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Time Without Tide: Mirth & Misery in a World of Fog

Created by Chaosium

A TTRPG of exploration and adventure in a fog-shrouded faux-Victorian apocalypse. You are a Delver. Hold your lantern high and venture into the unknown. Fight horrors, discover marvels, and protect the odd survivors of the fallen moon.

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Game Rules!
3 months ago – Mon, Jul 27, 2026 at 11:08:18 AM

Game Rules!

There are just over two weeks left until our campaign launches! Thank you everyone for sharing your enthusiasm, questions, and support for Time Without Tide.

Last week’s poll favored more information about the game’s rules. We’re going to dive into mechanics for this update, but first here’s some TWT news.

Questions By Lantern Light, a live TWT Q&A hosted by Chaosium’s Bridgett Jeffries, is now available to watch on the Chaosium YouTube channel. It was a blast getting to talk about the game. Thank you to everybody who sent in questions. Remember, you can keep the conversation going by joining us in the Chaosium Discord. We do our best to share links to any other news or media about the game there.
Onto the Rules
Let’s move onto some mechanics. I want to mention that the best way to get a sense of the game is to download the Time Without Tide: Quickstart and take a look for yourself. It’s freely available for anybody who follows the Backerkit campaign. That said, here’s a quick summary.

The Basics
Time Without Tide is at its heart, a D6 dice pool system. When you’re faced with a challenge, you pair one of your traits (BODY, MIND, & WILL) with one of six skills (Culture, Industry, Navigation, Skulduggery, Survival, & Violence). You roll a number of D6s equal to the sum of your score and trait. Each result of a 5 or 6 counts as a mark towards succeeding. Get enough marks and you’ll succeed the test.

So, you combine 3 traits and 6 skills. Easy right? Well, the complexity comes from  combining your traits and skills in interesting ways. Let’s take Skulduggery as an example. 

  • BODY + SKULDUGGERY covers physically sneaking about. Creeping past distracted enemies or skillfully picking a pocket.
  • MIND + SKULDUGGERY covers investigation. Finding clues at a crime scene or noticing an ambush up ahead.
  • WILL + SKULDUGGERY covers social deceit. Lying to somebody, or managing to keep your poker face in a bad situation. 

Every skill pairs differently with each of the traits to cover any challenge you might encounter. There’s plenty of further refinements to these core rules that are discussed more further in the Time Without Tide: Quickstart, but let’s leave that aside for now and skip  ahead to one of the most exciting parts of Time Without Tide, your records.

Records
Records are the elements that make each character unique. Your items, features, or fog-driven adaptations. As you play, you will slowly amass, refine, and develop a collection of different records. Some records are straightforward bonuses to particular activities and test types. Others make you immune to certain type of damage or unlock new kinds of actions. The most powerful  records fundamentally change the way you play the game. 

Not all records are easy to get. Features for example, are reliable. You earn them naturally as your skills increase. Items, less so. You need to find them on your adventures or trade for them with some of the few remaining merchants. Adaptations are utterly chaotic. When you manifest an adaptation (often by taking too much damage during combat) you roll randomly to determine which one. Whatever result you get, it arrives in its malignant form as an explicit hindrance. If you invest your experience into a malignant adaptation, you will unlock its hidden potential over time.

Combat, Travel, & Downtime
There’s lots to do in Time Without Tide. Although all  gameplay builds on the fundamental rules described above, each area has its own unique mechanics too. We’ll talk about these more in future, but for now, here are some quickfire details about a few fan-favorite gameplay areas.

  • Combat is strategic and turn based. It will be familiar to most experienced TTRPGs players. The most unique element is ward. You must keep battlefields lit to fight off the fog. Otherwise, you take damage and monsters become more powerful. Lanterns are as ubiquitous as weapons during combat.
  • Travel is at the heart of many Time Without Tide adventures. The quintessential item that defines each party of Delvers is their Decadent relay. These ancient teleporters allows Delvers to instantaneously jump home at the push of a button. As a result, Delvers can push deep into the wilderness and take wild risks during battle, secure in the knowledge that they can always teleport away if things get hairy. Although, picking the perfect moment to press the big red button is never as easy as it sounds.
  •  Downtime is integrated into everyday game-play. There's no dedicated system for ultra long-term actions, because weeks, seasons, and even years will drift by over the course of regular delving. Healing, for example, requires three full days of uninterrupted rest. Between that and travel, there will be plenty of time to attend to your long term projects. 

Our Next Update
We'll be back again later this week to talk more about the rules. Please let us know what mechanics you're most interested in learning more about. Until then, keep the light!

First Light
4 months ago – Mon, Jul 20, 2026 at 07:32:01 AM

First Light

Time Without Tide is here. You can download the Quickstart rules right now and start playing. After close to a decade of total development time, the fog has parted. For us, the Time Without Tide team, it’s surreal.

This is only the beginning!

We’ve got so much more to show across the course of this campaign. We want to talk about everything. We’ll show you how the game works, talk about its development, geek-out about the world, ask you what you want to know, and answer your questions. First of all though, we need to say thanks. To all of you reading this update, all of you following this project, we appreciate you.

You can get further involved in Time Without Tide by joining the conversation on the Chaosium Discord. There’s a dedicated channel there where you can speak directly to the team, as well as with other players. Some channel members are already sharing their wonderful experiences with the Quickstart.

We’ll be back with another update soon where we will talk more about the game. Please tell us what you'd like to hear about! You can vote in our poll to help us determine what to discuss next. Please feel free to expand upon your answer in the comments. For those with absolutely burning questions, please join us on the Chaosium YouTube Channel for a live AMA on July 20th 7pm EDT (a recording will be posted later). Thanks everybody.