# Broken Shores *Created:* 2025-05-17, *Modified:* 2026-11-02 ![[Broken Shores (cover).jpg]] A drowned world, a boat, and whatever you can salvage before the tide takes it back. **Broken Shores** is an ocean hexcrawl about being a **Drifter** on the One Sea of **Zephorus** — sailing to small islands, ruins and floating derelicts in search of **godshards**, the residue of a dead divinity that is the most valuable thing left in the world, and the reason several cults are out here looking too. It is blunt about its intentions in the subtitle: *brutal survival in a drowned world*. The horror here is not cosmic but logistical — fresh water, a seaworthy hull, and enough of a reason to keep going. ## Setting The world is Zephorus, and it has already ended once: an ancient cataclysm drowned it, and what survives is shallow archipelago, ruins standing in water, and derelicts still afloat because nobody has taken them apart yet. The old world left relics behind for anyone brave enough to go into the ruins after them, and the most prized of all are **godshards** — splinters of divinity that power sorcery and that the cults will kill for. You are a Drifter: a survivor of that cataclysm's long aftermath who travels the One Sea looking for the next island worth scavenging. The game is built for solo play as readily as for a traditional GM-led table, and the ocean it hands you is **randomly generated** — the map is discovered in play rather than read out of the book. ## Mechanics ### The percentile core Everything runs on **percentile rolls**: two d10s for tens and units, against an attribute or skill, with low good and lower better. The full polyhedral set gets used for damage and the various tables, but the resolution question is always the same one — did you roll under. ### Characters Characters are built on attributes — **Strength**, **Dexterity**, **Constitution**, **Intelligence**, **Willpower** and **Charisma** — which set the starting score of many skills and decide the shape of the character before play begins. Talents supply the edges: *Brawler* for unarmed damage, *Camouflage* to pass Stealth checks in natural terrain, *Controlled Breathing* to hold your breath for twice your Constitution in rounds, *Break Armor* to get through a shell. Combat is where the game earns its subtitle. A telling blow can force a **Vitality check** to avoid rolling on the **Critical Hit** table — the doubled damage lands either way. A fumbled attack sends the character to the **Fumbles** table, while enemies and monsters simply lose their turn instead, which is a small mercy pointed in the wrong direction. Hit points return slowly: **three per full day of complete rest**, under properly sanitary conditions. ### Sorcery Casting costs power points and a **Tenacity** check, and releasing the spell is a second step — either it consumes a **shard**, or the sorcerer rolls on the miscast table and finds out what the sea thinks of the attempt. Sorcery is less a tool than a transaction with something that has its own opinion, and godshards, the thing that makes it reliable, are what everyone else is diving for. ### The ocean The campaign frame is a **hexcrawl** across the One Sea: sail, discover, land, scavenge, survive the landing. It is tuned for solo or GM-less play using the same tables a group would, and the published play aids show it — hex maps for ocean and island exploration at twenty miles to a hex, a raft sheet, and a ruin-exploration procedure. ## Editions - **Broken Shores** (2023) — the core rulebook, designed and written by **Alex T.** and published by **Blackoath Entertainment** under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. *In the library (v1.2).* It ships with character sheets and play aids from the publisher's site, and the library holds both a three-page sheet file and the separate hex map, raft and ruin-exploration sheets. ## References - [Blackoath Entertainment](https://www.blackoathgames.com/) - [Broken Shores player aid — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/485938/player-aid-for-broken-shores) - [Broken Shores review — r/Solo_Roleplaying](https://www.reddit.com/r/Solo_Roleplaying/comments/17fagjj/new_video_review_for_broken_shores_the_solo/)