Pilgrim's Moon Overview (plus, fun with dice)

Overview

Pilgrim’s Moon is a tabletop roleplaying game designed to provide the experience of exploring a science fiction frontier in the medium of a point or hex crawl. Players assume the role of pilgrims travelling to dangerous moons and returning to Lido with recovered pieces of their lost cultural heritage.

This is a game intended to place exploration and discovery at the center of the narrative, while providing the players with major opportunities to influence the game’s world, and keeping combat quick, tactical, and engaging.

In play, the game flows from planning and resource management on Lido, to traversing the void in a spacecraft, to landing and exploring one of the fallen moons - Vesta, Adaghist, Syrinx, or Tarsus. 

Dice

Pilgrim’s moon requires only six-sided dice to play. All references to dice in this game refer to d6s. 

Side note: I did some math about the odds of rolling at least one of a given number and made the graph below. I think there’s some interesting stuff about this curve: increasing your dice pool from 1 to 4 makes a huge difference, but increasing it from 8 to 14 matters a lot less. This is only important to the game on the back end, but I think it’s interesting.

Phases of Play

In Pilgrim’s moon, Pilgrims set out from Lido, cross the void in their vessel, seek for treasure on dangerous moons, and return to Lido with their findings.

Pilgrimage 

During Pilgrimage, players explore the surface of Mara’s fallen moons, using hex or point maps. Pilgrimage is dangerous and demanding, with pilgrims thinking and fighting their hardest to survive on a hostile world. Pilgrimage is the “crawl” part of play, and will occupy a majority of time spent playing. 

Traversal

Traversal is the time spent getting to a moon to explore. It consists of a takeoff protocol, spaceflight, and landing. Depending on fuel, flight conditions, and the state of the craft, this might be simple or complex.

Moonside

While moonside, pilgrims plan their next survey and invest the resources they’re recovered into furthering the development of Lido’s culture and infrastructure. These improvements are long-term, but offer lasting advantages.

Rest 

When pilgrims need to rest while on Pilgrimage, they must return to their ship’s safe environment. There, they can eat, sleep, and socialize in order to heal their wounds and buoy their spirits.

Danger

When there is a serious threat to pilgrims or their allies or resources, the game enters the Danger phase; during Danger, time is measured precisely, and every second matters. Think of Danger as the camera zooming in on the action in slow motion. Every action performed In Danger has a duration measured in beats, representing the time required to perform the action. Players move markers around a clock to track their actions,