# Perseverant *Created:* 2024-01-14, *Modified:* 2026-11-04 ![[Perseverant (cover).jpg]] **Perseverant** is the oldest premise in survival fiction, handed to the table to build: a group of people have to cross somewhere that wants them dead, and nobody has promised they'll all arrive. Two to five players invent the Wilderness, decide why they're in it, make the people who'll be walking it, and then find out over the session how much of the group is still standing at the far end. The book is unusually straight about what it's selling. There's no game master and no preparation, the text is written in the first person plural throughout — instructions for a group that hasn't met yet — and *it's unlikely all of us will make it to the end* turns up in its opening pages without a trace of hedging. Most survival games make you spend the cold and the calories. **Perseverant** spends the people: characters wear down in the same arithmetic as the weather, and the group itself is a resource that can be sold out for an advantage at the right moment. ## Setting The setting is **the Wilderness** — the book's capital letter — and the table gives it three strokes. **Nature** is the simplest, most evocative shape the place has: a mountain range, an ocean, a desert, a glacier, a jungle, ruins, space, an alien planet, a planar anomaly. **Era** isn't a date but the texture of technology, training and ideology the characters carry — Feudal Japan, the Thirty Years' War, Hippie America, 6000 AD, time travel. The **goal** is why the group formed in the first place, deliberately kept separate from anyone's private motivation, and it's usually the less obvious answer that carries the story: survive, escape, get home, find it, claim it, make a map, save others. None of that ties the game to a map. The game works with any setting, the publisher says, "so long as there are people determined to pass through an inhospitable environment" — and the book means it, going so far as to encourage mismatches. There is nothing in the rules to stop Roman centurions surviving space. The lineage is credited rather than implied: the publisher's pitch names **[[Microscope]]**, Downfall and **[[Fiasco]]** among the game's inspirations, and the acknowledgements single out Ben Robbins, Caroline Hobbs, Jason Morningstar, Hannah Shaffer and Ben Lehman. For a game this cold, it has a lot of parents. ### Seven Ready-Made Wildernesses The back of the book carries complete starting scenarios for groups who'd rather play than invent a mountain range — nature, era, goal and a full deck of locations and challenge sources, ready to be written onto cards. - **Silk Road** — 13th-century Central Asia, across the Iranian plateau, the Pamirs and the Mongolian steppe. Merchants, explorers and missionaries walking from the Mediterranean to China, some for commerce, some for God. - **Jadid Sector** — 2483 CE, in alien space: bizarre planets, inexplicable phenomena, and sentient cultures hostile to humanity. The first humans to colonise the region, and the tip of humanity's spear. - **Blood Magic and Jaguars** — the medieval Americas, in an infinite primordial jungle of poison and bounty. The Sun Eaters raid the villages and burn beating hearts for their god; the group's goal is to outrun them and leave home behind. - **Weeping Sun** — bronze-age fantasy beneath a sun weeping liquid light, drowning the great empires in bright hot water. Survival means going deep underground, away from the Sunwater. - **Suburbia Lost** — 1970s America, teenagers poking around a nuclear test site that time forgot, trying to make it home past the ruins and the voices. - **The World Between Worlds** — a parallel dimension of frigid black swamps where down is up, and a hunched predator works the endless night. Find the portal you came in through. - **Pale Journey** — the underworld: the dead crossing the River of Woe, past the Forest of Despair, to pay Charon his due in coins. ## Mechanics Play is a cycle of **challenge scenes** and **social scenes**, and the thing holding it together is the character card. Every relationship and every trait is a card in your hand, and every card you can key in a challenge is another die. Cards exhaust, get blocked and get renamed as the journey goes on, so a character's history is a hand that keeps getting smaller. ### Building the Wilderness Five steps, done by the whole table: define the nature, pick the era, agree the goal, then make the locations and the challenge sources on index cards. Around ten locations, more than the group will use, since a set piece nobody reaches beats a shortage. At least five challenge sources — each is worth roughly fifteen minutes of play, so the deck is what sets the length of the evening. Anyone can veto any card, and the book is insistent about what that power is for: removing something a player is uncomfortable with, not steering a story you happen to disagree with. Once they're agreed, the locations and the sources are shuffled into two face-down decks, and the rest of the night is spent drawing from them. ### Characters Relationships come first, before anyone knows who their character is, and that ordering is the design argument in miniature. People hand out stereotypes once they know the traits; start with the relationships and the tough centurion may turn out to be secretly in love with his commanding officer rather than typecast as a tough centurion. Each character gets a letter or a number as a placeholder. Each player writes two relationships from their character's point of view — relationships that need not be true, since a character can be wrong about another — and the cards go face-up to be vetoed. Then everyone takes two of them. The character then gets a name and four traits, one card each: **History** (past life, profession, training), **Method** (how they approach problems), **Cause** (ideology, morality, motivation) and **Fear** (what they dread). Traits should err narrow — *Soldier* is too broad for a game about mountaineering, *Jaded, Maimed Veteran* is the right size. Those cards plus the relationships are the hand, and the hand is the character. ### The Loop Play opens in freeform: what the characters look like, who they know, how they came to be in this group, with anyone free to describe the landscape as long as nobody dictates another character's actions. There's no clock on it. When it's narratively right, or when someone gets bored, that player draws a location card and becomes the scene's framer. Then: frame and resolve a challenge, discuss what it did to the story, take any social scenes the table wants, and go back to the beginning. Repeat until the story ends. ### Challenge Scenes Framing takes four draws. The location card supplies the place. A d6 supplies the **trouble** — an unexpected attack, a previous choice coming back to haunt you, something breaking, an environmental threat, an internal threat, an unsettling development. A drawn source card supplies what the trouble is actually made of. Then a second roll sets the **severity**, which is how much work the scene will take, and the arithmetic has a deliberate bite in it: roll equal to or under the number of players and the severity is the roll plus the number of players; roll over it and the severity is just the roll. The severity sits in plain sight on a couple of dice, and everyone watches it come down. Each player gets one turn, ordered by narrative sense — or by the oldest player when nothing suggests otherwise. Describe the intent. Key any number of cards, face-up, with a reason why each one applies. Roll **1 + keyed cards** d6: a 4 or better is a success, a 3 or worse a failure. Every success drops the severity by one. Every failure exhausts one of the cards that contributed — keyed or not, your choice which fits — and an exhausted card can't be keyed again until it's recovered. Roll no successes at all and the character takes a setback. That's the trap the game is built around: keying more cards buys more dice and more failures at the same time. A cautious player contributes little, and a bold one can end up with nothing in their hand while the wolves are still circling. The scene ends when everyone has acted or passed, or when the severity reaches zero. Whatever severity is left over is a failure for the group: the source card goes back into the deck to be met again later, and the group takes a consequence. ### Social Scenes After a challenge, in any order, each player may frame one social scene with another character — with that player's consent, since a scene needs a participant rather than a prop. The scene must create camaraderie or conflict, and it must connect to the journey or to the relationships of the characters in it — a rule that quietly rules out the perfunctory check-in. When the scene threatens to become a formality, a d6 table gives it an event: reveal something about your past, confess real or hidden feelings, express a wish or regret, apologise, call out a mistake and place blame, or ask someone's opinion. These are the recovery phase, and the rates are lopsided on purpose — one card per scene, and no banking: - **Conflict** — the framer takes one exhausted card back. - **Camaraderie** — every reacting character takes one back. - **In place of a card**, a setback can be cleared instead, so long as it makes narrative sense and is something the characters would actually do. The framer pays for it with the card they'd otherwise have recovered. A character with nothing exhausted gets nothing, and there's no accumulating a surplus. An especially significant scene earns the pair a new relationship card, and existing relationship cards are never edited: that murk is meant to represent who these people have already been to each other. ### Setbacks, Consequences and Death A **setback** is a complication, injury or impediment that blocks a character card — write it on the card, or on its own card if it has more to say. A blocked card can't be keyed. You can clear one of your own mid-challenge for the price of +1 severity, once per scene; more usually somebody else clears it for you in a social scene. A **consequence** is the larger failure: something that hampers the whole group, drops a setback on every character (two in a single scene is the ceiling), and can be spent to skip the next trouble roll and take "a previous choice haunts you" instead. Failure feeds itself. Death comes through exhaustion rather than a damage roll. Take a setback while holding no cards and the character is dead or defeated — your choice, and your choice of where in the scene it happens. A dead character leaves the story and their player moves over to helping narrate the wilderness and its locations. A defeated character is separated rather than killed, can return later, and pays for it by permanently renaming one trait to *Defeated*. ### Conflict Between Characters The Wilderness is only half the pressure. There are four ways for the group to come apart, and each has its own price. **Internal conflict** is a straight contest. On your turn, attack — verbally, socially or physically — and both sides key cards and roll as normal. A hostile or conflicted relationship gives the attacker a bonus die; an amiable or positive one gives the defender a bonus die. Compare successes: whoever has more frames the outcome and describes what it costs the other. Ties go to the attacker. The loser can take a setback or hand the group a consequence, and both characters come out of it with a new relationship card recording what just happened. **Helping and hindering** costs you your turn. Before you act, name a character you share relationships with and force a reroll on up to one die per relationship you share — the lowest dice to help, the highest to hinder, chosen by you and taken whatever they land on. If the character you helped rolls no successes, you both take setbacks; if the character you hindered rolls any success, you take one. It's an efficient way to be generous, and a better one to be punished. **Betrayal** can be declared in any challenge or social scene, whoever has already acted, and the reward is immediate and large: automatic successes toward the severity equal to the cards in your hand, or, in a social scene, every exhausted card back at once. The bill is every relationship card you hold with that character, struck through and renamed to describe what you did. The betrayed can contest it with internal conflict, and it changes nothing about the successes already banked. Witnesses may form new relationships with you, or start their own fight. **Self-sacrifice** is the clean exit. Describe the final act, drop the severity to zero, and choose whether the character dies, is gravely injured and incapacitated, or is simply lost to the group. ### Optional Rules Three sets of bolt-ons. A **resource stack** adds a deck of one resource card per player — meaningful things, not lanterns and rations — of which one can be keyed per challenge for another die; it returns to the deck on a clean key and is gone for good if the character keying it fails or takes a setback. **Advancement** turns the one-shot into a campaign: a new trait at the end of every session, one existing trait may be swapped, no duplicates over consecutive sessions, three of any card at most. **Challenge modifiers** are the cruelty dial — **Twin** (a second source), **Painful** (one setback becomes two), **Devastating** (a consequence seeds a new source into the deck), **Haunting** (a beaten source returns to the pile), **Exacting** (−1 to every die rolled that scene) and **Critical** (any setback in the scene fails the whole group outright). ### Gameplay Tips The closing chapter of the book is about making the thing work at a table. The **facilitator** is a resource rather than an authority — teach by making the first character and framing the first scene, not by reciting rules — which leads to the book's best piece of advice, **delayed rules incorporation**: don't announce betrayal, self-sacrifice and internal conflict up front; mention each one when the fiction makes it relevant. Scenes that don't connect get built on rather than corrected. And the book is candid about its own weak spot. Below three players the severity averages high and the relationships thin out, so it suggests capping the severity die at 4 or 5, doubling up on relationships, letting a single social scene recover cards for both players, or having somebody run two characters. Under time pressure, it gives you permission to cut to the climax, to ignore the trouble roll when the location and source already agree with each other, and — if the table knows better than the dice — to reject the outcome outright. ## Editions - **Perseverant** (2017) — Ben Dutter, published by **Sigil Stone Publishing** with **Nocturnal Media**. 84 pages, issued as a black-and-white softcover and as a DRM-free digital release in PDF and EPUB. *In the library* — held as both the PDF and the EPUB. It is the only edition the game has had; the print edition is out of print, the digital one is still on sale, and secondhand copies turn up. ## References - [Perseverant RPG, the publisher's own page - Sigil Stone Publishing](https://www.sigilstonepublishing.com/perseverant-rpg) - [Perseverant RPG, the digital edition - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/204755/perseverant-rpg) - [Perseverant RPG, PDF and EPUB direct from the designer - Ben Dutter](https://www.bendutter.com/downloads/perseverant-rpg-download/) - [Perseverant, out of print, secondhand stock when there is any - Noble Knight Games](https://www.nobleknight.com/P/2147773033/Perseverant) - [Perseverant RPG: a Survival Story Game, the 2016 funding campaign - Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sigilstonepublishing/perseverant-rpg-a-survival-story-game) - [A read-through in an acquisition round-up, filed next to Our Last Best Hope - Faked Tales](https://fakedtales.com/2023/10/24/rpg-quest-june-part-one/) - [Rules queries from a group that played it, mostly about the relationship phase - r/rpg](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/yftod5/perseverant_rpg_rule_clarifications_needed/) - [The Death Ziggurat, where Perseverant comes up as a companion to frozen-waste survival play - Fear of a Black Dragon](https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/fear-of-a-black-dragon/death-ziggurat)