Welcome to Branch Riders, an exciting new role-playing game from The Bodnana Group and Onyx Path Publishing! In this game, you take on the role of a specially trained agent entrusted with protecting the eight realms and your home, The Nexus, from a malevolent force known as the Blight. Use your unique approaches, gifts, skills, and the power of your team to ensure that the Blight cannot tear down the curtain and dominate all eight realms.
This easy-to-play, narrative-based storytelling game utilizes distinctive mechanics, including Approaches, Gifts, an Exposure Tracker, and Condition Cards, to help you craft thrilling stories of exploration, creativity, and courage. Creating a character takes only 15 minutes!
Suitable for adventurous players as young as 10 and appealing to adults, our multi-genre realms ensure that there is something for everyone at your table as you take on the stewardship of the realms. The core rulebook contains everything you need to play, including rules and guidelines for creating your own Gifts, Blight, and realm locations. Join the Branch Riders and help combat the Blight!
What is a Branch Rider?
You are a Branch Rider, recruited from one of the eight realms surrounding your base, The Nexus. You have demonstrated the ability to see the Blight for what it truly is and have been trained at the Branch Riders Academy. Your mission is secret as the realms are separated by a barrier we call the curtain - put in place to ensure that the Blight is never allowed to join forces and take over everything. No one from the realms knows of the other realms, the Blight or the Branch Riders. Your mission must remain secret. You carry your special skills and Gifts to aid you. Gifts are powers that you bring with you from your home realm. But use them with care, as they also risk exposing the secret of your mission and the true threat at stake.
What is a Branch Rider's Job?
A Branch Rider's mission starts when the nexus is alerted to a growing Blight threat in one of the realms. This alert causes a response where a team is recruited and briefed before traveling the portal system to the site of the emergency. A Branch Rider surveys the scene, gathers information, all while keeping a low profile. Their job is to find out the nature of the Blight and what its plan is then determine how best to respond to the situation.
Sometimes your job is to battle a monster, other times it is helping a citizen disentangle themselves from the Blight and its influence. Once the emergency is stopped or reduced to the point where extraction is safe, the Branch Riders engage in a debriefing to learn more that can help other teams in the future. And all the while, they must remain clandestine and not draw attention to their presence and their mission.