Introducing our New Tabletop RPG - Haven
Be Dauntless in the face of Dread.
What is Haven?
TL;DR: Haven is a heroic, hopepunk, low-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game.
Still interested? Here’s a bit more…
The world has changed. In moments, your small, idyllic community and the vast world beyond lost countless people. And somehow, for some reason, you survived. Now, horrific, morphed abominations, beautiful, deadly plants, murderous doomsday cults, and the chaotic storm that is transforming the world are spreading across the lands of Archaeus.
You and the remaining members of your Haven must now come together to survive and eventually thrive in this altered world. You will venture out further into this vibrant, dangerous land than ever before to find other survivors, gather seemingly magical visicrysts, expand the protective powers of your Haven, and fight back against the forces of chaos and darkness.
Combat is fast-paced and swingy, utilizing a D6 pool system driven by our unique Dauntless and Dread mechanics. The hex-based exploration offers plenty of tables to help GMs world-build unique and exciting landscapes, settlements, and adventures. And the Haven-building mechanic encourages players to get out, explore the world, and reclaim what has been taken from them.
What is hopepunk?
Glad you asked. We hadn’t heard of it before either. It’s basically the opposite of grimdark. In a hopepunk world, the world itself is dystopian — in ours, its suffered a recent near-apocalyptic event — but the players actively fight back against that darkness to try and build (or rebuild) a better world through community-building. This doesn’t mean you don’t fight and kill and do possibly amoral things. It means that you have hope that the world can be better and that you are going to work together to make it so.
What is low fantasy?
It’s a fantasy world, but more similar to our Earth than fantasy worlds where magic and non-human beings are the norm. Archaeus, the setting of Haven, is similar in style to a medieval Earth, but the flora and fauna are much weirder, wilder, and more vibrant. Humans were the only humanoid beings on Archaeus until six months before the game begins; that’s when the world changed. Magic only exists through a type of recently discovered crystal called visicryst. How the magic works is still relatively unknown to most people in the world, and the vast majority of people have never seen nor heard of visicrysts. Think of them like electricity when it was first harnessed by us, we had an idea of how it worked and what it could possibly do, but our knowledge was limited, access was more limited, and it was rather dangerous. This world is much closer to Earth than Middle-earth.
What made us create a new TTRPG system?
When Aric and I started Meadowlark Games, our goal was to create modules, adventures, settings, and other tabletop gaming goodies tied to the parts of this hobby that we love. Initially, we figured we decided to do that for Dungeons & Dragons 5e, because it was (and still currently is) the most ubiquitous system, and honestly, the system that gets most people into this world (for good or for worse). It was also the system that brought us together, and we knew the best. But, as we ran games for our live TTRPG + culinary experiences, Fantasy Feast, we found that we needed to tweak D&D to be able to run it in a way that we found satisfying for bigger groups simultaneously enjoying extravagant meals. So, we began researching and playing other systems and engines. We found countless amazing and creative games that inspired us, and we were able to create what we called D&D-lite. It was a stripped-down, faster-paced version that worked well for getting people to the table and playing while syncing adventures up across multiple tables. We were running alongside chefs preparing multi-course meals, so it was a necessity. Creating that gave us the bug for building a system all of our own, one that brought together all of the pieces of tabletop roleplaying that we most care about. That game is Haven.
The core mechanics that we cared about when building Haven were fast-paced encounters and combat, a low barrier to understanding and getting the game going, a focus on narrative and campaigns that make you care about your characters and the world they inhabit, exploration that feels exciting, impactful, and makes you look forward to down time, characters that are real, and grounded, and still have some fantastical abilities to make you feel powerful, and making gameplay player-facing to drive engagement at the table. So, with most of that in mind, we sat down to start building.
What was the process of making a new system?
We began with a system we called Feast and Famine. It stemmed from the idea that fear should matter more in RPGs. Sure, you’re heroes of a magical realm, but taking an arrow to the chest from a goblin or a gnarly bite to the neck from a dire wolf that takes out a quarter of your life should leave a bit of a mental scar. Watching your companion have a broadsword pierce their guts and drop down, bleeding out, moments from death — that should cause everyone on the battlefield some mental turmoil. Feast and Famine was a fun start, and we’ve kept a lot of pieces of that in Haven, but it had too much going on. The world was in constant flux, going from fertile and peaceful to terrifyingly deadly at the flip of an hourglass. Monsters had two stat blocks. There was a pantheon of warring gods. It was honestly pretty sick. But it had so much going on you would never play it; neither would I if I weren’t the creator. We all have the books from systems that sound awesome — cool art, amazing lore, unique mechanics, but what we don’t have is time. So, we had to take that framework and make it faster-paced and with a lower barrier to play.
Our Haven playtest character sheets.
We’ve got a halberd-wielding Sentinel and a time-space bending Temporalist at the table
From there, we took the ideas we liked most and started rebuilding. Our main focus was combat. Like with most systems, everything kind of builds off of the combat mechanics. We initially ran with a D20 system. But, I’ll be the first to admit, I hate math (maths, for you across the pond). Is it awesome to be a high-level martial character doling out 200+ damage in a single round? Hell yeah, it is. It isn’t awesome adding up to 219 damage. So, we decided to slide over to a D6 pool system. 6 is simply simpler than 20. But, even that was a bit much; adding is adding, and I ain’t a fan. So, we went simple. 1,2,3 fails. 4,5,6 succeeds. Get more successes than the DC, you freaking nailed it. Easy peasy. (Nothing new at its core, you’ve seen similar things in The Havoc Engine, Forged in the Dark Engine, Wrath & Glory Engine, etc.) And from that decision, we found a phrase we’ve said at least once every subsequent conversation that we’ve had since: “Simple and elegant.” That has become our mantra while building this thing. If something deviates from either of those two words, we don’t put it in the game.
With the dice rolling figured out, we knew we had to add our own spin on the D6 success-fail mechanics to differentiate our system from the others that came before. What began life as feast and famine transitioned to Dauntless and Dread. This is our favorite aspect of the dice-rolling part of the game. It harkens back to the idea that fear should matter, but in this version, so does courage. In Haven, everyone is a human (for now — we have some fun stuff planned down the road). And as humans, we are mortal. We can and will die (sorry for anyone like myself with a touch of thanatophobia). At the beginning of any game of Haven, you will choose a loved one who died when the world changed. You also choose one who lived, because we kinda loathe the lone wolf trope, and you have to have someone you are living for and fighting to make the world better for. The point is, there is real danger in this world, and you and your party will be seeing the worst of it as you explore further out from your Haven.
The Dread mechanic makes sure that when you feel fear from taking wounds (amongst other things), there is an in-game mechanic to represent that emotion. You take a point of Dread and lose the ability to roll one of your die. (Yeah, die is the correct plural of dice, even if my spellcheck hates it.) But, on the opposite side of that coin, when you do something heroic, you can gain a point of Dauntless. You can spend that Dauntless to do tons of cool stuff depending on which character you play. The simplest thing that Dauntless allows you to do is roll extra die to make success more likely. But, we’ve built characters to be able to use Dauntless to truly be the heroes of this world. Throughout a session of Haven, you will be gaining and spending Dauntless consistently to boost yourself and your party. Simultaneously, you will be taking hits from enemies, which will consistently be dealing you Dread and dragging you closer and closer to failure.
While gameplay mechanics were at the top of our minds, we also wanted to fill this game with world-building and philosophical aspects that are core pieces of ourselves. Firstly, we wanted players to focus on doing good and heroic things in the face of fear, evil, chaos, uncertainty, and all the other bad stuff. There are games out there where you get to not care; you get to fully dissociate from reality and focus on being selfish and maybe a bit of a shithead. Those games can be fun. They can be an escape. Haven isn’t one of those games. While building this game, we focused on the idea that being a hero is helping others even to the possible detriment of yourself. Being heroic is stepping up when others can’t or won’t. So we gave each of the first five character classes (and will do so with subsequent classes) a Heroic Action which can be taken once per combat round. All of these actions are used to aid a fellow player, never oneself. By helping each other as often as possible, players can more handily take out the foes they come up against, and keep Dread at bay.
Secondly, we wanted people to focus on being a part of a community, to realize that no one does anything great alone. The world of Haven is a dangerous and deadly one. The Malimber, a chaotic storm that changes the world below it, has made it so the players are living in a world unlike the one they knew mere months before the game began. They lost loved ones; the whole world did. There are horrifying, morphed abominations scouring the world, killing, building, and making more. Players are unsure of what the world beyond their little village looks like now. This is a much younger world than ours, and most of the humans haven’t seen more than a dozen miles from their doorstep; the world was already a bit unknown and scary before; now it’s terrifying. To be alone in this world is to be a walking corpse, dead already without knowing it. Players must grow and protect their Haven; they must gain allies by trusting strangers and being trustworthy; they must save others and bring them under the visicryst-charged protective dome of their hallow tree. Only by doing these things can they expand their Haven and gain new powers and abilities as they bring in new people who offer specialized skills like blacksmithing, apothecary knowledge, combat training, culinary expertise, and more. The larger and stronger your community, the more powerful you become, and the more you can fight back.
On top of that, we also started teaching ourselves art. We freaking hate A.I. It’s one of the most detrimental innovations in human history. It doesn’t have to be; it could be used for good to help the working class, to help give us more time, to…I’m not going to go on a tirade here, but don’t use A.I. We believe the only art is human art, and neither of us had much experience making art in the sense of drawings and paintings. I’m a former culture journalist and magazine editor; I’ve written novels and short stories. I am an artist, but not that kind of artist. Aric is a bladesmith; he makes chef knives for a living and has for a long time; he is one of the most talented artisans I’ve ever met. Painter, though? Not really. But we’ve put in the time and effort, and we got better. Maybe even decent? Which is endlessly more talented than any A.I.
Cool, how can I play?
We still have a ways to go in this endeavor; we are currently working on exploration mechanics and writing lots of tables to help GMs fill in their worlds quickly yet meaningfully. We’re glad you’re here to follow along; we will be posting all the updates and progress on our socials over the coming months. Our goal is to have a Quickstart Guide with pre-built character sheets and the basic rules up on here in PDF form in the coming months for you to playtest at home with your friends and give us feedback on what you like, love, and wish was different. Until then, if you’re in the Indianapolis area, you can join us for our playtests that we will be doing at various board game stores and local and regional cons. Keep an eye on our events page for those and sign up for our newsletter to get updates, event invites, and much more sent directly into your inbox. Other than that, if you made it this far, thank you for reading and hopefully being excited by what you have read; we can’t wait to share more of Haven with you.
-Cavan
P.S. Be one of the first people to play Haven at Who’s Yer Con 2026. I’m going to be running five people through our starter adventure Blood Dawn on Saturday, September 5, 2026 starting at 1 p.m. Learn more and get your tickets here.
