Welcome to the World of ESPER!


Thank you to everyone who downloaded the ESPER RPG main manual! I appreciate all of your support.

The ESPER Roleplaying Game is a tabletop RPG where you play as members of a secret society dedicated to protecting the world from the threat of supernatural evil, staving off what they refer to as The Five o' Clock Shadow, the moment when the sun goes down one last time. It's a rules-light experience best played in groups of three to five (plus a Dispatcher), and aims to make it easy to have a detailed and personalized character capable of performing complicated actions with extreme ease. 

The game was released for the Tabletop Graveyard Jam, and was made in just over a week. As a result, there are some typographical errors in the text, and I didn't get a chance to playtest it, although it is loosely based on the rules of a game I designed that has been my exclusive tabletop RPG for many years. However, this is the direction I've wanted to take it for a while,  and so going forward I will be focusing specifically on this incarnation.

First Steps

The first step is to add some content! The ESPER universe has been around for about twenty years, but all the rules and stats currently available are for a much more complicated version of the system designed to work with horror, fantasy, and science fiction settings.  Because of this, I need to do some translation of the system. Rather than releasing large sourcebooks (which will come out eventually), I'll be releasing the parts in smaller, more digestible Playbooks. I've joined the Loose Playbook Jam here on itch.io, and I'll be releasing the first tonight: The ESPER Agent Classification Manual: Section I . This will contain six agent archetypes to help in creating new characters for the game, including:

  • The Hunter: A warrior who hunts down darkness with weapons, wits, and their bare fists.
  • The Priest: A clergyman who saw things they couldn't explain to the Vatican, and now do their part to keep the world safe from it.
  • The Scholar: An intellectual whose wide range of practical studies could greatly assist in our field work.
  • The Skeptic: A tech-savvy brainiac with the skills to help uncover the darkness and learn more about it.
  • The Investigator: A detective with the skills to track down the darkness wherever it may try to hide.
  • The Occultist: A magician with not only knowledge of the Supernatural and Occult, but power over it.

As soon as this is released, there are two areas that I'm going to immediately begin working on:

  1. Corrections and Upgrades: Having put together a 67-page game in over a week left it with a few odd "deformities." There are some typos (mostly spaces inserted in the wrong place betwee nwords, like that), and I'm not necessarily 100% happy with some of the rules about how Traits, Characteristics, and Magick works. I'm going to do a little cleanup and a little revising. Before I get too far into that, I hope that somebody has a chance to playtest the current version and give me some feedback!
  2. ESPER Introductory Package: I'm going to also try to get out an introductory pack of Playbooks as soon as I'm happy with the finalized rules. These will include:
    1. The ESPER Agent Classification Manual: Section 01.
    2. Ten Codex entries for Supernatural entities and Paranormal creatures.
    3. The Guide to ESPER HQ. This will include a map and descriptions of the ESPER Headquarters, along with some info about the secretive organization itself.
    4. The Grimoire of St. Benedict, the Patron Saint of Exorcists. It will contain ten spells a magician can use against the Supernatural.
    5. The House on the Hill, a Ground Zero Experience to help guide your new recruits into the ESPER Organization.

All of this should be coming before the end of March, so stay tuned!

Files

ESPER Main.pdf 4.8 MB
Feb 27, 2023

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