Shade Keepers: Keeper's Handbook - A Monster Catching OSR TTRPG

Shade Keepers is an OSR monster-catching TTRPG, along the lines of games like Pokemon or Cassette Beasts, and of utterly tectonic scale. In this game, you and your fellow youths will don the mantle of Shade Keepers, capturing, befriending, and working alongside mysterious creatures called Shades that you summon out of a tome. Heard a story like it before? That's mostly the point.

What sets Shade Keepers apart is it's unique combat system, which is simple to learn and run at the table but complex through the sheer number of options players and enemies have at their disposal. The other, more obvious perk the game has is its ludicrous number of creatures to find, fight, and befriend. Forget 100, forget 151, there are 200 Shades in this game, and each of them is unique in some way!

I spent well over a year coming up with, illustrating, and writing this delightful and often unserious menagerie, drawing from childhood experiences, science topics that interest me, and often just silly puns I thought of. There's a Shade for everyone in here, and the BX-adjacent stats mean that you can also think of this as a barebones bestiary for any OSR game you are running.

Here's what you're getting with Shade Keepers:

• Over 200 Shades, spanning 12 Types and a host of different environments.
• Over 100 Moves, at least a handful of every type, that vary in complexity and usefulness.
• Simple Core Rules that take up less than a 10th of the over 200-page rulebook (as core rules should in my humble rules-light-biased opinion)
• 8 Keeper Classes, letting you customize not only your party of Shades, but what sets you apart as a Keeper!
• Over 200 Illustrations of passable quality by myself, a really good illustration by Gavin Redino, and photography of a random park in Ohio.

Early Access

Right now, the state Shade Keepers is in is equivalent to an early access video game. It's fully playable, it has a ton of content to use, but it is far from finished. I wanted to first get the game out there and see what people think, and moreso what they want. Here's what I'm planning to add, based on audience feedback and what is most important.

• Glossaries, such as Shades in alphabetical order or sorted by where they live, and one for moves as well. It feels essential for a game like this, but I simply want to see how people want them sorted.
• Rules changes, tweaks, and rebalancing, somewhat obviously. There are two many moving parts in Shade Keepers for me to figure out every possible way the game stops making sense, so I'll be monitoring it as playtests continue.
• More GM Resources, like how to build a Shade Keepers campaign, balance adventures, and probably an essay on the ethics of the monster catcher genre as a whole.
• A Full Campaign Book, the real kahuna. I'm very early in the progress on this, but it's going to consist of over 50 interconnected point crawl adventures, making up the Land of August and its vast reaches of harmonious nature and hazy childhood nostalgia.

Why's This Giant Book Free?

1. First and foremost, I don't want to charge people for my art because I am not an artist. I wasn't going to be able to afford to hire someone to draw 200 of anything, and I'm super proud of what I was able to do, but I think it is the creativity rather than the artistic talent that makes this game good.
2. I always prefer games where the core rules are free. That's the same reason both BËNTHIC and Kaiser are free to download, as adventures should be what you pay for. It feels weird because this core rulebook is over 200 pages, but it is what it is.
3. I made this game first and foremost because I wanted to, not because I wanted a huge crowdfunding campaigns. I love making those too, but this was my personal art easel, and I just want to share it with the world.