Cradle & Ward SRD

Build a community. Face impossible choices. Watch your world transform.

Cradle & Ward is a fiction-first, GMless tabletop RPG for 1+ players about community building, collective storytelling, and shared stewardship. Guide your community through cycles of nurturing (cradle) and protection (ward) as you face challenges, seize opportunities, and shape the fate of your people through collaboration and care.

Will your village survive the winter? Can a generation ship crew overcome internal divisions? Will your resistance cell preserve its values under pressure? Using only a deck of playing cards and a handful of d6s, you'll discover the answer together.

What Makes This Different

• No GM needed — Everyone shares narrative control and facilitation equally
• Emergent characters — People naturally arise from the story instead of being created upfront
• Four-phase structure — Escalating tension across Establishment, Growth, Crisis, and Resolution phases
• Card-driven prompts — A standard playing deck generates events, challenges, and turning points
• Flexible tracking — Choose from maps, journals, tokens, ledgers, or pure memory to record your community's evolution
• Setting-agnostic — Works for post-apocalyptic villages, space stations, fantasy monasteries, or anything you imagine

What You Need

• 1+ players (works solo, duet, or in groups)
• A standard 52-card playing deck (no Jokers)
• A handful of six-sided dice (4-6 recommended)
• 6-10 hours of play (typically 2-3 sessions)
• A way to track your community (paper, tokens, shared document—your choice)

How It Works

Each turn, draw a card that prompts an event—a storm threatening your food stores, a stranger seeking refuge, internal tensions over scarce resources. Choose one of four actions: Cradle (nurture growth), Ward (protect what you've built), Project (undertake long-term efforts), or Deliberate (decide what your community values).

Roll dice to resolve uncertainty, with your pool growing as you build resources, complete projects, and develop community bonds. Characters emerge organically from the fiction—named individuals who take on mechanical weight as they prove their importance to the community.

As the deck advances through four phases, the stakes escalate: foundation gives way to expansion, which yields to crisis, which transforms into resolution. Every choice matters. Every loss leaves a mark. Every triumph shapes who you become.

Perfect For

• Fans of The Quiet Year, Microscope, or Blades in the Dark
• Groups seeking collaborative worldbuilding
• Solo players looking for emergent narrative
• Anyone interested in community-focused stories over individual heroics

License & Use

This SRD is released under CC BY-SA 4.0. You're free to share, adapt, hack, and build upon this framework for any purpose, including commercial projects, as long as you provide credit and share your work under the same license.

Design & Writing: Roberto Bisceglie