No Strings, No Masters

You are a puppet, a magical creation infused with engineering and demon essence.

Crafted by a deceased master craftsman, your father, your Pappateer. He grzanted life through a demon-infused serum, empowering both your body and supernatural abilities.

But this world was not created for you, you are an outsider. Despite that, you possess sentience and a growing capacity for emotions. The Pappateer warned you that when he was gone, nobody would be left to protect you from humans that covet the secrets of the magic bestowed upon you by the Pappateer.

You are not alone, you have something those that wish you harm do not have. You have your Troupe, not something as trivial as a family that is born by random chance, but a family that was crafted for you, that you not only choose, but were made for. The Pappateer warned that you must protect yourselves once he was gone.

The names change, time passes, but what THEY want is always the same. The secrets to life. The show always ends the same. In screams and blood. No Strings, No Masters is a horror rpg about outsiders surviving together in a world that hunts and fears them. For 3-4 players and 1 game master, each game should be between 1-2hrs.

What is this game about?

The Big Three – by Jerod Sorenson These are the 3 questions created by Jerod Sorenson in regard to RPG design and are used here to provide come clarity what this game is about:

1. What is your game about? It is about small demon infused puppets working together as outsiders in a world that is sometimes hostile and dangerous to them.

2. How does your game do this? Through a modified version of the Iron Core system that focuses on making hard choices when taking actions. These choices sometimes represent the best traits of the characters and sometimes the lowest flaws that make them who they are.

3. How does your game reward this? By providing mechanics to encourage thinking about the group (Troupe) by means of rewarding cohesion and making things harder if this is ignored. The game also rewards being creative when interacting with the environment and the use creative problem solving.

Puppet Stories

This is the story of demon infused puppets. Their story spans across time, with different Troupes rosters that sometimes include puppets only for a brief period in that history.

These stories are the puppets’ history and told from their point of view.

The puppets are unreliable narrators. Puppets only see things through brief windows of time, sometimes with limited context and understanding. It’s acceptable to have the story shift character traits, motivations, or historical events around. This makes pinning down the history of the puppets difficult but also makes it flexible to suit the story that is currently being told.

It’s ok if dates or details contradict each other as eras change. The only consistency should be within the era/story. This is meant to emulate some of the film series that have inspired this game.