Riverbend : Fishing Adventures
A downloadable game
Riverbend is a game about river exploration, adventure, fishing and magical cats made by Torthevic and Gustavo Tertoleone
In this game, characters known as 'Villagers' band together in their own boat to explore a river basin while they try to accomplish certain goals set at the beginning of play. In this journey they will encounter peaceful fishing spots, weird river dwellers, ancient artifacts, horrifying aberrations and navigate from the calmest stream to the most dangerous rapids.
So what's in the book?
- Simple rules based on the wonderful Tunnel Goons by Nate Treme*, keeping things concise so the whole focus is kept on exploration
- Die Drop Table fishing with multiple options and tiers for fishing gear, each with it's own strengths and weaknesses
- 9 Magical Cats with different powers to accompany the Villagers and help on their Fishing Quests
- A River Basin Generator with landmarks, curios, artifacts and a system for determining strength of currents as well as rules for navigating them
- 19 River Dwellers that characters might encounter during their journeys
- 12 River Aberrations; horrifying creatures who terrify those who live nearby
You can also get Physical Copies here!
*Riverbend is not affiliated to Nate Treme or Highland Paranormal Society in any way
Writting Gustavo Tertoleone and VIctor Amorim
Illustration Victor Amorim
Layout Gustavo Tertoleone
Editing Jarrett Crader, whom we deeply thank for editing the book and making sure it actually works in English
Also massive thanks to Exalted Funeral for believing in our little game about cats and fishing
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $8 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Exclusive content
Support this game at or above a special price point to receive something exclusive.
Community Copies
If you can't afford the game, feel free to grab one for yourself. No questions asked!
We'll add 1 Community Copy for each copy sold at full price.
Download demo
Comments
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Lovely game. Great hack of Tunnel Goons you made here, Torthevic!
this looks awesome!! Any chance community copies will be updated soon?
Done! Thanks for the reminder!
Hi! How does a GM facilitate the more “land based” foes (encounters, abbarations)? They can be frequent but trying to keeping in mind the rules seem to encourage PCs to stay in their boat. Do they often leave the boat but stay close to the shore?
Also one weapon to start with, for a group with 3+ PC am I correct in thinking the unarmed PCs can still attack just don’t have the nice weapon modifier?
Thanks!
Hi! Thanks for your questions, and sorry for the late response!
You can think of the river structure as a pointcrawl in which progression/exploration on a larger scale is only possible via boat. So, yes, they are expected to get out of the boat at certain points of interest, but in order to continue exploring, the rules encourage that they get back on the river in order to reach the next location.
As for the facilitation of "land based" encounters/exploration, you can treat it as any freeform/rules light adventure game, such as tunnel goons, which inspired this game. The rules are so simple you can just play fast and loose with it (that's how i always do it anyways, and it's worked out pretty well!)
And yes, you are correct about fighting unarmed! THey can still fight, but without a weapon modifier
I hope this helps :)
Could I get a community copy? I have a physical copy, but I want to CTRL+F lol
Hi! SOrry for the late response, but i just refilled the CC pool :)
Could you refill the community copies pool, please?
And done! Thanks for the reminder!
I can't express my gratitude enough : )
As a thank you, I will dedicate my next few hours just fishing (with the help of this beautiful book), while filling my mind with the image of you and your great generosity 🥰
Would I be able to get a community copy of this to adapt into a solo journaling game for use with my struggling readers this school year? (That was a ridiculously long sentence.). Thanks!
Sure! I just dropped a few more copies, see if you can catch one in this batch! Otherwise, just reach out to me and i'll make you a link, no problem at all!
Cheers!
I was lucky! I'm working at my laptop so I got one. Thank you!
I don’t understand how to fish. The example has 3d6, 2,4,4 “landing on a picture of two catfish”, based on the included diagram im not sure what that means. Either way assuming all three dice landed on catfish, in this example why was the difficulty set to 8 to catch them?
if one player fishes and misses all the fish with their die or dice, are they free to fish again immediately? Is there a limit, or drawback, to fishing repeatedly at a fishing location?
I played this recently and had the same issue. Ran it by the table and no one understood it. I ended up just making up rules that gave the players a bunch of fish so that they had a bunch of pips to spend on new stuff, since none of them seemed to enjoy the idea of fishing repeatedly for pips anyway.
I had them roll a d6 to determine the type of fish they found in a 'school' of fish (treating it as a d3) then 3d6 to dermine the amount of fish. Then I set a rating they had to beat based on how hard the amount and size of fish sounded. Then if they failed the next roll I let another person on the boat try to help them pull it in.
Players didn't seem to hate it. But did not seem to like that they rolled so much to fish. Again I think fishing was their least favorite part of the fishing adventure. They mich preferred mapping the river basin and uncovering all the secrets in it.
Hi! Hope you're doing great! Thanks so much for the comment and sorry for the slow response!
Catfish is the big one, as described on page 16. I feel maybe we should have added the names of the species in the diagram for clarity, your confusion makes total sense.
Since Fishing counts as an Action, it is up to the GM to determine difficulty like any other. It's a super rules light game, so the GM could simply define the Difficulty for a Fishing Action according to the fiction they're envisioning. Fishing near a waterfall could be way harder than fishing in a calm lake, for example. (page 9, The Catch Roll)
And, finally, the only hard limit on fishing is the equipment's HP, representing wear and tear to the fishing gear, although miss on the die drop table does not count as a failure. You need to hook up fish and fail the Action roll in order to damage the equipment. That's as far as limits go, rules as written, but of course you could always make rulings of your own in order to limit fishing activities
I hope this answers your questions! Feel free to get in contact if you need anything!
Cheers!