Skyfarer is a Tabletop RPG by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor, published via Rowan, Rook and Decard. It's based on the Sunless Skies video game by Failbetter Games.
At the dawn of a strange new 20th century, Queen Victoria rules a new empire in the "High Wilderness" of space. Decades ago, London was swallowed by the Earth and the Empire seemed doomed. However, Her Renewed Majesty has triumphed and a new Albion now reigns amidst the dead stars.
The Reach is the frontier of that empire, and its skyfarers — some independent, others partisan — seek fortune and adventure in this wild territory. They cross the Reach in "engines", steam powered locomotives adapted to space travel.
The Player Characters are the officers of one such engine. They're in peril, their captain is no longer able to lead them, and if they can't save themselves, nobody else is going to save them.
Characters get four statistics — Iron, Mirrors, Veils and Hearts — each of which is on a scale of -1 to 3. They also get a set of Integrities, strong beliefs that help to define their personality, as well as a pool of Tenacity points.
Roleplaying an Integrity gains Tenacity points, especially when the Integrity causes problems and complicates the plot. Tenacity points can then be spent to reduce Peril and avoid Danger when a poor dice roll puts the character at risk.
Skyfarer was released as a downloadable game in 2018. As of 2024, it's never been released in printed form and no supplements have been published.
Skyfarer includes examples of the following tropes:
- All in the Manual: Skyfarer doesn't attempt to fully describe the world of Fallen London and Sunless Skies. Some of the Reach's inhabitants and locations get mentioned, many don't. Players are encouraged to draw details from the original games and other sources.
- Ascended Extra: The player characters are intended to play a locomotive's officers. As well as the four key roles in Sunless Skies (First Officer, Quartermaster, Signaller and Chief Engineer), they can be the Gunner, Stoker or Navigator. None of those three roles got any importance or named characters in the original game.
- Brown Note: The starlight of the High Wilderness can cause "wild fascinations", "consuming obsessions" and madness if seen without coloured glass to protect the eyes. Star-Maddened Explorers are one of the threats encountered in the Reach.
- Dead All Along: The game suggests that the locomotive's captain should be immediately removed from the action at the start of the story, leaving the players in charge. One listed option is that the captain is actually a ghost.
- GMPC: The locomotive's captain is played by the gamemaster. The game suggests a range of options to take them out of the main plot (e.g. cowardice, drunkenness or replacement by an imposter) to ensure they don't overshadow their subordinates, the player characters, but for many of those options they'll still be an ongoing part of the game,
- I'm a Humanitarian: The game suggests that the locomotive's captain should be immediately removed from the action at the start of the story, leaving the players in charge. One of the listed options for this is that they were "revealed to be a cannibal".
- The Roleplaying Game: Skyfarer is based on Sunless Skies, offering a tabletop version of the video game's setting.
- Steampunk: As with most other games in the Fallen London setting, it's a mix of Victoriana, weird technology and eldritch horror. This time it's in space.
- You Are in Command Now: The game specifies that the locomotive's captain is largely out of action during the game, leaving the player characters in charge, but without formal ownership of the locomotive. Suggested options include missing, incompetent, terrified and unconscious captains, as well as stranger choices such as captains who are ghosts, exposed as cannibals, replaced by imposters or actually a shared hallucination.
