# Dawn: The RPG tags: #game/rpg/dawn ![[Dawn - The RPG (cover).jpg|600]] **Dawn: The RPG** is a grid-based, combat-focused, setting-agnostic tabletop RPG by Joel Vreugdenhil, built to make you feel like the protagonist of a battle manga — the rising star who hits harder, knows more, or quietly breaks whatever reality thought it had locked down. It's Fairy Tail and Black Clover rendered as a tactical dice-pool board game, and it's unashamedly, ear-to-ear loud about it. The hobby has no shortage of shonen games that sell you the vibe and call it a day. Dawn's sin is the opposite: it makes the vibe a real combat engine. Give it the usual path to publication — three-plus years in beta, a Kickstarter, a run of patches, and a 2026 "LionWing Edition" you now pay $15 for. That's the genre's favorite ritual, but this one earned the name and not just the logo. ## Setting DAWN is setting-agnostic: build your own world, or drop it onto one you already own, so long as it's got combat, the supernatural, and no interest in realism. It still ships three official example settings. **Sand and Stars** sets you loose on the desert world of Ka'Sha, flavored by the fairy tales of 1001 Nights (and it's the half the Quickstart, *Tale of Sand and Stars*, runs on). **Daggers and Dusk** drops the action to street level — syndicates squabbling through the modern city of Pantomime. **Faeries and Frost** is straight European fantasy, all walls and winter. You play a rising star, one of the extraordinary few the book's opening singles out as different. The design commits to that. It never forces your death — Tension is supposed to come from who you love and what you owe, not from a health bar hitting zero — and a consent-first Rule Zero sits at the top of the rules with the X-Card right there beside it. It's a fighting fiction where the fights are the point and the people are why they matter. ## Mechanics ### The XD6 Resolution System Everything risky rolls the same way: a pool of d6 equal to the relevant Attribute, every 4+ counting as a Hit, and every 6 a Critical Hit that explodes — roll another die, keep going. Success is measured against your Tier: at or under Tier Hits you fail into the Risk; better than Tier clears the bar (Reward, though at notable difficulty); Tier×2 or more is an extreme success with room to show off. Advantage adds dice, Disadvantage strips them, and when two characters are at each other's throats the roll goes **Opposed** — most Hits wins, and a tie rebounds until somebody backs down. ### Two Sides, One Character Characters are two deliberately separate machines. Unstructured play runs on Skills and custom-built **Abilities** — a points-buy power list where you pay for what it hits, how, and on whom. Structured combat runs on a 7x7 grid, Action Points, and **Techniques**. The sides almost never cross, on purpose: combat is a universal skill Dawn won't let you buy out of. The fiction might let you stop time; the board won't hand you an extra turn for it. ### Character Creation Four Attributes — **Body** (health and muscle), **Talent** (speed and stunts), **Spirit** (the supernatural and your gut), and **Mind** (the book-learning). One Primary starts at 4, one Secondary at 3, the other two Tertiary at 2. Then an **Outlook** for the fiction — a choice of ten: Rebel, Loyal, Light, Wolf, Mentor, Apprentice, Accursed, Blessed, Quiet, and Confident — and up to three combat **Archetypes** for the grid: Powerhouse, Vagabond, Bulwark, Altruist, Disruptor, and Ruiner, each dangling Techniques of rising complexity. Tiers rank you up the ladder, and the campaign scale decides whether you're settling street beefs or starting god wars. ### Structured Combat Combat runs on a 7x7 tile grid. You get 3 Action Points a turn and a stack of Basic Actions — movement, attack, defense, utility — plus Reactions for between turns. Spend an Influence and you can **Break Out**: shove in a non-attack action as a reaction outside your turn, no AP cost. Characters left out of a Scene can **Assist** a teammate instead of spectating. Health runs 10 + Body + Tier×2; drop to 0 and you take a **Wound** and snap back to full, and the person who put you there banks an Influence; three wounds and you're out of the Scene. Armor blunts attacks, Evasion drinks the damage instead of your health, and terrain is worth caring about. ### Influence & Antagonism The glue is two meta-currencies: players hoard **Influence**, the Narrator burns **Antagonism**, and both reward actually engaging with the story — spendable in or out of combat. A campaign is a **Series**, a session a **Chapter**, and Scenes, Clocks, Tension, and Intermissions keep the melodrama on schedule. The influences are worn openly: the combat engine nods to **[[Lancer]]**, and the out-of-combat chassis to **[[Blades in the Dark]]** and **[[Tenra Bansho Zero]]**. It wears its borrowings the way it wears its shonen heart — you don't have to squint to see them. ## Editions - **Beta** (2024) — the development stretch, β1.0 through 1.02 (2025), as Vreugdenhil iterated toward release. - **First Edition / Print Beta** — *In the library.* One of the held core versions (the other being the LionWing Edition below), alongside the character sheets (plus a fillable copy) and the **Quickstart: Tale of Sand and Stars**. - **LionWing Edition** (2026) — *In the library.* The current core, a light revision of the Print Beta (mostly page and figure cross-reference fixes) that the studio now ships as the version you buy and play; available as a $14.99 PDF on itch and in print via Vreugdenhil Games (ISBN 9798991409018). ## References Where to pick it up, grab the free quickstart, or read a grown-up take on it. - [DAWN: The RPG — official itch.io page](https://joel-happyhil.itch.io/dawn) - [DAWN Quickstart: Tale of Sand and Stars — itch.io](https://joel-happyhil.itch.io/tosas) - [DAWN: The RPG — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/508347/dawn-the-rpg) - [TTRPG Essentials: Picking Your Second System — Goonhammer](https://www.goonhammer.com/ttrpg-essentials-picking-your-second-system/)