Graven

For the About This Game section, I’d let it breathe and sell the premise, mechanics, and player freedom separately. Something like:

GRAVEN

Christmas approaches, and Dr. Graven is on the verge of accomplishing what physicians, philosophers, and alchemists have dreamed of for centuries.

He intends to conquer death.

You are his apprentice. Whether through brilliance, obedience, curiosity, or simple ignorance, you help your mentor complete his greatest experiment—and a dead man lives again.

Then both of them disappear.

Search the city for Dr. Graven and the man you helped return to life. Question friends and strangers, follow conflicting leads, involve yourself in the lives of its inhabitants, and uncover what your mentor has set in motion. What begins as a search for two missing men may leave you deciding who has the right to create life, whether death ought to be conquered at all, and what should become of the knowledge that it can be.

YOUR SHORTCOMINGS ARE PART OF YOUR CHARACTER

Build your character around six traits/skills: Beauty, Empathy, Observation, Wit, Alchemy, and Theology.

Being talented opens possibilities—but being deficient doesn’t simply close them.

Your skills interact throughout conversations, allowing different combinations of strengths and shortcomings to produce different thoughts, responses, misunderstandings, insights, and opportunities. A brilliant alchemist with no empathy may approach someone very differently from an observant theologian with little wit.

There is no requirement to build a well-rounded character. Being remarkably bad at something can be just as defining as being good at it.

SHAPE EVERY CONVERSATION

Talk is at the heart of Graven. Question people, persuade them, offend them, comfort them, deceive them, misunderstand them, or occasionally say something remarkably stupid.

Your character’s abilities affect what they notice, what they understand, and what they are capable of saying. Decisions ripple outward through relationships and events, changing what becomes possible as the story progresses.

There isn’t one correct personality, one correct investigation, or one prescribed relationship with the people you meet.

FIND DR. GRAVEN

Explore a Gothic European city in the midst of Christmas as you trace the movements of your mentor and his creation.

Graven’s experiment means something different to everyone. To some, it may be a miracle. To others, an abomination. Some will want it destroyed. Others may see in it the end of disease, grief, and mortality itself.

And the resurrected man is not merely evidence of an experiment. He is alive. What that means, and what he is owed, is for you to confront.

Follow leads in whatever manner your character permits. Become involved in the troubles of the city and its inhabitants. Decide whom to trust, what to reveal, and whether finding Graven means rescuing him, stopping him, joining him—or something else entirely.

AN UNCANNY CHRISTMAS

Against the story’s forbidden experiments is a city preparing to celebrate the birth of Christ: snow-covered streets, candlelit windows, churches, markets, music, festivities, and people confronting their own hopes and failures as Christmas approaches.

Graven draws from the tradition of Frankenstein and Gothic literature, placing questions of creation, mortality, faith, knowledge, and human ambition inside a choice-driven RPG where those questions ultimately belong to the player.

Find your mentor. Meet the man who returned from the dead. Decide what becomes of them, and what mankind should do with the impossible thing Dr. Graven has discovered.