RECKONING
A ROLEPLAYING GAME · NO DICE · NO CARDS
Certainty is a currency. Spend it, and the bill comes due.
FOR 2–5 PLAYERS + ONE KEEPER · ANY SETTING · TOKENS & A SHEET · FIRST EDITION
⬇ Download Reckoning (PDF)) — free, 20 pages
PAYABLE ON DEMAND · NO EXTENSIONS
Reckoning is a game about people who are sure of themselves, and about what their certainty costs everyone later. Nothing is left to chance, because the drama was never in whether you succeed.
You do not roll to succeed. You pay to succeed.
Everything you pay becomes a debt the world can hand back to you — in full, with interest, at the worst possible moment.
It plays like a heist that has already gone right and is now quietly unravelling. Like a mystery where nothing is wrong until your own confident moves make it wrong. Like a tragedy of a person who could do anything, and did.
How It Works
Everything is counted in tokens from one shared bowl — beans, pebbles, coins — sitting in three places:
- Surety — your private reserve of certainty. Spend it and the deed is simply done.
- The Tally — the shared pile in the centre of the table, face-up. Every token you spend lands here, and it is the keeper's only weapon.
- Scars — what you earn by taking the consequences when the bill comes due. They make you stronger, and they make you dangerous to yourself.
Why Run It
- No dice, no cards, no hidden numbers. Every consequence has to be paid for out of the Tally, sized to the tokens spent, and traced back to the deed that funded it. The keeper can't cheat you — and a sharp table can see trouble coming.
- Five-minute characters. Five Standings, a reserve of eight, and one line that says what all this certainty is for.
- Light prep. Bring a situation, a price list, and a few people who want things. The players' own confidence builds the disasters.
- Characters become biographies. Every Scar is written down with the Reckoning that made it. Over a campaign, the sheet tells the story of everything the character has survived.
- Any setting where people are too sure of themselves — which is all of them.
Key Facts
| Players | 2–5, plus one keeper |
| Setting | Any |
| You need | A bowl of tokens and a character sheet per player |
| Inside | Complete rules, a worked example scene, table Q&A, a tear-out quick reference and character sheet |
| Length | 20-page PDF |
| Price | Free |
Reckoning is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Designed by Brian Casey / Fiddleback Productions. Assisted by Claude.