Enigma

Grab Your Passport

Enigma is a tabletop roleplaying game inspired by Franco-Belgian comics like Tintin and Blake & Mortimer. You play as daring adventurers, chasing down dastardly villains and their master plans. Your character never dies, and through pulpy luck and comic relief, stumbles into plots much larger than they can imagine.

The System

The rules are explosively light. It's built on a d6 dice pool system; you roll a fistful of d6's and let the story take over. Use modifiers like Blammo! Dice and Lucky Saves to keep the action moving your way, just make sure your Peril doesn't get too high.

Character creation is fast. Pick an archetype as a starting point, fill out a few defining traits, and you're ready to go. 

Designing adventures is intuitive and lets the story develop as you play. The structure of locations and clues keeps the narrative moving forward, and it always ends with a climactic final showdown.

What's Inside

The Enigma Core Rules has everything you need to make characters, design adventures, and run a game. It also includes advice for the Director and a 3 Leg Adventure across Europe.

The Enigma Quickstart is a smaller version of the core rules, and optimized for booklet printing at home (at exactly 44 pages). It's the perfect reference doc for players, and it also includes a 1 Leg adventure for beginner Directors.

Lastly, Enigma Pocket Edition is a trifold version of the core game mechanics, and is great for quick reference as well as giving away at conventions.

You can also find character sheets, sample pregenerated characters, and a Director Screen in the downloads below!

Physical Copies

The original version of Enigma can be purchased as a softcover on Amazon.

A deluxe hardcover can also be purchased from Amazon. It contains all of the content from the original, as well as the trifold adventures, the solo rules, and the horror ruleset Tenebra. 

Other Resources

• Verdant Ventures - three wilderness oneshots for Enigma 
• Eerie Encounters - three spooky oneshots for Enigma
• Perilous Passages - three travel focused oneshots for Enigma
• Tenebra - a pulp horror hack of Enigma
  
• Paper Trail - solo rules for Enigma

Licensing

Enigma is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. That means you can remix it, hack it, translate it, write adventures for it, and sell what you make — just give credit.

If your product is compatible with Enigma, you may use the [ENIGMATIC] logo. Products using the logo must include the following text:

This product is [ENIGMATIC], compatible with Enigma by Andrew Pelham. This is not affiliated with or endorsed by Andrew Pelham.