Fight to Survive: Role-playing Martial Arts Meets Heart
2023 Indie Groundbreaker Award nominee for Best Setting
Fight to Survive: Role-playing Martial Arts Meets Heart is a heartbreaking, struggling, mundane, down-and-dirty role-playing game about martial artists in the 20th century. It seeks to capture the spirit of martial arts action cinema, with all its sincerity and emotion. It's a game about tough folks in the low-stakes adventures of down-to-earth urban try-and-die martial arts where most situations are violent and usually end in sadness.
Frail heroes in a desperate world.
Throwing punches.
Throwing kicks.
Throwing away their lives.
Fight to Survive: Role-playing Martial Arts Meets Heart requires a GM to run up to five players in three to four hour sessions of play. Best for long campaigns of martial legacy. The game includes:
- 1 complete, original, set of easy-to-learn rules
- 5 ready-made fighters
- 50+ martial arts
- 30+ opponents
- 10 districts in New Hope City
- 100 years of martial history and lore
- 3 years of pre-made adventures
- Shawscope full-colour interior
Take a foray onto the mean streets of New Hope City where your guts and your fists are all you have to fight, fight...to survive.
The Game
Fight to Survive is a game with:
- Martial Arts: Where you don't need to know martial arts to play, but if you do you will find a deeper richness.
- Meaningful Combat. Moves are compared against other moves with one winning against the other in tactically-deep, meaningful, diceless resolution.
- Heart. The emotional side of your character is as important as their violent lifestyle.
- Multi-Generational Play. Where you unfold an entire martial lineage throughout the 20th century.
Fnd the meaning behind the fist. Embrace the action.
Inspiration
The movies Bloodsport (1988), Hard Times (1975), Streets of Fire (1984), Lionheart (1990), anything the Shaw Brothers ever did, most things Golden Harvest but especially Yes, Madam (1985), Project A (1983), all Bruce Lee, and an entire mid '90s rental store worth of American martial arts movies from Ninja III: The Domination (1984) on up to The Karate Kid (1984). We want it all.
