What is Spectrum

Spectrum is a novel tabletop roleplaying system designed to tell stories, your stories. Spectrum has been painstakingly honed to work for all genres and play styles, from mind’s eye theater to fast-paced tabletop battles and is optimized to keep the story in motion. It allows for dynamic character creation and development that is not limited by preconceived cookie cutter “class” structuring. 

The mission behind Spectrum is to give creative power back to the players with the only limitations being imagination and the will to create. Black Coffee Games fundamentally understands that an RPG system optimized for profit cannot also be optimized for game quality and player experience. Thus we have chosen to make all the rules for Spectrum open and free, to include all the rules and mechanics created for future modules and paradigms.

Spectrum’s Math

Spectrum approaches game mechanics with the belief that using nonlinear math is a more accurate representation of reality. The math of reality isn’t pretty. Nor is It nice, neat, or convenient.

As the innumerable variables of every moment coales and compound, the resulting effect can very rarely be expressed with a simple one-to-one formula.

The use of linear, oversimplified math in traditional game systems allows for the creation of easy-to-describe scenarios that are simple, predictable, and safe. But what adventure have you ever experienced that was any of those things? What story do you want to hear where everyone was safe, where the possible outcomes of choices were predictable or formulaic? Linear math lends to rigid and unyielding dynamics that easily lose their organic qualities and become disassociated from storytelling. 

Spectrum is attempting to use non-linear progressions in the hope to better represent the interplay of constantly shifting variables in everything, everywhere, all the time. 

We hope that this break from the standard creates more dynamic and exciting possibilities for your stories to blossom. Is it the right way? You’ll have to tell us.

Why Storytelling Matters

We believe that stories make up the primary core of our shared human existence. The moment that even the most rudimentary language was developed by our ancestors, the narrative was born. From that single pivotal event, every evolutionary step has led to you here, to now. Every aspect of who and what we are is the evolutionary product of countless millennia of humans sharing stories, shaping perspectives, reasonings, and understandings. Thus, we have been built to share, learn, and develop our understanding of the world through the collective sharing of narratives.  

And if such a hypothesis is true, that means storytelling is what makes us human, what gives us identity, what makes us all thinking, breathing, shitting gestalts of countless epics and legends spanning countless generations. It is your story, the stories you have witnessed, and the stories you will still create, that add to the great and ever-expanding exploration of the human experience.