A System Reference Document (henceforth “SRD”) is a Reference Document that contains the basic mechanics and play description of a role-playing System. Basically, it’s a description of the structural gameplay skeleton upon which the meat and tendons of a role-playing game lie.
Feel free to break every rule in this document, with one exception: attribution. We wrote these rules so you could play with them. Part of that is taking them apart, deciding which ones you like, and putting things back together your way.
But if you do use this SRD to make your own game, please make sure to credit us (see “Attribution” below).
Short version: A game of shapes, basic addition, and flash fiction.
Long version: A nautical-themed solo role playing game where a player rolls dice, pretends they are the stars in the night sky, then consults a book of shapes to interpret their meaning like a Delphic Oracle prodding at entrails. Once they are satisfied with their shape-gazing, they do some basic math using the values shown by those dice to arrive at a Number. When the Shape and the Number are combined, they reveal a writing prompt and some mechanical outcomes via consultation of numerical tables. The player, now confronted with a prompt and mechanics, writes down what happens and applies the mechanical effects, which may lead to victory and rewards or failure and gruesome death.
We think this game system is cool because we are huge fans of shapes, and while the version we made is about boats and adventure and sea monsters and depression we think that it need not be limited to that theme and setting. In fact, we would love nothing more than to look at shapes in space or lost in a forest or hopping through mindscapes, but we made the one about boats so we can’t play those other ones.
So we have a conundrum: we didn’t make those other ones, but we would like to play them. Our solution was to make this SRD and let somebody else make them, so that we may have all the fun of shapes with none of the work of shapes.
The text of O Captain and the O Captain System outlined in this document are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To learn more about the license, visit the Creative Commons Website.
Effectively, you can make whatever you want using these rules so long as you release it under the same license and credit Scott Bullock and Leon Barillaro for design of the system without implying that we are affiliated with you and your product. Here’s an example:
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To learn more about the license, visit <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/>.
This work uses the O Captain System, written by Scott Bullock and Leon Barillaro. It is an independent production by [[Your name here!]] and not affiliated with Scott or Leon in any way.