A d20 tabletop RPG where your Aura Barrier shatters mid-fight, bosses break into new stages, and your best gear is carved from what you kill. Pathfinder-deep builds, played at 5e speed.
Alpha v0.2 is out now: a two-session adventure plus three high-level boss fights, ready to print.
The Core Loop
Every hunter fights with an Aura Barrier that takes the first blows, Flesh HP underneath it, and Aura to fuel their techniques. This is what happens when the Barrier runs out.
Claws and dragonfire hit your Barrier before they touch flesh. You can't restore it yourself mid-fight, so every point you lose stays lost.
The hit that breaks it keeps going into your Flesh HP. Your chants and concentration collapse. You're Broken, and you can't take Reactions until your next turn ends.
Next turn you get +2 Action Points, and your archetype's Break Surge kicks in. The Vanguard's blows sunder deeper. The Arcanist's spells roll an extra die. Its Break Flaw comes with it.
Hit 0 Flesh HP and you choose. Go down and trust your party to drag you back, or make a Last Stand: +2 Aura and +2 AP for two more turns, paid for in Trauma.
Trauma doesn't heal in the field. Cracked Ribs, a Nerve Tremor, a Strained Soul-Core: they stay on your sheet until a surgeon or a sanctum ritual takes them off.
The Design Philosophy
Too many fantasy games turn high-level combat into hours of chipping at a health bar. Aura Break keeps the depth in your character and the speed at the table.
Standard encounters are built to be decided in 3 to 5 rounds. Coordinate well and monsters fall fast. Misread the fight and you pay in blood. Boss fights run 5 to 10 rounds, and they change shape as they go.
No action types and no bonus-action juggling. You get 2 AP a turn at Level 1 and 5 by Level 20. Move, strike, guard, focus, or cast in any order. Unspent AP is gone at the end of your turn, so every turn asks what matters most right now.
Shatter a boss's Barrier and it Breaks, unleashes its Break Shockwave, and moves into its next stage. Stuns and lockdowns can't steal a boss's whole turn; they cost it Action Points instead. You win by pushing it through every stage, not by stun-locking it.
Flesh doesn't bounce back after a nap. Every drop to zero adds Trauma, and Trauma turns into permanent injuries with real rules attached. A veteran hunter's sheet tells you exactly what they've survived.
For Build Crafters
Every archetype has a 20-node talent tree across three branches. At Level 10 a Gateway opens 15 Ascendant specializations. At Level 16, each archetype's keystones may break one named core rule, and the text tells you exactly which.
Enchanter keystone
Breaks the die. Roll two d20s at the start of each round, then swap each one in for any d20 rolled within 30 ft.
Vanguard keystone
Breaks the Break. Once per fight, when an ally within 15 ft would become Broken, they keep 1 point of Barrier instead.
Arcanist keystone
Breaks line of sight. Cast any spell as if you were standing in one of your decoys.
Duelist power axis
Stack weapon traits, talents, and conditions to widen your critical range until crits stop being luck. The floor is printed in the rules, so you know exactly how far you can push it.
Then layer on five Discovery Paths any hunter can learn (Blood Arts, Gravity Magic, Shadow Stepping, the Radiant Oath, and the Gale Path), nine lineages, and an Infusion on every action. The combos run deep, but every limit is written on your sheet, so your turn still takes seconds, not minutes.
The Five Archetypes
Each archetype earns Aura its own way and breaks its own way. How you fill your pool decides how you play.
"Stand fast. Protect all."
The wall the party stands behind. Heavy plate, a tower shield, and blows that crack armor open.
Iron Sentinel · Earthbound Titan · Dread Berserker
"Knowledge shapes reality."
Fuels big magic with small magic. Every cantrip that lands builds toward chanted spells that take a turn or two to finish and reshape the battlefield.
Calamity Elementalist · Spatial Weaver · Aether Binder
"Influence. Inspire. Alter fate."
Runs the fight through conditions. Taunts that pull enemies off allies, rerolls that undo a miss, and a Barrier that pulls a Broken friend back from the edge.
Emissary of Will · Archmage Weaver · Chronomancer Seer
"Control from the shadows."
Wins the fight before it starts. Assembles a kit of traps every rest, seeds the ground with caltrops and snares, and strikes from stealth.
Shadow Assassin · Alchemical Saboteur · Chaos Trickster
"Precision is power. Victory is art."
Lives on tempo. Hits the same target twice, ripostes when an attack misses, and widens their crit range until every swing is a threat.
Blade Dancer · Sword Saint · Shadow Duelist
The names along the bottom of each card are its three Ascendants, unlocked at Level 10.
The Hunter's Craft
When you bring down a drake, you don't find a random glowing sword in a chest. You take out your carving knife.
Every weapon and suit of armor is forged from three layers:
Climb the Hunter Guild from Grade-E to Grade-S. Every promotion means a bigger kill, and every rank opens a better forge.
Field Dispatch, Hunter's Log
"A sword bought from a city merchant will keep common cutthroats away. But if you intend to descend into the deep fissures, you need armor that has already survived the heat of magma, and a blade that has already tasted titan blood."
Exploration isn't empty travel. Tracking spoor tells you what you're hunting before it knows you're there, so you can coat your blades, prepare the right salves, and pick the ground you fight on.
And the ground fights back. Lightning spreads through standing water. Fire turns spilled oil into an inferno. Water cools lava into broken rock you can cross.
Alpha Playtest v0.2
Two playtests, everything a GM and five players need to run them, and no rulebook homework.
Guild Contract #447, Levels 2 to 4
"Two miners are missing. One is dead. One is not, yet."
Descend beneath Mount Duurn. Fight a Skarrow nest in the Warren, then fight or bargain with the mysterious creature within the Sunken Vein. Wake the oath-bound smith who has kept his forge burning for five hundred years. Then outrun an erupting mountain with whatever treasure you can carry.
Eight acts over two sessions (about 5 to 6 hours). Your hunters level up twice along the way.
Levels 10, 15, and 20
Three one-shots with Ascendants, Spend-X abilities, and Ascendant Breaks fully online.
A printable PDF for one GM and five players. Material is alpha and will change based on what playtesters find.
From the Designer
"I started building Aura Break because I missed the tension of tabletop combat where every decision genuinely mattered. I wanted a game that was easy to run as a GM, gave players deep tactical freedom without endless homework, and made monsters feel terrifying again."
Aura Break is an independent, creator-owned game in active development. I've run hundreds of simulated fights. Now it needs real tables to find what breaks, and every feedback form you send back changes the rules.
Get the free playtest packet, run it with your table, and help shape the game before it's finished.
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