want to draw them all, because…
• Faces explode, Aces crit: Face cards (J, Q, K) “explode”, meaning you draw another card. Red Aces count as two reds, but Black Aces result in a complication: a fleeting difficulty, a scene escalation, etc.. 
• Foes set intentions: At the beginning of an action round, the GM tells the players exactly what each enemy is going to do and when those enemies act, that’s what’ll happen, no checks are made (the GM never draws cards). The heroes always act first, and it’s up to the players, who decide among themselves who acts when, to stop those intentions from materializing. 

And there’s more: As your skills develop, you gain access to cool abilities, such as automatically regaining guard every turn (as a parrying swordswoman) or negating a foe’s conversational difficulty (with a disarming smile). 

Also in development: Vivid Colours, an extremely simple engine for encouraging innovative action.