Stonetop - Starter guide

What is Stonetop?

The harvest is in, mostly. The palisade needs mending before the first frost. And three days east, where the old road dips into the marsh, something has started taking sheep. You are not adventurers passing through. You are the people of Stonetop, and if you do not deal with it, nobody will.

Stonetop is a hearth fantasy roleplaying game about a small village at the edge of the known world, and the neighbours who step up to protect it. The setting is a gritty Iron Age that never was: hill forts, bronze and iron, old gods with real teeth, and the ruins of a vanished civilisation humming quietly under the fields. What is actually true out there is decided at your table; the books offer options, not canon.

The game was designed by Jeremy Strandberg, with illustrations and hand-drawn maps by Lucie Arnoux and layout by Jason Lutes, who publishes it through Lampblack & Brimstone. It began as a setting for Dungeon World and grew, over ten years of playtesting and a 2021 Kickstarter, into a standalone game. Netherbook sells the complete edition: the two hardcover volumes in their slipcase, together with the five large maps from the Map Pack.

How does the system work?

Stonetop is Powered by the Apocalypse. When you do something risky, you roll two six-sided dice and add a stat: 10 or more and it works, 7 to 9 and it works with a cost or complication, 6 or less and the GM makes a move and the story lurches somewhere new. Play is a conversation, with named moves that trigger when the fiction calls for them. There is no initiative and no grid.

The signature idea is that the village has its own playbook. Stonetop has stats like Fortunes, Prosperity and Defenses, a cast of named neighbours, a Surplus to manage before winter comes, and a list of improvements to work toward: a palisade, a mill, a herd of horses. Every season you roll to see what the turning of the year brings, and the village's Fortunes shape whether that is a threat or an opportunity. As the heroes win and lose, the village changes, and as the village changes, so does what comes knocking.

Play breathes between two rhythms. At home, moves cover the seasons, the work and the hundred small obligations of village life. Away, the expedition rules take over: setting out, making camp, the Die of Fate, the long road back. Come home in triumph and the village's Fortunes rise. And woven through it all are the arcana, unique magic items with their own requirements to unlock, each one a ready-made adventure waiting for someone to pursue it.

What do you need to start?

The slipcase set is the whole game. Book I: Stonetop holds the rules, the nine playbooks and extensive guidance for the GM, including a step-by-step first session that builds the village together. Book II: The Wider World and Other Wonders is the almanac: regions, settlements, creatures, ruins and the full collection of arcana. The two books run to around 600 pages each, so treat Book II as a menu, not homework. You never need more than the next expedition's worth.

Add two six-sided dice per player, pencils, and a GM with two to five players. The maps earn their place on the table from the first session: the village map in particular turns "where does the smith live?" into a question everyone can point at.

Who is this game for?

Stonetop is for groups who want a campaign with roots. If you love slow-burn stories, communities that feel real, and stakes measured in harvests and neighbours rather than gold pieces, there is very little else like it. It is a gift for GMs who like strong support: the books walk you through village creation, threats, seasons and campaign arcs with unusual care. And it suits players who enjoy playbooks with a point of view, from the Marshal who commands the watch to the Would-Be Hero who starts out weaker than everyone else and grows by taking risks.

It is honest to say who it is not for. If your group mostly plays one-shots, wants dungeon loot and level-ups, or prefers rootless drifters with nothing to lose, Stonetop will feel like the wrong shape. Its whole heart is having something to lose. It is also a big game: the moves are learned in an evening, but the setting rewards a dozen sessions or more, and a GM who is not willing to let time pass between adventures will miss the best of it.

How does it compare to other systems?

Next to Dungeons & Dragons, Stonetop swaps initiative and battle maps for fiction-first moves, and swaps the endless journey for a home. Failure does not stall the story; it pushes it forward. And where D&D measures progress in levels, Stonetop measures it in a mill that finally turns and a winter nobody starved through.

Root: The Roleplaying Game runs on the same Powered by the Apocalypse engine, so the dice will feel familiar, but its vagabonds are exactly the rootless wanderers Stonetop is not. Root asks which faction you will betray; Stonetop asks whose barn you will help raise. Playing one after the other shows how far the same engine can travel.

Wanderhome shares the pastoral warmth, but wanders where Stonetop stays. Wanderhome is gentle by design, largely without conflict and without a GM; Stonetop keeps its teeth and its GM, because a home is only precious when something threatens it.

Where do you start?

Start at the table, together. The first session in Book I builds the village as a group: who lives where, what Stonetop has in surplus and what it lacks, which shrine stands on the square. Then everyone picks a playbook, answers the bond questions on it, and you are playing neighbours within the hour. Let the players read the backs of their arcana; the requirements to unlock them are the best adventure hooks in the book.

Then let the campaign breathe. Follow the seasons, let improvements take the time they take, and let threats build slowly at the edges of the map. When the players return from an expedition, give the homecoming a scene of its own. The game rewards patience like almost nothing else in the hobby.

Recommended products at Netherbook

The Stonetop slipcase set including the Map Pack is everything: both books, all nine playbooks and the five maps that will live on your table for years. If the engine is what hooked you, Root: The Roleplaying Game takes the same dice into a very different woodland; if it is the warmth, Wanderhome offers a gentler road. You will find all three in our Fantasy collection, and the old stories behind Stonetop's gods and ruins in Mythic & Folklore.