Daniel (@dungeondive) delivers an exhaustive look at Godshard, a D100 tabletop RPG from Alex T of Black Oath Entertainment, set in a drowned world of endless ocean where you play a drifter — a cult escapee adrift on a raft, scavenging the derelicts and newly-surfacing islands. Fresh water is the most precious currency, and magic comes from shards of dead gods you can graft into your own body.
He pitches it as a “next step” solo RPG: more robust than a beginner game, but slimmer and more playable than Alex’s dense Disciples of Bone and Shadow, while carrying more detail than the lighter Sacrifice — making Godshard, for him, the designer’s best game yet. It’s an all-in-one sandbox hex-crawl with GM-less Oracle tools, and he walks through character creation, his drifter Fein Cairo, and open-sea, derelict, ruin and island exploration, praising the clever usage-die system for pacing dungeons. His main criticism: the book is disorganised — vessel and crafting rules scattered across pages, no index — and time-keeping during island exploration is under-explained, requiring house rules. The theme, charts and world, though, he adores.
Godshard leans on you to house-rule its vaguer edges, like how time passes during island exploration. Does a game that hands you that much interpretive freedom appeal to you, or do you want the designer to nail it all down?