Review: Breathless Frightmare Edition
The peak of zombie survival TTRPG
I was given an early access copy of Breathless: Frightmare Edition player’s survival guide, “Burning Bridges” Journey, and the brief overview of Journey and Haven rules. I want to thank Fari RPGs for the opportunity to cover this exciting new edition of Breathless!
The fire started over a week ago. Smoke billowed across the horizon as the hungry, smoldering beast made its way over the hills. Dozens of the Breathless—undead, air-hungry zombies—fled the consuming wildfire. Camden, the Haven’s head of security and veteran of three wars, stood watch on the apartment building’s lookout tower for days, finally giving the evacuation recommendation to the Haven’s leadership. They ignored him. The Breathless were more frightening than the imminent inferno. “Stay at your post,” they ordered him.
“Good soldiers follow orders,” he muttered under his breath as the fire marched closer each day, filling the air with smoke and embers.
“We have to go, Camden,” Lana, his wife of ten years and the only decent mechanic left in the Haven, shouted from the roof access. “The fire will be here by dawn. We can go to Thom’s farm or anywhere else, but we can’t stay here.”
“My orders are to keep watch,” Camden said, stubbornly.
“Fuck your orders! You’re not in the army anymore. Are you really going to condemn me and our baby to the flames?”
Introduction
Fari RPG’s Breathless released in 2022, and since then has birthed nearly three hundred titles built upon the system—at least a hundred of them in languages other than English, according to creator René-Pier (RP) Deshaies. The original game’s mechanics became the foundation for many of Fari RPG’s other games, such as Nomadic, Stoneburner, and Tales of the Burned Stones.
In Breathless, players face off against a world gone to hell. A virus spread through the population, turning people into oxygen-starved zombies, the eponymous Breathless. Those who were spared enzombification by the virus lost their memories. They were the poor, unfortunate few. Forced to eke out an existence in protected Havens, these (un)lucky survivors must Loot, Shoot, and Survive or die.
Four years later, RP has teamed up with Mythworks—the people behind Wildsea and CBR+PNK Augmented Edition—and DNGN Club to release Breathless: Frightmare Edition, live on Kickstarter at the time of this publication. The Frightmare Edition boasts the cumulative refinements to the Breathless system produced by continued iteration, making it the definitive version of Breathless (in my opinion).
Breathless: Frightmare Edition makes use of Mythworks’ STORYPAK format, which looks like an old horror VHS case in my eyes. This edition will contain enough player pamphlets for a party of five, the pamphlets for Havens and Journeys, and four Journeys (point-crawl adventures, we’ll get to that). That’s a total of twelve pamphlets, all showcasing amazing, thematic artwork.
Mechanics Discussion
The Breathless system is one of my favorites. It uses a dice degradation, or step-down, system where each time you make a check with a stat or an item, the dice you use decreases (ex. d10 → d8 → d6 → d4). In Breathless: Frightmare Edition, as with the original, your characters have seven stats, each with a different initial dice rating. In Frightmare Edition, the dice rating of each stat is determined by the occupation (of which there are eleven) you choose. Dice ratings can never decrease below a d4, and can be restored by taking a brief moment—at any time, even in combat—to Catch Your Breath. Catching your breath in the thick of things comes with a risk, however. It isn’t a free “get-well-quick” move. There are always consequences to taking a moment to recover in the middle of a tense situation. What that consequence is will be up to the GM and the narrative.
Breathless is intended to be a traditional TTRPG, with players and a GM. I played this early access solo, as I am inclined to do, and will discuss playing Breathless solo in more depth below. Suffice to say here that it is easily solo-able.
Items, likewise, receive a dice rating and can be used in lieu of a skill when making a check in situations where they can be leveraged. When an item’s dice rating reaches d4 and you use it again, it breaks or otherwise becomes unusable until you repair it. In my playthrough, Camden, my veteran, wields a service rifle with a dice rating of d10. In one situation, where I wanted the focus to be on the service rifle’s rate of fire, I rolled the check with the item’s dice instead.
Camden covered the others as they fled toward the relative safety of the hospital’s emergency room awning. Seven (d6+3) oxygen starved figures raced toward him. Instincts kicked in, and he pulled the trigger on his trusty service rifle. The staccato of shots fired echoed off the cement walls of the hospital. The Breathless fell to the hail of bullets (Check (d10) = 7), and Camden raced to catch up with the others.
Success or failure on a check is determined by the face value of the dice roll. A 1 or 2 is always a failure, introducing complications or challenges that must be overcome. A roll of 3 or 4 is a success, but one that comes with a complication, while a roll of 5+ is a complete success. The higher the roll, the better the outcome of the check. In the example above, since Camden was in control of the situation and had plenty of time to react, I allowed his roll of 7 on a d10 to ultimately take down the entire group of oncoming Breathless.
I, by the grace of the polyhedral deities, did not have an opportunity to get hands-on experience with the game’s Harm mechanic. Instead of having hit points, or some other mathematical method of tracking PC health, Breathless tracks harm on the silhouette of a person divided into five sections. The rules read “when you face a Consequence, the GM may decide that you [take] Harm. The GM assigns 1-3 Harm based on severity.”
Harm is not a requirement of a complication, even in a combat scenario. It is, however, a potential outcome. The game indicates that 1 Harm is for minor damage, while 2-3 Harm is reserved for more severe cases. When a character accumulates five total Harm, they enter a state known as Vulnerable. Consequences of a check while in this state can lead to a player character’s death.
In hindsight, I probably could have marked a minor Harm when, near the end of the Journey, my party was being pursued by a group of Breathless through a mountain forest. Mandrake, my least active character, rolled a fail on his Dash skill check (d4 = 2) and tripped. Fortunately, the others made successful checks. Curt—my nurse character—rolled a 3 (on d8), which I envisioned as him putting himself in harm’s way to help Mandrake to their feet.
A new element for the Frightmare Edition are Journeys. These are point-crawl style adventures that provide players with places to encounter other survivors, loot, and engage in conflict with the Breathless.
The early access kit I was given had the “Burning Bridges” Journey included. “Burning Bridges” is one of the four Journeys included in the Frightmare Edition STORYPAK and is a considerable amount of fun. I played through the whole Journey in about two hours or so, from character creation to the end of the Journey. That said, I can see a more in-depth run by a group of players could take up to two or three sessions to complete.
“Burning Bridges” begins with the player characters’ Haven (safe zone) being overrun by a wild fire, forcing them to flee in search of another Haven amidst the turmoil that is the world post-virus. The world-building contained in “Burning Bridges” is evocative and makes the world feel alive—despite being overrun with mostly-dead, oxygen-hungry zombies. There are factions which the players can interact with, with their own goals that can shape, propel, or hinder the PCs own goals.
The Avenging Angels, a biker gang that holds the Angel Bridge, want to take over the old airforce base. Their leader demands military veteran Camden and nurse Curt assist his gang in their offensive against the surviving airforce members to take the base in exchange for perpetual free passage across the Bridge. Camden is assigned a fireteam and sent in through the back of the airforce base. Curt is positioned in the rearguard, holed up in an old, bulletproof money transport.
The central mechanic of the Journey is the Journey die. The GM can assign a dice rating to the Journey die from d4 to d12. The Journey die gets stepped down just like any other dice rating in the game whenever the die shows a result between 1 and 4. In “Burning Bridges,” whenever the Journey dice turns up a 1-2, a world event on the “Fire Clock” takes place and the dice steps down to the next rating. Whenever it shows a 3 or 4, the Journey dice steps down and each character must step down one of their skills as well. A 5+, as with skill checks, is a full success and the Journey dice does not step down.
I think the complications for the 3-4 result on the Journey roll is one of the few issues I had with the journey mechanic. Stepping down a skill dice is a risk, and being forced to do so because of a “complicated success” result seems more severe than activating the next event in the Fire Clock (on a result of 1-2). The Fire Clock event could have dire consequences if the party is in the area where the event takes place, but I only had the Fire Clock advance once in my entire Journey, and we were well away from where the event took place. The world was altered, sure, but my party was fleeing and had no intention of going back. I don’t know if putting the Fire Clock event on 3-4 would be an optimal solution either, but attaching dice degradation to a 1-2 roll would feel more like the result of a failed journey roll. That said, the point-crawl style of travel works incredibly well with the other mechanics Breathless uses.
All in all, the core mechanics of Breathless are incredibly satisfying, weighty, and play into feeling like survival is a real challenge that wears you down slowly. They are easy to understand, pick up, and play with only a few minutes of reading. Combined with the “Burning Bridges” Journey, the core mechanics create a satisfying single session adventure that feels threatening and, more importantly, fun.
Solo Friendly (?)
As those of you who regularly consume my content know, I am an almost exclusive solo TTRPG player. I’ve not had a group game in actual years, and even then I was the GM. I prefer playing solo and exercising my creative muscles. I have already mentioned to RP, the game’s creator, that, license permitting, I can see a third-party solo Breathless pamphlet being very useful. The game as I have it in the early access package does not contain spark tables or oracles of any kind (I cannot speak for the final version’s content). The original Breathless came with tables for weapons, locations, complications, and missions, which would be useful for GMs and solo gamers alike.
To play through “Burning Bridges” solo, I relied on my trusty print-out of Mythic 2e’s Fate Check to serve as the GM in cases where I had questions about events. Otherwise, there were no other changes required. I made four characters, though Camden the veteran became my primary character, and set off. Managing multiple characters, especially in a game where the dice rating of each character’s seven skills and their items changes with every check, can feel overwhelming at times. Though if you are good at bookkeeping, it becomes intuitive after a few skill checks. I used a simple Google Docs tab to build my character sheets, but I would recommend using a printed version if you were serious about an on-going Breathless campaign. The Breathless: Frightmare Edition comes with five (!) full-art player pamphlets that will make it easy to do so.
Conclusion
As a long-time fan of RP’s work, I can’t recommend this game enough. In fact, any of Fari RPGs’ games are worth picking up. There are a few differences between the original and the new version—largely that the new one has benefited from the refinement of the core mechanic through iterations in other Fari RPG games. Breathless: Frightmare Edition is a fun, satisfyingly dangerous TTRPG that plays up the draining nature of survival through its core mechanics.
I can see myself jumping back into Breathless: Frightmare Edition and continuing the story of my PCs as they Loot, Shoot, and Survive in a world overrun by Breathless.