Catalyst RPG

Catalyst: Heart, Shadow, and Crown

A tabletop role-playing game about choice, consequence, and enduring the chaos after the fall of the gods.

About Catalyst

Catalyst is a narrative-driven, tactical role-playing game about consequence, identity, and surviving what the gods left behind. 

It is set in the Eschaton, a mythic, post-divine world where reality has started to unravel after the death of the gods. The shimmer of primal magic warps everything it touches. The restless dead pierce the Veil, finding no rest. And the dreams and nightmares of the living creep into the waking world. It’s a place of quiet ruin and dangerous beauty, where miracles are commonplace, but always come at a steep cost. 

Catalyst uses an approach-based system where players are tasked with creating protagonists rather than selecting attributes, skills, and class abilities. Their core stats (if you can call them that) are tied directly to the characters' personalities - their drives, vices, and beliefs. Their abilities and skills stem from their origins - where they came from, why they left, and the paths they took along the journey. Your approach, the context you bring, and the cost you accept shape every outcome. 

That is because, at its core, Catalyst is a run on trust. Its rules foster deep collaboration between players and GMs, rather than focusing on adherence to prescriptive rules. Players are rewarded for engagement, creativity, and description, while GMs set the game's tone through difficulty thresholds and open narration. 

It's a game where success is rarely clean; failure never halts momentum. Wounds wear you down by shrinking the tools you rely on. Spellcasting is a risky dance of creative interpretation and meaningful cost. The only resource tracking involves your character’s will and resolve. And instead of gaining experience through victory and plunder, characters grow by confronting the foundations of who they are and what they seek to accomplish. 

Catalyst is for the players who lean in. Those who take the risky move not because it's optimal, but because it means something, and welcome scars for the stories they tell.

Pillars of the Game

Consequence First. Every action has weight when nothing happens in a vacuum. Players declare intent and method, and the world responds accordingly. Failure is never dead air; it is a turn in the road.

Fiction-Driven Resolution. The dice are tools, not tyrants. You roll when the fiction demands risk, not because a rule says so. Outcomes exist on a spectrum, shaped by context and approach. Even catastrophe tells a story worth following.

Simple Framework, Tactical Depth. Catalyst is light on tracking and heavy on decisions. The tension lives in how you spend your dice, when you hold back, and what you are willing to sacrifice. The system is built to get out of the way, then cut deep when it counts.

Magic Is Not a System. Magic is the narrative alchemy of intent, belief, trauma, will, and sacrifice. It does not follow rules; it exists only to break them. It is mystery, force, and fracture. Every spell is personal. Every casting one of a kind. The only law it obeys is the cost it demands from you.

Player-Focused Play. All rolls come from the players. Enemies do not roll. They apply pressure, shift difficulties, drain resolve, and make the world burn. This keeps the pace taut and the spotlight where it belongs: on player action and agency.

Language as a System. The foundation of Catalyst is open literary interpretation. Its rules and narrative are inseparable. Traits are not just bonuses; they are story hooks. Scars shape what you become. Catalyst's mechanics speak the same language as its fiction, letting drama rise from narrative structure, not in spite of it.

Scars over Scores. Character growth in Catalyst does not follow a ladder, it traces a spiral. You do not get stronger by stacking numbers. You change by enduring, sacrificing, and adapting. Your character arc is mechanical. Your wounds shape what comes next.

The World Pushes Back. Catalyst is not a power fantasy. It is a friction fantasy. The world is volatile, weird, wounded, and it remembers. Scenes shift. Plots e. Enemies adapt. Consequences ripple. It is not just about what you can do, but what the world refuses to let go of.

Shared Canvas, Sharp Lines. The GM is not an author, and the players are not just actors. You are all etching the story into the same page.  Catalyst’s structure is meant to create depth through layered meaning. Foundations, character traits and foundations all combine to foster creative action, while the GM sets difficulty thresholds, drawing the line of reality and possibility. 

Why I Wrote Catalyst

I LOVE tabletop roleplaying games. I have, since my first game, GURPS Fantasy, using a spiral-bound photocopy of the Brazilian translation and monopoly dice. There was a warm magic to that experience. Sitting around a table with a bunch of kids from my grandmother’s neighborhood, it was a chance for a terminally shy 12-year-old me to burst out of his shell and find the kind of confidence that only comes with leading your friends out of a troll-infested cave. Gaming was the mind's eye hero’s journey that helped me find myself. And for as long as I’ve been a GM, I’ve tried to give people that same feeling of agency over their stories.

Like many others, the main avenue for my adventures was 5th edition D&D. It brought a new crop of players to the hobby. Players who, like me, found solace and acceptance in these fantasy worlds. Worlds made all the more accessible by streamlined rules (at least in comparison to older editions). But after ten years of DMing, I started feeling frustrated with the game. While frustrations with capital-driven decisions and scandals certainly didn’t help, I just noticed how much louder the rules (and shallower) were when compared to the experience of them. I found myself having to bolt on drama through extensive homebrewing - patching stilted combat or fixing a turn system that led to many players wait long ages just to roll a die and have nothing happen. And honestly, the parade of new books with flashy races and overpowered subclasses started feeling more like video game DLC than real additions to the game. It just wore me out.

In my search for alternatives, I found a vast treasure trove of beautiful, thoughtful, and wildly creative games. Books that revitalized my love for the hobby and inspired not just this work, but all the homebrew rules and settings I've created throughout the years. Eventually, this journey of discovery led me to something that felt so different, so unique, that I had to pursue it. A “catalyst” for creative, dramatic gaming.

Simply put, Catalyst is the game that finally felt right to me. Instead of smoothing out every rough edge, it leans into the chaos and drama at the table. It gives players the freedom to imagine and focus on what is happening in the moment instead of flipping through rulebooks. It helps GMs guide the story so that every choice feels alive, part of a real story, not just some series of dice rolls.

I hope Catalyst will inspire sessions that are as vivid and dramatic as any movie—fostering experiences that transcend simple anecdotes, weaving lasting shared memories between friends where everyone feels like a hero because we all deserve to. 

The Current Release

This is a playtest version; a living draft of a larger work. It includes:

• Full core rules (playable from character creation to campaign)

• Starter threats and environments

• Guidance for GMs on framing scenes and creating encounters

• A world just beginning to take shape

What’s here is lean by design. Catalyst rewards tables that want to explore tone, tension, and meaning as much as mechanics.

Download the document, read it like an artifact, and run it a few times. If you don't see anyone on their phones, you know the game is working.