Stonetop: A Primer

If you've heard of Stonetop but aren't sure whether it's a good fit for your group, here's a brief overview that should give you an idea of what the game is about.

What Is Stonetop?

Stonetop is a hearth fantasy RPG set in an iron age that never was. It's for a GM and 2-4 players, and it's heavily focused on campaign play. The book encourages you to play at least 3 or 4 games to really get the experience, but the game is designed for even longer play.

You're the local heroes of a small, isolated village called Stonetop.
Your friends and family live there.
It's home.

You go out on adventures, travel to far-off lands, explore ancient ruins, fight monsters and hunt for items that your village needs.

Eventually, you return home.

Stonetop includes a playbook for the village itself, including population, prosperity, defenses, resources and improvements. The players determine which improvements they'd like to implement, and building them may require resources Stonetop doesn't have, which provides a natural reason to explore the wider world.

The World Around Stonetop

Stonetop is a poor village of 300 or so people in a sparsely populated region called the World's End. The village surrounds a huge standing stone dotted with faint runes. Lightning strikes the stone often enough that no local really gives it much thought.

Stonetop is adjacent to the Great Wood, and other settlements are days away. It has more of an iron age feel than your average medieval fantasy RPG. Iron is common, but good steel is not.

Magic exists, but it's not particularly safe. Ancient roads and ruins dot the World's End, including ruins under Stonetop itself.

Who Do You Play?

There are 9 standard playbooks: The Blessed, The Fox, The Heavy, The Judge, The Lightbearer, The Marshal, The Ranger, The Seeker and The Would-be Hero.

Character generation is collaborative. As you generate your characters and answer questions about their lives, you're also defining relationships and details about the village. When you're done, Stonetop has already begun to take shape as your group's version of the place.

What Does a Campaign Look Like?

A Stonetop campaign often alternates between village life and expeditions into the wider world. You go off, encounter challenges along the way, and hopefully make it back home. Then you learn what went down while you were away.

Home time is also part of the game. Your characters spend time with family and friends, work on projects, aid the village, pursue relationships and prepare for what lies ahead.

The seasons change. Your children grow up. People die. Improvements are made. Stonetop changes.

Mechanically, Stonetop is Powered by the Apocalypse, and it's based on Dungeon World. You describe what your character does, and when that description triggers a game move, the rules handle the rest.

Players ‌get ‌a ‌real voice in how the world turns out. The GM throws questions your way, you answer, and those answers end up sketching in what Stonetop looks like for your table. That’s why every group’s Stonetop winds up its own thing, I doubt any two versions will match, and they probably won’t even feel all that close.

Is ‌Stonetop ‌a ‌good fit for your table?

If you like the idea that home actually counts. Sure, you’ll still run into crumbling ruins, monsters, long treks, strange magic, all the usual fantasy RPG stuff. But the people you’re risking your neck for aren’t random NPCs you’ll never see again, they’re the folks your character grew up with, the ones they’ve known their whole lives.

And when you drag something back from a ruin, it isn’t just “loot,” it can be the exact piece your village needs to finally put up that upgrade you’ve been talking about for the last few sessions. What you choose to do out in the wider world doesn’t stay out there either, it follows you home and changes what you’re coming back to.

Because the game can run for years, you don’t just level up and move on, you watch the village shift under your feet. Stonetop after twenty sessions won’t feel like the place you first stepped into, and it changes right alongside your characters.

If the idea of being local heroes in a small village at the edge of the known world grabs you, that’s probably all you need to know to decide if it’s worth digging deeper.