GODEATER

Core Rules & Conversion Guide

A Tabletop RPG of survival, transcendence, and building a future amidst the relics of the past
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Core Rules
What Godeater is
Narratively, Godeater is a game about
surviving in a post-apcalyptic world that
may well be better than it was before,
and dining on divine carcasses in an
attempt to thrive and ascend yourself.
Practically, Godeater is a game about
triumphing over long odds thanks to
your wits, your preparations, and clever
use of your own inherent weirdness.
Mechanically, Godeater is a 2d10 system
with an emphasis on temporary items
and assets rather than extensive
character builds, designed for ease of
play.
Historiographically, Godeater is an
attempt to meld the rulings-focused
simplicity of the OSR movement with
the narratively-focused stylings of more
modern RPGs.
Why Modular Design?
Each subsystem within Godeater (items,
adventures, magic, and so on) is
designed to be connected to every other
subsystem through very simple
connectors. They’re like lego bricks -
easily attachable to one another, and to
plenty of other things besides. The
section on ritual magic, for instance -
not in this document - fits perfectly
smoothly into the rest of the game, but
isn’t necessary to play it.
The other advantage this gives is ease of
conversion: you can take the sections on
summoning demons, performing
rituals, exploring dead gods and so on,
and easily stick them on to your own
games, even if they’re in different
systems. The only thing you need to play
the game is this document, but each
addition gives you more options. If you
want, you can even start with just the
core rules and introduce more complex
systems organically as players continue
to explore the world.

The Core Mechanic
Anything attempted by a character with
a meaningful chance of failure requires
a roll on 2d10 to beat a certain difficulty
value determined by the GM.
The player will announce their intent,
then the GM will tell them the target
number. The player will then have the
option to spend an amount of Ability
Points to increase their odds of success,
before making the roll.
Monsters, enemies, environmental
threats and NPCs do not make rolls;
instead, whenever they attack or oppose
the party, players make a reactive roll to
avoid or mitigate it.
If players end up working against each
other, they both roll simultaneously,
with the winner being whoever rolled
highest.
Some tasks may require different target
numbers to represent degrees of
success; attempting to shoot a cannon at
a gunship may require a 12, but hitting
the powder magazine and destroying
the whole thing may be possible on, say,
an 18.
Advantage and
Disadvantage
Some effects may give you Advantage or
Disadvantage on a roll. If you have
advantage, roll twice and take the
highest result. If you have disadvantage,
roll twice and take the lowest. Spent
ability points apply to both rolls.
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Abilities
Every player character is represented by
three abilities:
● STAMINA is a measure of your Core Rules
character’s physical strength, health,
and durability. Stamina is the relevant
stat for fighting off disease, punching
your opponents, minimising damage,
and performing feats of athletic
endurance.
● DEXTERITY is a measure of your
character’s fine motor skills, grace, and
poise. Dexterity is the relevant stat for
evading traps, attacking at range,
duelling, dancing, and performing
feats of athletic skill.
● PRESENCE is a measure of your
character’s charm and strength of will.
Presence is the relevant stat for
winning people over to your side,
making friends, making your voice
heard, defending yourself from
psychic attack, and commanding
attention.
Spending Ability Points
After being told the difficulty value of a
task, a player may choose to burn Ability
Points from the relevant Ability to
increase their odds of success. They may
spend up to four points at a time, each
one reducing the target difficulty value
by one. Spent ability points are
refreshed between Adventures.
Skills
Characters may choose to take any skill,
so long as the GM approves it. Having a
relevant skill reduces the difficulty of a
check by 2, and having two relevant
skills reduces the difficulty by 4, but
after that there are no further benefits
for stacking skills. So, being trained in
closing planar overlays would reduce the
difficulty of closing a Patterner Overlay
by 2. Being additionally trained in the
Patterner would reduce it by 4, but any
further relevant training would have no
effect.
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Danger and Death
Retirement
Initiative A character may Retire at any time,
Core Rules If it’s a situation in which it makes a using any ability, item or skill that they
difference who takes their turn first - have access to. The results of this action
like combat - usually all that matters is will be particularly impressive and
whether the players get to go first, or dramatic, but will render that character
their opponents do. If either group got permanently and irrevocably
the drop on the other, they should go unplayable. For instance, when the party
first. If no other factors apply, seizing is pursued by an unstoppable swarm of
the initiative is usually a DC10 intellect goblins, a player may choose to retire
check for whoever is leading the party. their character to buy time for the
others to escape; their success in this is
Harm all-but guaranteed, but they will
heroically fall in the process. This is
The most common consequence of
designed to be an opportunity for
failing rolls in dangerous situations is
players to end their character’s story on
Harm. Harm comes at four different
their own terms.
levels. If you take a level of Harm that
you already have, increase it by one
instead. If you have 2-Harm and take
2-Harm again, take 3-Harm instead,
and if you have also already taken
3-Harm, crank it up to 4-Harm. At
1-Harm you are bruised and winded, at
2-Harm you are in need of medical
attention, at 3-Harm you are in serious
need of help and can barely stand, and
at 4-Harm you are Broken. Fighting
everything you come across is unlikely
to end well.

Breaking
Taking 4-Harm causes a player to
become Broken: they are incapacitated
and no longer able to achieve anything
until healed. The exact consequences of
Breaking are deliberately left to be
determined by the players and GM,
depending on the tone and feel of the
game you want to play. At maximum,
being Broken could mean instant,
irreversible death, but at minimum, it
could mean that you'll spring up again at
the end of the encounter, not much the
worse for wear. So long as the terms of
being Broken are mutually agreed upon,
consistent, and public knowledge,
anything works.
Critical Success and
Failure
Rolling a 20 on a standard 2d10 roll is
considered a Critical Success. This means
that the action has gone unexpectedly
well for you, often in an unforeseen
manner. Notably, this doesn’t guarantee
success, only a positive outcome.
Conversely, rolling a 2 is considered a
Critical Failure, causing the action to go
unexpectedly poorly. Notably, this
needn’t be because the character in
question actually did anything wrong,
as such. For instance, critically failing to
strike an enemy could mean that more
opponents show up, or the opponents
change their tactics, and so on.
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The World Items
Anything attempted by a character with
Players may carry an amount of items
a meaningful chance of failure requires
equal to their maximum Stamina score.
a roll on 2d10 to beat a certain difficulty
value determined by the GM.
Swords, armour, and so on, are not Core Rules
usually included in this: Players can be
assumed to be carrying basic tools and
Tags provisions unless there is a specific
Special effects on items, people, and reason these might be lost or destroyed.
monsters are known as Tags. An item
might be flaming, a person might be
berserk, a monster may be intangible. The
Afflictions
In addition to Harm, players may suffer
effects of these are intuitive: it is clear
from Afflictions. These are persistent
that a flaming weapon will set some
ailments, curses and more ambiguous
things on fire, provide light, and be
effects that will impact upon the
somewhat more effective against
character until they are cured.
enemies made of or armoured in ice, but
Afflictions may occur when taking high
it is up to the GM to determine what
levels of Harm, or when touched by
those effects are in a given situation.
weird energies. They come in three
Similarly, if a creature is flaming,
levels, Minor, Major and Chronic.
attempts to grapple it will likely result in
Higher-leveled afflictions are usually
a lot of pain and burns, while any
more serious and more difficult to
attempts by that creature to sneak or
remove. Some examples are as follows -
pass unnoticed are unlikely to succeed.
note that not all of the effects of an
affliction need be negative:’
Monsters and Foes
Creating monsters and other threats is
incredibly simple; choose a number
between 1 and 20. Then add some tags to
Creating a Character
Characters are defined by what they
it. The number is the challenge’s DC, or
carry and what influences are acting
difficulty check. If a player wants to
upon them. Developing as a character is
‘beat’ that challenge - be that by
as much about picking up weird
sneaking past it, fighting it, or tricking
metaphysical complications as it is
it - that is the number to beat. For
about becoming more powerful. To get
monsters that are much greater
started, define a name and pronouns,
challenges in some areas than others -
then roll 2D6 for each of your three
like a clumsy giant that is hard to fight
stats, or assign a 5, a 7, and a 9.
but easy to avoid - use tags. In this way,
the focus is on what monsters can do,
not what their stats are, and fights are
more about creative use of abilities and
the environment than comparing stats.
It also means that monsters are trivially
easy to create: here are some examples:
● -Chameleonoid Fungus (DC7):
sneaky
● -Chimera (DC11): poisonous, unflankable,
flying
● -Lesser Phoenix (DC13): divine, wild
magic, ranged, flaming, resurrecting
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Exploring the World
Some Useful Definitions
A God is an intelligent, self-aware plane
Core Rules
several thousand square miles in size.
The shape and position of that God in
four-dimensional space determines
where any entrances or exits from the
plane end up-back into the world, into
other Gods, or to other, darker places.
The contents of that plane are
manifestations of the mind and nature
of that God, and look and act
accordingly. Sub-components of the
God, often referred to as Servitors, may
resemble living beings in of themselves,
and might even come into conflict with
their fellows. Gods are in control of their
interior dimensions, but often simply do
not notice the humans poking around in
there.
A Dead God is functionally very similar
to a living one; it lacks a controlling
intelligence, and cannot be
communicated with, but the
fragmented parts of its mind are still
active and meaningfully living. It is
substantially easier to harvest resources
and Godsblood from the dead. Servitors
of dead gods that are sufficiently
removed from their origin to survive its
death are known as Scions, and typically
inherit a portion of the deceased’s
power while gaining much more
individuality into the bargain.
A Godeater is a human who spends
most of their time, willingly or
unwillingly, inside a God, living
parasitically off its contents and seeking
to survive and maybe, if they are lucky,
transcend. Godeater communities tend
to be nomadic, based as they are within
ever-shifting spaces.
The Materium is the space still
untouched by the warping influence of
Gods. Most settlements are within the
Materium.
An Overlay occurs when the
8-dimensional body of a god, living or
dead, intersects with the Materium for a
time, causing it to warp in
unpredictable ways. Without regular
overlays, the world would be a much
safer place - if a more boring one. Most
humans treat Overlays like extremely
inclement weather: dangerous, but
predictable, and survivable so long as
proper preparations are taken.
The Between is the space outside the
Materium that is not occupied by Gods -
the sea that divinities swim through. It
is cold, empty, and inimical to life.
Human is the term used to describe the
sapient species of the Materium. Before
the great war, these people bore other
names and divisions; Orc, Minotaur,
Aven, and so on. These divisions are less
important now, though some may still
have an attachment to them.
Ecology of the New World
True, many mourn the old world that
was, but just as many do not: a good
deal of those that survived were those
that the old world was not kind to, after
all. The world is undeniably more
dangerous now, with divine weaponry
running amok and much old
infrastructure and resources laid to
waste. Those settlements and
organisations that have survived and
thrived have done so by embracing
symbiosis: every danger in this world is
also a resource to be understood and
utilised, and each horror is an
opportunity for those brave enough to
risk it. By collecting the essence of the
divine and using it to flourish, humanity
has a (dangerous) way forward.
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Core Rules
THE GODEATER’S CATECHISM

A long time ago, Gods were entwined with the World and their
magic suffused it.

That was then. This is now. What Gods survived the war are
wounded, dangerous, unpredictable. Those that died have become
deadly divine carcasses, sprawled across the world in 4-D
horrorspace.

The rest of the world has been torn asunder by divine

superweapons, filled with monsters and horrors. Small towns and
hamlets, heavily fortified, are pockets of safety in a world of
weirdness.

Yet without the weird, these bastions of safety have no resources,

and no meaning. They depend upon those reckless enough to seek
out the strangeness and horror of the world outside, to consume
the remnants of the Gods, and to become more than human.

They depend on Godeaters.

Now, Feast.
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Conversion Guide
Converting the Setting
Core Rules Godeater’s primary differences from
more conventional fantasy settings are
a) that it details a particular cosmic
ecology involving the bodies of dead
gods, and b) that it exists after an
apocalyptic war that changed the nature
of the world. Accounting for b) in other
fantasy settings is fairly easy - a lot of
them have ancient wars and long-dead
civilizations. Moreover, the fact that
civilization as we know it has largely
fallen apart doesn’t have that much of an
impact on how the game is played: The
biggest change is the absence of
currency, but assigning prices to the
items and treasures of the world is well
within the capacity of a good GM.
Resolving a) is a little more complicated.
Obviously you can just drag and drop
the Godeater deities into your world
wholesale. Otherwise, if your game
setting already has a cosmology, you can
adapt: to use D&D as an example, the
positive energy, negative energy, and
elemental planes make for good
substitutes for the gods, and their
associated denizens make for good
equivalents of scions, servitors, and so
on.
Converting the System
● Stats: in an old-school six-stat
system like D&D, Stamina should be
either Strength or Constitution
(depending on context), Dexterity
should be, well, Dexterity, and
Presence should be either Wisdom or
Charisma, again depending on
context.
● Encounters and Adventures: Most
games you play will have fairly
natural breakpoints for encounters
and adventures anyway. For games
like D&D that use ‘short rests’ and
‘long rests’, you can treat a short
rest as a gap between encounters,
and a long rest as a gap between
adventures, for the purpose of
refreshing abilities.
● Harm: This is likely to be the
hardest part of conversion: Harm is
very deliberately designed to be
logarithmic in scale, not linear like
any systems that use hitpoints. The
most sensible approach here is just
to treat 1-Harm as ‘a little bit of
damage’, 2-Harm as ‘a decent
amount of damage’, 3-Harm as ‘a
great deal of damage’, and adjust
according to what feels right. For
D&D 5e, 1-Harm should be d8
damage, 2-Harm shouldbe 2d10
damage, and 3-Harm should be
4d20 damage.
● Effort: Effort can either be added to
the other system wholesale, or
converted to ‘spell slots’, or
equivalent. Alternatively, you can
replace “expend effort for the
encounter” with “once per
encounter”, and so on.
Advice for GMs
The key thing to remember when
running this game is that TRPGs are
made fun by their choices, and by the
characters that we play. Those two
things are the focus of this game. When
running this game, consider the
following advice.
You don’t need to roll as
often as you think.
You should only roll for tests where both
failure and success have the potential to
advance the plot and characters. There is
no need to roll to see if a character can
tie their shoelaces. Similarly, if the
characters are seeking out an important
NPC, rolling to see if they find them is
largely superfluous, since they will
simply keep trying or abandon the plot
entirely. Rolling to see the complications
come about as a result of their search,
however, has more potential.
Be upfront with your
players.
It’s usually more fun for players to figure
out how to deal with a problem than to
figure out what the problem is. Nobody
likes getting killed by a threat they never
knew was there. Let players know the
likely consequences of their actions - it
will make their choices more interesting
for everybody. If there is a good reason
to disguise the nature of the
consequences, at least try to telegraph
the likely severity of them.
Expect players to move in
mysterious ways.
Asking your players to engage with the
core elements of your game is not
restriction or railroading, but basic
common sense. If you are running a
game about slaying a dragon, it is
reasonable to expect your players to go
along and engage with that dragon,
rather than, say, running away
somewhere else entirely. However, in
terms of their feelings toward the
dragon, their plans to reach it, and so
on, try to allow as much improvisation
and freedom as possible.
Give tools, not buffs.
The core of this game is
problem-solving, and a power that can
solve any problem is a fairly boring one.
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Core Rules
Encourage creative use of skills and
items rather than catch-all solutions or
straightforward statistical advantages.
Make every encounter
matter.
Before planning any individual
encounter, consider what it adds -
thematically, mechanically, narratively -
to the game. Rather than padding things
out with unnecessary fights, move fast
and hit hard with novel challenges and
emotional beats. A couple of good
encounters are more memorable and
compelling than a hundred mediocre
ones.
Make calls according to
consistency and fun.
When situations come up that you have
not planned for, try to choose the most
fun option that is consistent with other
rulings - that is, if you earlier decided
that lightning does extra damage to
people in plate armour, it would be
strange if that suddenly ceased to be
true. Be unafraid to say yes to clever
plans, but equally, be unafraid to say no
to strategies that are not fun, while still
rewarding players. In a game about
determining the last wishes of a dead
Empress, having one of your players
instantly whip out an Arcana of
necromancy and summon her reckless
shade is not fun, and you should feel
free to come up with an excuse as to why
that won’t work, so that the rest of the
game can go ahead. However, the player
in question should also be rewarded in
some way for their quick thinking.
Use prep work to help you
improvise.
A quick list of random names, random
treasures, and so on, will do a lot to
streamline your GMing. Write down ten
of each before each session, just in case -
it only takes a moment.