By Raven

About

By Raven is a dark fantasy tabletop RPG played through messages, not around a table. There is no virtual tabletop, no shared initiative, and no schedule. The Raven (the person running the game) sends each player their own private thread. Players write what their characters do. The Raven resolves it. The scene moves forward.

Play happens at your own pace: a turn over coffee, a reply before bed, a tense exchange across three days. The game was built for asynchronous play from the ground up. It is not a tabletop game bolted onto a chat app.

What makes it different

• Your inventory is your health. Every slot on your sheet carries gear, wounds, treasure, or death. When slots run out, you fall. Pack light, stay alive.
• No classes, no preset archetypes. You build a person: a name, a sentence, three facets you invent yourself. The numbers follow the fiction.
• Five full magic traditions. Wizard, Sorcerer, Witch, Warlock, and Druid. Each tradition has its own costing engine, its own feel, its own relationship to power. Magic is a negotiation with forces that do not love you.
• Fifteen premade characters. Grab one, rename it, tweak anything you like, and you are ready for Session Zero in thirty seconds.
• The party split is native. Every fork resolves in parallel at full attention. No one sits silent while half the table plays.
• Standing orders. Two or three if/then instructions the Raven follows when you are not at the keyboard. Your character acts even when you are offline.
• Hub-and-spoke architecture. All play is private, one-to-one between each player and the Raven. You structurally cannot know what is in another player's thread. Fog-of-war is free.
• Channel-agnostic. The rules name no tool and depend on none. Use whatever your table likes to carry the messages.

The world

By Raven does not ship with a setting. It ships with a mood.

The year is somewhere in the long grey stretch between the fall of one empire and the birth of whatever comes next. It is not the Dark Ages. It is the thin ages: a time when the boundary between the living and the dead is a membrane you can push a finger through. The wild has not surrendered. The law is a rumour. The dead are close. Folk magic is real and frightening and mostly small. The old gods are dead or sleeping. Something else has noticed.

The world is built at your table, hex by hex, facet by facet. But the game knows what it smells like.

What you get

Two books. The Player's Guide covers character creation, combat, inventory, advancement, all five magic traditions, and a full premade character catalogue. The Raven's Guide is the Raven's half: how to structure play, run Session Zero, resolve turns and combat, handle healing and lasting wounds, build monsters and NPCs, and run exploration and travel. Reference tables at the back are designed to be printed and kept beside you.

Both books come as full-colour PDFs with printer-friendly versions included.

Community

Join the By Raven Discord for questions, session reports, rules discussion, and finding a table: discord.gg/bxczVnDEr6

Version

Right now it's early, playable, and in active development. The core mechanical spine is solid and has been through multiple revision passes. What remains is polish: visual references, layout refinements, page-number cross-references. The price will rise as the game approaches v1.0. Buying now gets you every update.