A Tabletop Roleplaying Game About Losing Everything... and Taking It Back
There are no chosen ones here. No destiny. No mercy waiting at the end of the road... only rot, ambition, and the kind of survival that costs something permanent.
Left for the Vultures is an unforgiving fantasy TTRPG where characters are built from Masteries and Disciplines... not character classes. No pre-packaged hero. No sacred role. You build the kind of person who survives in a world that actively resists being survived.
The world doesn't pause while you level up. Towns decay. Power corrupts everything it touches. The longer you stay in one place, the worse it gets: for them, and for you.
This isn't 5e with the guardrails removed. It's a different animal entirely: one with teeth, and no intention of putting them away.
"The unforgiving fantasy you always wanted from D&D... and never got."— Deimos Infinitum Publishing
Always set at night. Driven by consequence. The world decays whether your characters intervene or not.
The world of Left for the Vultures has one standing rule:
It is always night.
What lives in the dark has had a very long time to get comfortable there.
No classes. No prescribed path. You assemble a character from layered Masteries and Disciplines... building something that fits the world, not a handbook. Full customization with enough structure to stay coherent.
A pool of d4s you spend on damage, mitigation, movement, healing, or conditions. The game doesn't give you resources for being good. It gives you resources for getting hurt... and using that pain as fuel.
Reaching 0 Physical Health isn't just a game-over state: it's a trigger for advancement. Grievous wounds. Madness mechanics. Characters who survive become something harder and stranger than what they started as.
When the dice hit their ceiling, they keep going. Chaos lives in the math here. A desperate peasant can land a blow that cracks armor. A seasoned killer can catch a blade in the throat on a bad roll. Nothing is guaranteed.
Combat leaves marks. Lost fingers. Ruined eyes. Bone-deep trauma that stays. The body keeps score, and the system makes sure you feel every number on that tally.
Surviving a fight isn't the end of the problem. Grievous wounds, madness, and physical trauma accumulate across sessions. The system tracks what your character has been through... and makes sure they carry it.
One day, the sun didn't rise. No warning. No explanation. It simply didn't come back, and neither did the light. The world of Umbraeth: eight continents, seven bishops, and an eternal night that has lasted long enough that most people have stopped asking why.
Across the land moves The Despair: a mist of ash and darkness with no fixed home and no pattern anyone has been able to map. Those caught in it age without warning. Those born inside it come into the world without color, pale and hollow-eyed. They are called the Ashenborn, and the world has made it clear, in every way it can, that they were not expected.
The seven bishops rule their continents in a peace that holds only because open war would cost them more than the scheming does. They smile across the table. They plot beneath it. History in Umbraeth has a pattern: something resembling hope surfaces, and then something larger swallows it whole.
Magick exists. It has always existed. But the bishops have declared it forbidden across every continent, burning the ancient tomes wherever they find them. The rumors blame magick for the darkness: a sorcerer, a dead god, a ritual that went further than anyone intended. Whether that's true or not, the mobs don't wait to find out. Anyone caught using magick in public won't survive the crowd.
German-inspired and fungal-dark. Trees can't grow without light, so prototaxites cover the wilderness instead. The tribal Ashenborn here: the Grey Sons: harvest their chemicals for poisons, toxins, and salves. The cities of Faulbruck and Valich lie within its borders.
Father Upir rules here. Nobody says out loud what some of them suspect. The land runs deep with Gothic horror, undead, and necromancy, and Father Upir has been in power for longer than anyone finds comfortable to calculate.
French in its bones and cold in its soul. The Black Bishop presides over a continent where madness is a theological condition and the ice doesn't care what you believe. King in Yellow territory, through and through.
Bishop Diallo's continent is the wealthiest in Umbraeth for one reason: glow-in-the-dark ink, produced here and sold everywhere. High alchemy, dark desert, and enough coin moving through it to make everyone else nervous.
Free Adventure
Get the free playtest packet, the intro adventure Lambs to the Slaughter, and early updates on Left for the Vultures... before anyone else.
No algorithms. No bright side. Just the newsletter.