THE REALMS
Branch Riders features eight distinct genre-based realms for your adventures. Each character represents a different storytelling genre, leading to the creation of these eight realms.
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Each realm is based on a broad genre with a unique beneficial theme, allowing for varied gameplay. Players who enjoy fantasy, sci-fi, steampunk, and superheroes can all participate together.
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These realms serve as starting points without overwhelming lore. We provide overviews, including key locations, notable NPCs, a brief history, and mission ideas, encouraging creativity at your table.
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Each realm guide includes specific sample Blights for immediate opposition, along with advice on creating your own realms using questions for GMs and players. While there are more than eight genres and themes, we make it simple to incorporate your own material into our world.
THE BORDERLANDS
A creative outpost in an unpredictable wilderness where people survive through art and expression while carrying a six-shooter and a guitar or a paintbrush and chisel. Still life at High Noon - DRAW! This wild west setting is a vast blank canvas filled by creatives of all stripes! One of the more treacherous surprises in this realm is that sometimes the world responds by bringing to life what is thrown away, bringing nightmarish creatures like the Scrapture to life.
THE BOROUGHS
The rain-slick streets of a gray-hued pulp noir cityscape inhabited by anthropomorphic animals. Every corner reveals a clue, and every shadowy alley hides a motive or a secret within a city no one can escape. The Boroughs mainly take place in Horizon City, a maze of mysteries set against a 1940’s pastiche of crime and decadence, and the search for a grand enigma that always manages to evade detection and solving.
THE CHAIN
A realm of scattered islands with communities whose technology is driven by electricity, clockwork, steam, and by an energy form of the Blight they call Tenebris. Great risk yields powerful rewards, but beware the arm of the Imperium! This powerful militarized force has weaponized Blight in their bid to take over the entirety of the realm and keep the citizens in a near-constant state of fear. A powerful resistance makes their dissatisfaction known as they search for the mysterious anomaly known as the Fog for whatever advantage they can find.
THE CRAGS
Here, magic is bound to items of power. Elves, dwarves, fairies, and similar creatures inhabit the Crags. The land is harsh, with scarce food and unforgiving weather, and it’s hard to keep hope alive. The Blight has infected the very ecosystem, causing crops to fail and rain to burn. Can the citizens find hope and the energy to continue the fight against such oppressive odds and the threat of Argatho’s Children of Discord?
THE HEIGHTS
A cityscape utopia of superheroes and supervillains, but secretly a corporate playground where everything depends not only on your word but your image. Watch your CapeBook rating! Every citizen wields powers of all shapes and size and they fight for followers and likes in a world where competition is lucrative and controls every move you make and the eyes that watch it. You may be a sidekick today, but a hero tomorrow, and forgotten the day after. Stay relevant!
THE PARTY
An authoritarian dystopia where punk rock wizards fight against an emotionless police state that seeks to protect everyone from the dangerous magic of unchecked emotion. CNTRL bans expression, and this does not sit well with the Heartbroken and Heartsick Extremists, both of whom believe they hold the key to managing the swell of feelings. Citizens are caught in the middle of this battle and do not dare react, lest they face the Open Valley.
THE RAILS
Adrenaline-fueled anthropomorphic beings shred through the ruins of the past to prove they’re the best — because when the Feral arrive, only the fastest and cleverest are likely to survive! Once obsessed with athletic prowess, this tattered land of ruins now houses desperate denizens scraping for tools for survival as bestial visions of what the Juice can bring stalk the haunted wreckage of the once sprawling JAM Complex!
THE TERMINAL
A futuristic world where data is priceless and hazardous. Coveted by a malfunctioning artificial intelligence named Zepto, this information tells you not only what to think but what to feel and do. Zepto took its programming of rooting out truth from false facts too seriously and has determined that the citizens of the cities are no longer a focus. Resistance fighters rescue previous code to take to the Cloud, but are they protecting it or robbing those who still dwell on the surface of a fate worse than death?