In the last few years, as Dungeons & Dragons has reached audiences at a scale that Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax could only dream of, others have come onto the scene trying to be the next “fantasy heartbreaker;” that is, a true alternative to D&D. But none have looked quite like the in-development Confluence: The Living Archive by Publishing Goblin, a project that claims to offer something for every type of tabletop gamer.
Fantasy heartbreaker — a term coined in 2002 by Ron Edwards on indie RPG website The Forge — originally meant a game that more or less filed the serial numbers off D&D while purporting to offer a fresh perspective on the genre. Since then, it has evolved to mean any fantasy game that might gain widespread popularity. Today, contenders for the crown include upstarts like Darrington Press’s Daggerheart, MCDM’s Draw Steel, and Son of Oak’s Legend in the Mist among others.
Confluence takes a classic fantasy heartbreaker and blends in a diverse array of settings, cultures, and over 700,000 years of history; creating an easy-to-learn game that positions itself as the Swiss Army knife of tabletop role-playing games D&D has become over the last 50 years — and more. Confluence has been in development for the last two years, with a team of over 15 developers who have previously worked with companies like Paizo, Darrington Press, Rowan Rook and Decard, and more.
Ajurea, the main setting of Confluence, is “a world of meeting,” as the Backerkit campaign describes. Phenomena called Confluxes converge 40 settings worth of people, objects, and locales into a unified mechanical system, which will initially manifest in four physical books and two zines.
The core texts build on the tradition of D&D books like Volo’s Guide to Monsters, presenting them as in-universe documents. However, with the convergence (or should I say confluence) of these different cultures and perspectives, the standard multi-column form D&D players are used to seeing in rule books is littered with contradicting perspectives. The text acknowledges that history passes through many hands, with diegetic “additions” like newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, and hidden mechanics — stylistically “ripped out” of tabletop mechanics books — written, stapled, tapped, and smeared in the margins.
With this seemingly infinite number of choices, decision paralysis could easily prevent new tabletop fans from picking up the book. However, developers have prioritized the ease of access that makes D&D so appealing to new players. The pre-campaign Calibration guide uses a series of questions to ask players what type of game they want to play, before directing them to the proper sections. On Confluence’s crowdfunding page, the list of genres and narratives this system is equipped to tell include pirate stories, heroic rebellions, criminal underworlds, occult investigations, climate research, and atlantean sci-fi, enabling players to tell their stories without having to look for another new system or third party supplement.
Confluence also maintains familiar play frameworks D&D fans have grown accustomed to like a game master (who in this system is called the Story Leader) and dice-based resolution systems. However, Confluence adds in developments from some other Fantasy Heartbreakers, trading the d20s for an evolving dice pool of d6s that rely on narrative developments and character skill sets, while adding in physical cards called Focuses that allow more intentional storytelling with mechanical benefits.
The tabletop game finishes crowdfunding on November 15, with PDFs slated to be available by July 2025, and physical materials by September 2025.
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