Light Omens: A Roleplaying Game of Identity and Hope (v0.6) (Early Access)

[Working on the Quickstart Guide to be available as a Demo]

Light Omens is a science-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game about survival, discovery, identity, consequence, and the difficult work of building a future from what history left behind.

The world of Hiraeth has already survived its apocalypse. Generations ago, civilizations transformed reality through Grim Light, creating impossible machines, reshaping living beings, and constructing wonders that pushed beyond the limits of human understanding. Their ambitions eventually collapsed beneath forces they could no longer control, leaving behind ruined cities, unstable technologies, fractured histories, and monsters born from the remnants of their power.

The world did not end. It endured.

A century and a half later, communities have rebuilt among the ruins. People raise families beneath broken megastructures, maintain roads between isolated settlements, preserve traditions nearly erased by catastrophe, and argue over what lessons should be carried into the future. Every surviving culture has inherited something different from the old world, and each must decide whether the past should be preserved, transformed, controlled, or abandoned.

Players take on the role of Seekers, ordinary people who step into uncertainty when something dangerous, unresolved, or important can no longer be ignored. Seekers are explorers, diplomats, engineers, scholars, hunters, protectors, thaumaturges, and visionaries. They are not chosen by prophecy or guaranteed victory. They act because communities need answers, because lost histories deserve to be recovered, and because the future will not shape itself.

The relic your group recovers might power a settlement for generations. A truth uncovered inside a forgotten archive could redefine an entire culture’s understanding of its past. A negotiated alliance might prevent a war before it begins, while a careless discovery could introduce new instability into a region already struggling to survive.

In Light Omens, adventures are not isolated quests that disappear when the session ends. The people you protect, the compromises you make, the technologies you restore, and the consequences you leave behind can continue shaping the campaign long after the immediate danger has passed.

Hope Worth Fighting For

Light Omens was created from a desire to tell stories set in dangerous worlds without treating despair as the only form of maturity.

Hiraeth is wounded, unstable, and filled with threats capable of overwhelming entire communities. Ancient systems still fail. Grim Light continues changing the world in unpredictable ways. The Light Eaters and the horrors born in their wake represent forces that do more than destroy bodies. They consume memory, identity, faith, emotional resilience, and the belief that survival can still lead somewhere meaningful.

Yet the setting refuses to surrender to hopelessness.

People continue to build homes, protect one another, preserve their stories, recover what was lost, and imagine futures their ancestors never had the opportunity to see. Hope is not presented as passive optimism or certainty that everything will be fine. It is a choice people make while living with risk, grief, exhaustion, and unfinished histories.

At the table, that means your victories matter because they protect something worth preserving. Spectacular action, impossible powers, and towering threats exist alongside communities, relationships, traditions, and personal convictions that give those moments emotional weight.

This is not a game about preventing the end of the world. It is a game about deciding what deserves to come next.

The Hope Engine

Light Omens uses the Hope Engine, a dice-pool system built to connect narrative context, meaningful risk, and lasting consequences.

The system only activates when uncertainty or pressure matters. When an action is possible and carries no meaningful risk, the story moves forward naturally. When danger, sacrifice, instability, or serious consequences enter the moment, players build a pool by combining who their Seeker is with how they approach the problem.

Success does not always eliminate consequence. A Seeker may accomplish exactly what they intended while creating new danger, losing control of the situation, or being forced to accept an unexpected cost. A failed action may still reveal information, create an opportunity, or move the story toward a different path.

The Hope Engine is designed around the belief that the most interesting question is rarely whether the characters succeed. The more important questions are what success costs, what failure changes, and what the characters choose to do next.

Narrative facts called Truths allow the fiction to remain mechanically relevant. Injuries, relationships, preparation, environmental hazards, reputation, equipment, emotional pressure, and changes within a community can all shape the choices available to the characters. Momentum reflects growing control, preparation, and cooperation, while Chaos represents escalation, uncertainty, and the ways the world pushes back.

Hope itself is a resource of perseverance. It does not erase danger or guarantee success. It gives Seekers the ability to continue acting when the weight of the world threatens to make action feel impossible.

A World of Science Fantasy and Spectacle

Hiraeth combines ancient technology, mystical forces, living machinery, altered ecosystems, ruined megastructures, cultural conflict, and the remnants of civilizations that once believed progress could solve every problem.

Grim Light exists at the center of that world. It powers machines, fuels thaumaturgy, transforms bodies, and allows people to accomplish wonders that would otherwise be impossible. It is also unstable, poorly understood, and inseparable from the catastrophes that reshaped civilization.

Different cultures have built their identities around different relationships to that power.

Aethernauts study reality as something that can be understood and rewritten. Technocrats build systems, infrastructure, and technologies intended to survive beyond any single generation. Mythoterics confront transformation, instinct, and the fear of becoming something others may view as monstrous. Revenites preserve memory, ancestry, identity, and continuity across the boundaries between life and death.

These factions are not simple moral alignments. Each represents a philosophy shaped by survival, inheritance, and generations of disagreement over what humanity should become.

Their conflicts create stories of political tension, cultural preservation, technological ambition, spiritual transformation, and difficult cooperation. No faction is entirely right, and no vision of the future is harmless when pursued without restraint.

When conflict becomes unavoidable, Light Omens embraces cinematic, high-impact action. Seekers can battle across collapsing structures, leap between speeding machines, channel devastating Grim Light abilities, confront creatures large enough to threaten entire settlements, and combine their strengths against dangers no one could survive alone.

The scale may be extraordinary, but the reason for fighting remains personal.

Updates on the game can be followed at https://lightomens.com/ and the Kickstarter prelaunch is available to be notified at https://lightomens.com/kickstarter