Pressure12 SRD

A new engine for thrilling one-page and solo TTRPGs.

More than once, we’ve read how counterproductive and downright foolish it is to create your own game engine; readers prefer mechanically familiar game material so they can focus on the stories, characters, and thrilling new possibilities.

For this reason, well… today we present our third engine. Yes, we always do things our way. If we cared about what the market says, we wouldn’t be giving away content every month, twice a month.

After the fiction-driven Copperhead engine used in Epigoni and the upcoming Goblindom, and after the Blood Engine and its uncompromising OSR experience, we now present Pressure12 in its SRD version, ready to turn any idea into a finished, clockwork-running product.

The handmade logo of Pressure12

Pressure12 is designed to power one-page RPGs and solo games for fast-paced sessions where fiction is always front and center, and the stakes rise with every dice roll. It’s the same refined and defined engine we successfully used for Willie Stonka’s Sweetest Nightmares, Cookie Crime Time, and Pizza Delivery Guy against the Darkness.

Pressure12 uses only a handful of twelve-sided dice to ensure consistency and roll mechanics supporting the intense gameplay experiences it’s built for.

The name “Pressure” comes from its core mechanic: the more you roll (and fail), the more physical or mental stress you accumulate—until your character is defeated.

To survive (good luck!), players will rely on a mix of skills and items selected during character creation to mitigate the difficulty of rolls.

Pressure12 features modular difficulty rules, allowing you to tailor the challenge level to suit the story you want your players to experience best—a heroic, action-packed adventure or a drama where the fun is seeing just how badly things can go.

The engine is presented in its pure form and is available under the Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 4.0.

Newsletter subscribers will receive the PDF document, the engine logos to use in their own layouts, and the .doc version for easy copy-pasting of the rules.

The games we made for Pressure12 are not currently available for non-Substack subscribers but will be released as part of a bundle on online stores in the future. However, if you’re curious and want to see how the engine works, write to us privately, and we’ll see what we can do.