This was originally written on my Tumblr blog in December 2025, brought here for posterity; I've not edited it otherwise.
Trespasser: Dark Fantasy Tactics is a tabletop RPG created by Tundalus (of Haven Games), describing itself as a d20-based roleplaying game about common folk becoming adventurers amid the ruins of their fallen land [...] designed for player-driven, sandbox-style campaigns of base building, survival, dungeon crawling, and perilous tactical combat.
Being a game of tactical combat and with such listed inspirations as Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition or 13th Age, you might think it as another game in the somewhat nameless 4e renaissance, akin to something like Lancer, Draw Steel, or Pathfinder 2e, but I’m largely not a fan of those games - I don’t think of myself as a tactics person when it comes to TTRPGs (though I've played my fair share of PF2 and 5e); I’m much more of a storygamer these days, having run and played quite a lot of Forged in the Dark things primarily, plenty of GMless things like Microscope or Orbital, and with a mild interest in some NSR games like Mausritter.
For the most part, that’s all quite distant from Trespasser, and yet it is a game that has had me absolutely spell-bound all year long, while daydreaming for months on end about running a full campaign of it for my friends (haven’t yet had the opportunity to actually play or run the game for various reasons).
That’s important context, I think - if I was simply a pre-existing tactics sicko who’s found yet another crunchy game to fiddle with and optimize character builds or craft devious encounters to challenge said builds with and preaching to my fellow tactics nerds, it’d be one thing, but something else is surely going on here if this game has charmed someone who fell off the Pathfinder hype train as much as I have, or who’s never quite gotten fully onboard with Lancer.
While I can’t guarantee I will make anyone else as obsessed with this game as I myself have become, I hope I can at least point at some of the unique design highlights that made me pay attention to a game one could understandably dismiss at first if you’ve kind of sworn off fantasy d20 games like a lot of those escaping grand old D&D’s gravity well might have.
So here it goes, six (with an asterisk) things I enjoy about Trespasser - not yet but hopefully eventually from actual play experience, but still enough to have kept me glued to the game’s burgeoning community for nearly a year so far.
#1 - Not just combat tactics
This is probably the single biggest point, and one I might have slightly buried the lede on with the intro above. Even from the game’s own store page description, tactical combat is not the first listed hook, and while it’s still of notably larger rules weight than it would be in something like an OSR game, it is only one part of the game’s larger gameplay loop, shared with the aforementioned sandbox mechanics and systems of base-building, survival, and dungeon-crawling.
That alone puts the game somewhat apart from the usual suspects of tactically-minded TTRPGs, where combat is, candidly or not, the main appeal and the centerpoint of online discussions; How many times have people pitched Pathfinder 2e on the basis of “the three action combat economy” first and foremost? More than I can count, that’s for sure.
This stems from Trespasser’s avant-garde design philosophy that puts it in a genre so small I can only name one other game alongside it doing it (similarly cool and similarly T-named Tactiquest by level2janitor, another obsession of 2025 for me), which attempts to bridge the gap between what many would deem to be mutually-incompatible schools of thought, the 4e-inspired tactics and the OSR-inspired noncombat procedures (for things like overland travel or dungeon exploration, and other elements like high lethality and randomness).
The conventional wisdom is that those respective styles’ “combat as sport” (balanced and ‘desirable’ combat encounters) and “combat as war” (undesirable combat you’re expected to bypass or solve before it even begins) doctrines don’t mix well, and Trespasser began as an experiment intended to challenge that notion, and I think it is in that hybrid, iconoclast approach where a lot of its coolest innovations lie, and why they resonate with me more than simply another game merely attempting to refine and double down on the tactics-for-tactics’-sake approach spearheaded by 4th edition D&D in the late ‘00s.
#2 - A dark and grounded but not totally hopeless vibe
I’ve drifted towards a lot of non-fantasy (and at least, non-traditional fantasy) in the past several years, but have always retained kind of a soft spot for elves and wizards and warriors fighting monsters in ancient ruins and the like, on some level; The snarl is that I’m also a fan of darker vibes and grittier tone than a lot of the current big games on the market - some parts of Pathfinder’s Golarion do this, sure, as might some campaign frames in Daggerheart or settings in D&D like Dark Sun and Ravenloft, but it’s not quite committed enough for me, and I appear to be one of the very few Polish TTRPG players who did not grow up playing so much Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay that “warhammers” is the kind of synonym for the entire hobby that D&D is to the Anglophone world, apparently.
While Trespasser has no canon setting to speak of, its GM (or Judge) chapter outlines a few points that act as good anchors to what it assumes about the game world - some manner of Doom has struck it recently, and the still-unraveling apocalypse is spearheaded by several powerful Overlords, each ruling over their own local domain and with their own servants operating out in the falling world.
These, together with some other parts of the game form a fun skeleton that I can put my own spin on, while still having some shared worldbuilding language with other Trespasser groups; it’s fun to hear about what other Dooms and Overlords plague other groups’ games, be they fantastical or oddly mundane.
#3 - A built-in, actionable campaign structure
The above point about the Doom and the Overlords (your campaign BBEGs, essentially), coupled with other aspects of the game - the optional but recommended First Day (a deadly starter dungeon for sifting out your level 1 trespassers out of a pile of random level 0 commoners), the Haven base you establish afterwards, and the ensuing loop of expeditions to and from dungeons, upgrading your Haven, and eventually striking back against the Overlords while also repelling their invasions on your Haven - all creates a really vivid picture of how a full campaign plays out, even before you dress it up in any meaningful way.
This is further scaffolded by Ventures, which act as prewritten XP goals for a campaign; some can be repeatable, like vanquishing Overlords or bringing back loot to the haven, while others are one-time quests, like learning some specific dark secret of the setting or rescuing someone important from danger (There is a default list of these, but the game suggests writing one tailored to a specific campaign, possibly alongside your players.)
I’ve joked that Trespasser is a Forged in the Dark game reconstructed from tactical 4e rules and OSR procedures, because in many ways it echoes something like Brinkwood: The Blood of Tyrants (a game where you strike out against tyrannical vampires from your hidden forest refuge, aided by ancient fey and their strange masks) or Songs for the Dusk (a post-post-apocalyptic science-fantasy where your idealistic adventurers go out into the world and return to improve and spend time with their little community), but it does have a strong enough focus to clearly gesture at how it imagines itself being played out, in a way that gets a lot more fuzzy with games that can also be about urban intrigue, naval piracy, or planar weirdness, thus not supporting any one campaign shape all that well fundamentally.
Girl by Moonlight - another FitD game, one of magical girl tragedy as queer metaphor - is maybe not my favorite mechanically in some places, but its distinct and customizable series sets and overall ease of prep means that I’m now finishing my third campaign of it (on top of having played another prior to that), which is not something I can boast with literally any other TTRPG. It’s incredible how much more I can forgive an imperfect but actually really playable game; I hope Trespasser lives up to a similar functionality.
Meanwhile, there are games I really want to like and run more, but they simply lack these same kinds of step-by-step on-ramps for going from “I’ve read this rulebook, now what?” to “I have a group scheduled for session 0 and a clear plan for how this is gonna go over the next few months of prep and play”. I am not a GM that can simply Wing It, and I struggle a ton with prewritten adventures, so Trespasser’s framework speaks to me greatly - I’ve been slowly hacking away at a campaign I hope to run someday with it, and that process has been made significantly easier and more fun with the game’s assumed structure.
#4 - Resource attrition and friction my new beloved
One realization I haven’t been able to articulate until this year is that I am actually quite fond of long-form resource management, of the OSR variety - health, rations, torches, ammo, magical power all slowly dwindling over the course of an expedition until the PCs can return home to restock, making them more careful and possibly forcing retreats from fights or altogether extracting from the dungeon early, while balancing inventory space between things brought in and leaving room for cool items and valuable treasure to exfil with.
I have talked about this elsewhere in more detail, so I’ll leave this brief, but feel free to read this forum post and this Bluesky thread.
I did hear from some players that past a certain point, these systems do unfortunately become a bit less pressing in the previous version of the game (that being 2.0.3 that released early 2025 - 2.1 came out in tandem with this post in late ‘25, but isn’t as battle-tested yet), which is a shame, but Tundalus’s stated design intent remains that they stay a concern even at higher levels, so here’s hoping future versions address that down the line. It’s still in playtest after all!
#5 - Random character creation, directed progression
As mentioned, I’m not usually a tactics person, and that extends to not being massively into theorycrafting character builds - partly because I’ve found myself being on the GM side more and more over the years, or at best in oneshots (though I am in a campaign at the time of writing!), and not in massively crunchy systems, either. It might also be that I have a hard time really internalizing and analyzing the player options in something like Pathfinder 2e, outside of big broad choices like a class, archetype, or ancestry. (Reading color-coded optimization guides saps my soul.)
Imagine my surprise then at finding myself really engaged with the game’s potential for exactly this topic.
It has to do with a few things - firstly, you start out with randomly rolled-for level 0 commoners before you advance them into proper level 1 trespassers - and their random starting stats and background act as fun little prompts for how to advance to maximize your strengths and shore up your weaknesses, which in the context of a scrappy game like Trespasser I find a lot more fun than pre-crafting a perfect little blorbo.
Speaking of said advancement, it is also really great - at 1st level you combine a calling (similar to a class, giving you various features - a Diabolist and their summonable demon, a Magician with their customizable combat spells, a brutish Marauder, and so on) with a craft (a themed bundle like Flames, Battle, or Illusion, from which the bulk of your combat powers, or deeds, come from).
It is also the crafts that dictate your key attribute (Might, Agility, Intellect, or Spirit) used for attacks, meaning that even if you wanted to play a Warrior but ended up with poor Might yet great Intellect, you can still make an effective character, albeit with a different choice of craft than usually pictured (like Curses, or Prowess).
These big decision points are complemented by smaller elements you choose on a rotating basis every few level-ups, those being Enhancements to your calling’s core features, Talents that offer new benefits and abilities (also from said calling), and of course the different Deeds you gain from your Craft…And eventually, Crafts plural.
And those too deserve praise - I often find reading through and actually mentally evaluating spells or feats to be really dull for various reasons; I don’t fw Magic: The Gathering anymore but when I was, I was extremely a “I play Red and don’t really read or understand card text longer than a few lines” player. Trespasser gets around this by having extremely to-the-point ability descriptions, laconic even - no flavor text, just straightforward mechanics, carried only by themselves and the name of the thing. And it works really well! Every deed is distinct and immediately obvious in how it works and what it does because there is next to no ‘fluff’ for a mechanically-milquetoast effect to hide behind, it all has to stand on its own. (Some deeds from the Storms craft below.)
None of this means I have suddenly turned into someone ready to spend most of my waking hours in a CharOp conversation trying to bust the game wide open with a build that takes 5 levels to come online or whatever, but it has showed me there is a way to make me like this aspect of games that I usually kind of skip over until I have to engage with it. And that’s really the throughline of what makes me so compelled to try this game. Someone run a short campaign for me please!
#6 - Cool mechanics lightning round
The reason I put an asterisk on the number of things I love about this game is thanks to this final section - a rapid-fire list of rules and mechanics and other stuff that don’t quite fit anywhere above and don’t warrant a whole chapter unto themselves. Here we go.
- Sparks and shadows: Trespasser uses the classic “roll a d20 with modifiers against a target number to succeed” mechanic as its core, which I’m generally not fond of anymore, but it does have one key element that makes it interesting again - for each 5 by which a roll exceeds the target number, a ‘spark’ is generated, and in turn missing the TN by 5 or more creates a ‘shadow’, adding some much needed interesting texture to both combat and non-combat dice rolls. (Players can spend sparks to boost their deeds like adding extra damage dice or boosting forced movement, while shadows impart additional effects to monsters’ attacks and create further consequences during dungeon exploration.) Calculating them on the fly might be slightly tricky, but thankfully the number ranges are relatively constrained in Trespasser (between 10 and 20, generally), and the character sheets even have a handy reference table for up to two sparks’ worth of target numbers, so it might not be too bad.
- Flexible actions: In combat, characters get three action points to spend, in a manner that might seem similar to one Pathfinder 2e; unlike PF2 however (where the luster of the three action economy has worn off on me somewhat, what with most things being 2 actions each anyway), every action takes 1 action point by base (and any given action can only be performed once per turn), but most can be flexibly done with 2 or 3 actions for additional scaling effects, be that extra movement points on the move action or a bonus to a roll when attempting a deed (which plays well with the sparks system mentioned above!). This creates a really expressive and just kind of fun system, and is generally what I wish such “you have X points to spend” systems were like more. It’s a great way to marry a clear tactical ruleset with a little bit more freeform flexibility.
- States: Special conditions and status effects both positive and negative aren’t a new thing by any measure, but I’m a fan of Trespasser’s take on the idea, that being states - they usually have an associated intensity value (like “slowed 2”) which elegantly plays into how difficult they are to get rid of (the same action, prevail, is used to cleanse negative states from allies and positive states from enemies, after attacking them) as you add the intensity to the target number to prevail, and many deeds confer unique states, with effects that cleanly scale with the states’ intensity (which again has very clear interplay with the system of sparks above). It’s a really versatile system - indeed, it’s even used for handling special forms of movement for certain enemies, like flight, swimming, and burrowing underground (the latter two being handled with the same exact state, sunken). And hey, everyone’s favorite 4e rules widget, bloodied (being at 50% or less HP), is also a state.
- Magic items: Loot is a weird thing in fantasy TTRPGs - for some games, it is game-altering and special and seeking it out is a goal unto itself (the old school style), while others treat them as an expectation and kind of take out a lot of the wonder in favor of creating a bit of a treadmill (a sin of many tactically-minded games). I unfortunately have more experience with the latter, which combined with playing games totally outside this dichotomy has led me to really not being all that excited about most forms of treasure either consumable or permanent (something I have been trying to warm myself up to with NSR games such as Mausritter, though). Nobody was as surprised as me, then, when I started reading through Trespasser’s Loot chapter and going “wait, these magic items sound awesome actually”. Why exactly, it’s hard to say, but each category has a pretty distinct purpose: baubles with dubious uses you can get creative with, magic scrolls containing consumable versions of spell deeds, esoterica that require to be researched at the haven but unlock incantations (noncombat exploration spells) when you complete their project clocks, rings that offer unique actions, magic weapons with special enchantments (spark/activated effects) artifacts that confer unique deeds and wholly special traits… I think it helps that they’re largely treated as toolkits (rolling tables and procedures, though things like baubles and talismans are mostly bespoke objects), are very short and sweet in how they’re written similarly to deeds (none of them are longer than a short paragraph in length), and not having attached prices or levels makes them a good deal more evergreen than the stuff you might accumulate in something like Pathfinder.
- Production chains: The game’s haven frame (the part where you’re back in your home base that you upgrade and rest and recuperate in) already looks great (I’m increasingly a fan of any game that comes with an assumed shared asset like that), but there’s one particular aspect of it that I find especially captivating and, I think, quite unique to Trespasser even among games that include various base-building elements. Your haven can accumulate various NPCs over time, and you’re able to employ some of them as hirelings, of which there are many types, most of which can produce some sort of resources on a weekly basis - mix a few of them together and you can set up honest to god production chains (which the game itself calls out with a few examples like herbalists and alchemists producing concoctions as one feeds ingredients to the other, or miners and smiths making new weapons or armor out of the materials extracted by the former). It’s definitely something I’d want a half-decent automation tool for (or offload the maintenance of it to an eager player), but it adds a really unique layer of strategy to the game that I can’t say I’ve seen done in anything else, and it deeply fascinates me - it’s not tabletop Factorio, but it’s close!
- Plights: Lasting physical wounds and conditions like poison are one thing (which Trespasser very much has, with injuries and lasting states respectively) - I’m a fan of lasting consequences of combat and adventuring like that, but Trespasser has a third form through which to dish this out, that being plights. They’re a simple thing, really - they represent emotional and mental ailments, affecting PC behavior and come with various penalties in the dungeon frame (a sickly character can’t add their attribute bonus to Might or agility checks, while an enfeebled character’s inventory size is reduced by half), with a few possible ways of clearing them (witnessing an ally succeed on a skill check with a striking spark if it makes sense fictionally, having their spirits lifed while camping, or by resting for a week back at the haven). I love when the characters’ psyches and emotions can be battered just as their bodies can (as it ideally transforms into delicious character roleplay and drama, even if it isn’t a design priority for Trespasser), so this one just gets a nice little shoutout from me.
And that just about does it!
Once again I recognize that without actual play experience to back the above opinions up, I may end up walking back some of what I said in this - I certainly got burned on thinking I’d enjoy the game Grimwild only to bounce off from it after a messy oneshot after hyping myself up for it for a full month. Whoops.
Nonetheless, these and other things are at least on paper why I want to even try this game in the first place, and why I think it might similarly interest others. I’m not gearing up to play any Free League stuff in the same way, after all. (The Year Zero Engine just puts me to sleep, man.)
You can get Trespasser: Dark Fantasy Tactics in PDF on Tundalus’s itch.io for $15 (or a community copy, if there is one) - and hey, there are distant but hopeful plans for a hardcover print crowdfunding campaign (as well as more updates in the meantime), which might help get that realized, and I earnestly believe this is a game that deserves more support and eyes on it because it’s doing something really quite special.
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