A free PDF to introduce you to our Kickstarter for Stray Crows.

Stray Crows: Free Kickstarter Preview

Honour is expensive. Survival is worse.

Japan’s age of war was not a pageant of immaculate warriors composing poetry beneath the cherry trees. It was an age of fractured loyalties, ruthless ambition, religious conflict, peasant uprisings, wandering swordsmen, desperate compromises—and sudden, appalling violence.

Stray Crows is a new tabletop roleplaying game line inspired by the samurai cinema, historical drama and folklore of Japan’s Sengoku and early Edo periods.

This free PDF preview introduces the project, its approach and the three books that make up the complete game.

Three Books. One Bloody Road.

Ronin is the core game: a grounded roleplaying game of masterless warriors, impoverished peasants, mercenaries, monks, spies, criminals and other souls trying to find their place in a country tearing itself apart.

Characters may begin as hungry wanderers with little more than a blade, a reputation and some very questionable decisions behind them. Those who survive may gather followers, win land, build strongholds and claw their way towards power—assuming someone does not put a spear through them first.

Three-Candle Crown opens the door to the supernatural Japan of folklore and nightmare. Magic, curses, restless ghosts, strange creatures and things lurking beyond the firelight enter the game, allowing campaigns to move from historical drama into full-blooded horror and dark fantasy.

Autumn Moon provides support for solo play, Games Masters and those occasions when the rest of your gaming group proves less reliable than a band of starving rōnin. Generate characters, situations, journeys, complications and unfolding stories without requiring a conventional full table.

Together, the three books allow you to play anything from a hard-edged historical campaign to a wandering monster-hunting saga—or to move gradually from one into the other as old superstitions turn out to have teeth.

Not Another Coat of Fantasy Paint

Stray Crows does not merely take a conventional fantasy game, replace taverns with tea houses and call it Japan.

The game has been built around the conflicts, social pressures and peculiarities of its setting, while remaining playable rather than collapsing beneath the weight of academic footnotes. It takes inspiration from classic samurai roleplaying, old-school game design, Japanese history, folklore and cinema, then sharpens the result for a modern table.

Expect:

• Fast, dangerous combat where steel remains frightening.

• Social position, honour, duty and reputation that actually matter.

• Characters drawn from many levels of society—not merely samurai.

• Wandering, investigation, warfare, intrigue and survival.

• The possibility of rising from masterless exile to landholder and lord.

• Optional magic, monsters, ghosts and supernatural horror.

• Rules and tools for both group and solo play.

• A Japan shaped by its own history and culture, rather than by generic fantasy assumptions.

See What You Are Backing

Crowdfunding always requires a measure of trust, but it should not require blind faith.

Download this preview for free, take a look at Stray Crows, and decide for yourself whether you want to follow these particular birds onto the battlefield.

No cost. No obligation. No carefully worded pledge of eternal loyalty to Postmortem Studios.

Just a free look at the game—and, should it sink its claws into you, a link to the Kickstarter where you can help bring the complete trilogy to life.

Download the free preview, draw your sword and follow the crows.

This is a digital PDF download. No physical product is included.