Enter the survival horror with Ink Ribbon, a tabletop RPG inspired by videogames like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Alan Wake. Make every bullet count as you fight through hordes of zombies and deadly bioweapons to escape a doomed city!
From the designer of Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Soulbound comes Ink Ribbon, a survival horror tabletop RPG inspired by videogames like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Alan Wake, and many more. You and a handful of other survivors must fight to escape Sparrow’s Rest, a city in the midwestern United States that has been overrun by the walking dead. The shambling hordes fill the streets, and you’ll need to make every bullet count if you want to live through the night — but there are worse things lurking in Sparrow’s Rest than just zombies…
Ink Ribbon is a tabletop RPG that captures the feel of classic survival horror video games. It puts you in the shoes of everyday people (or a rookie cop having the worst first day in history) as you try to survive a zombie apocalypse caused by a shady pharmaceutical company. You’ll need to manage your inventory, keep an eye on your ammo, search for healing herbs, and face down rotting zombies and terrifying bio-weapons — all while trying to escape a doomed city that is just hours away from being nuked out of existence.
Ink Ribbon uses an intuitive d6 dice pool system along with Panic and Stress mechanicsto keep tension high and combat deadly. The ever-growing Horror of what is happening affects the world, unleashing new nightmares on the players and triggering grotesque mutations in the infected. The rules are meticulously crafted to evoke the feeling of a great survival horror video game in tabletop form, and you can see some of our inspiration below.
Ink Ribbon takes inspiration from Legacy-style board games and encourages you to play each scenario as a different group of survivors. Play through parallel stories happening over the final hours of Sparrow’s Rest and discover how different groups deal with the outbreak — and who survives. Use the city map to mark what buildings have been explored, when bridges were destroyed or roads collapsed, and where each survivor died. Maybe their corpse has some valuable gear another group can use — that is, if they’re really dead…
Ink Ribbon comes in either a Core Box or a Deluxe Box, each packed with zine-size rulebooks, adventure scenarios, maps, and more! What’s more, every physical pledge includes free PDFs of everything inside.
The Ink Ribbon Core Box contains everything you need to start playing, and includes:
Survivor’s Handbook: The intuitive core rules, quick and easy character creation, and an arsenal of weapons and gear you’ll need to fight for survival.
Welcome to Sparrow’s Rest: A visitor’s guide to the picturesque city of Sparrow’s Rest that reveals the dark history and hidden secrets that lie beneath the surface of the seemingly idyllic town. Includes dozens of optional rules to tweak your game, making it more action-focused or ratcheting up the horror!
Heal-X Pharmaceuticals Research Dossier: Uncover the truth that Heal-X doesn’t want you to know, with a dossier full of twisted experiments and bio-weapons gone wrong. Packed with a grotesque menagerie of weird monsters and mutated beasts.
Dead on Arrival: Take your first shambling steps into Sparrow’s Rest as you crash (literally) into the centre of the virus outbreak. Explore the Sparrow’s Rest Police Department in search of supplies and weapons, all while you try to figure out how the hell you’re going to escape the doomed city.
GM Screen (Standard): A discreet three-panel GM screen (~65 × 14 cm) filled with all the important rules, reminders, and tables you need to run Ink Ribbon.
Map of Sparrow’s Rest (Standard): A fold-out map of Sparrow’s Rest (~28 × 43 cm) to keep track of where you’ve explored.
The gorgeous Deluxe Box has everything you need and more! It’s packed with all the booklets from the Core Box, plus:
Lone Survivor: Solo rules for exploring Sparrow’s Rest alone — survive as long as you can!
Unexplained Phenomena: Heal-X has been up to more than just mad science — they’ve been dabbling in the occult! This booklet adds supernatural character options and monsters, so you can experience a whole new kind of horror
Extra Scenarios: Two additional adventure scenarios, written by some fantastic guest writers!
GM Screen and Map Upgrade: A deluxe GM Screen (~84 × 22 cm) and a larger, double-sided map of Sparrow’s Rest (~56 × 43 cm).
Character Sheets: 10 blank character sheets (spares for when survivors get eaten)
Tracking Tokens: Easily keep track of Horror, Stress, and Adrenaline!
Inventory Tokens: Tokens for all your weapons and gear that fit neatly into the grid on your character sheet!
Storage Box: A first-aid-style storage box for keeping your tokens and dice!
UNLOCKED! €25,000 — Fully Funded! Ink Ribbon comes shambling to life, all thanks to you!
UNLOCKED! €50,000 — New Scenario: Elaine Lithgow, renowned TTRPG writer and designer Heart: Ways and Means, Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Children of Time RPG, and more), will write a brand new scenario: Dead Mall!
€75,000 — 10 × New Monsters: We’ll add 10 new monsters to Ink Ribbon; 5 grotesque bioweapons to the Research Dossier, and 5 supernatural creatures to Unexplained Phenomena. €100,000 — Soundtrack: Award-winning music composer Si Rutherford will compose an original soundtrack for Ink Ribbon!
Ink Ribbon was created by award-winning designer Emmet Byrne and is built to capture the feel of a great survival horror videogame in tabletop form. Everything in the game is designed to evoke the fear, tension, and excitement of a great horror videogame, with easy-to-learn rules that enhance your experience without getting in the way.
Survivor creation is quick and easy: you can choose from a collection of premade packages, like Rookie Cop, College Student, or Private Investigator, or you can use the simple point buy method to create your character from scratch, choosing from a whole slew of Talents and abilities. Survivors are made from the following building blocks:
Attributes: There are four Attributes — Strength, for physical prowess and toughness; Agility, for body control and dexterity; Wits, for academic knowledge and street smarts; and Heart, for empathy and resisting fear.
Skills: Every character has natural aptitude or formal training in an array of Skills. These help when you’re making Tests (see below).
Talents: These are special tricks, quirks, and abilities the survivor has picked up throughout their life, whether from a job, a hobby, or a natural gift.
Stress Reliefs: Each survivor deals with stress in their own way, whether by helping others, repairing equipment, or finding proof about what really happened.
The core mechanic of Ink Ribbon involves making Tests to see whether you succeed or fail, using an intuitive d6 dice-pool system. Players combine their Attribute score and their level of training in a Skill to create their dice pool, and roll to see if they can equal or exceed the Target Number set by the GM. A typical Test goes like this:
GM Calls for a Test: The GM tells you the Test’s Target Number (TN) and the Attribute and Skill being tested.
Create Your Dice Pool: Gather a number of d6s equal to your Attribute score plus your level of Training in the Skill being tested. Add and remove dice based on any Advantages or Complications affecting the Test.
Make the Test: Roll all the dice in your pool and check to see how many, if any, equal or exceed the TN.
Determine Outcome: If one or more of the remaining dice equals or exceeds the TN, you’ve passed the Test! If you have any extra successes left over, you can use them to gain the upper hand, do a task quicker, or deal extra damage on an attack.
Ink Ribbon is a game of horror and violence, where you must fight for survival against nightmarish monsters intent on devouring your flesh. Understandably, this takes a psychological toll on a person, which is represented by Stress and Panic.
Stress is the underlying doubt, anxiety, and fear that comes with being in a near-constant state of fight or flight. It affects your ability to perform even simple tasks and forces you to remove one die from your dice pool for each point of Stress you have. Your maximum Stress is 6, and if you ever exceed that, you Panic.
Stress, fear, and injuries eventually push you to your physical and emotional limit, and cause you to Panic. When this happens, you must make a special Panic Test, to see if you manage to keep calm. If you don’t roll on the Panic Table to see what happens…
Horror measures the growing despair and hopelessness of your situation. As things get worse, as the city becomes overrun with zombies, as your allies die, and as you run out of safe places to hide, Horror increases.
Horror has both narrative and mechanical effects on the game. Narratively, the GM uses Horror as a shorthand to gauge and then describe how bad things have gotten for the players and the world around them. Mechanically, Horror affects what enemies you encounter and what they can do. Some enemies may deal additional damage based on the current Horror, gain increased Armour, or even unlock terrifying new abilities or mutations.
Combat in Ink Ribbon is designed to be fast, frenetic, and deadly! We use Zones and abstract Range to keep things simple and to keep the fighting fluid and dynamic. Zones are divided in ways that make sense, like rooms and hallways, and are usually 10-30 feet in diameter. Ranges are broken into Adjacent (within arm’s reach), Short (within your Zone), Medium (in the next Zone), or Long (up to two Zones away). On your turn, you can Move anywhere in your Zone and take an Action, like attacking, taking cover, barricading a window, or running to an adjacent Zone.
Survivors also have Adrenaline, which lets you push past your normal limits and is vital to your survival. You gain Adrenaline when your fight-or-flight response kicks in, such as at the start of combat or in an action scene. You can use Adrenaline in three crucial ways:
Before you make a Test, you can spend 1 Adrenaline to double your dice pool.
After you make a Test, you can spend 1 Adrenaline to re-roll some or all of the dice.
On your turn, you can spend 1 Adrenaline to take an extra action.
But be warned: some monsters also have Adrenaline, making them deadly and terrifying foes.
Combat in Ink Ribbon is deadly, and exploring the city of Sparrow’s Rest puts the survivors in constant life-threatening danger. Ink Ribbon uses Toughness and Health to represent the wounds and injuries inflicted on the survivors.
Toughness is your ability to resist harm and shake off minor injuries before you start taking serious damage. When you suffer damage, you reduce your Toughness first. Toughness is relatively easy to get back, and you recover all your Toughness after a short rest in a Safe Room. Various healing items also help recover Toughness.
Health measures your physical well-being. When your Toughness is reduced to 0, any damage you take is dealt to your Health. Health is divided into four different states: Unharmed, Fine, Caution, and Danger.Unharmed means you haven’t taken any damage, while each other state represents different stages of injury. You keep track of the damage you have suffered by filling in the squares on the ECG Health Tracker on your character sheet.
Ink Ribbon uses the iconic slot-based inventory system as seen in countless beloved survival horror videogames. Every item you find takes up 1–4 slots. Small items, like a handgun, first-aid spray, or knife, take up one slot. Large items, like a rifle, riot shield, or a rocket launcher, take up three or four (or more!) slots.
You start with four inventory slots, and can increase that number by finding hip pouches and backpacks. You also have two Quick Item slots. These are items and gear you’re either holding or can equip quickly if you need to. Unlike items stored in your inventory, Quick Items can be drawn or readied as a free action.
Safe Rooms are areas of reprieve from the chaos and horror around you. A Safe Room is usually a small room with only one or two exits and, ideally, no windows (and maybe a typewriter). You can’t be attacked while in a Safe Room! Each scenario tells the GM which areas are Safe Rooms, and the GM can also create their own. The GM can’t lie about a Safe Room!
You can spend 10 minutes resting in a Safe Room to regain your Toughness, relieve some Stress, and recover from deadly wounds. If you have a health kit, now’s the time to use it!
Ink Ribbon categorises enemies into three types: Horde, Boss, and Nemesis.
Horde-type enemies are numerous and relatively easy to kill, like shambling zombies and infected dogs.
Boss-type enemies are unique monsters that pose a deadly threat to the survivors, like a giant zombie elephant or a sentient, carnivorous plant. Most Boss-type enemies have unique powers and effects that trigger when their Health drops below a certain level, such as a devastating attack or some sort of grotesque mutation (usually with a lot of eyeballs).
Nemesis-type enemies are the most terrifying foes the survivors will encounter. They are similar to Boss-type enemies but with one important difference — they keep coming back. These enemies are inspired by the stalker-type monsters found in many survival-horror video games, which seem almost impossible to kill. You can slow them down and even incapacitate them, but they keep coming back no matter what the survivors do. Nemesis-type enemies often undergo strange mutations each time they are ‘killed’, so each often includes multiple different statblocks.
You can start playing right now by downloading the free 100+ page Quick Start Demo below, and learn more by watching our designer vlogs.
We work with a number of reputable, experienced shipping and fulfilment companies in the UK, US, and EU to ensure the lowest-cost shipping possible. US and UK orders will be fulfilled within those countries, and EU, Canada, and ROW orders will ship from one of our fulfilment houses in the US, UK, or EU (whichever is cheapest).
Shipping, as well as any applicable taxes in your region (VAT, etc.), will be charged after the campaign via the BackerKit pledge manager. The table below shows estimated shipping fees by region. Please note these are estimates only and are subject to change.
NOTE: US and ROW prices are listed in USD ($), while Canada prices are listed in CAD ($)
Ink Ribbon was created by Emmet Byrne, the CEO, founder, and creative director of Old Oak Games. Emmet has worked in the tabletop gaming industry for over 8 years as a writer, game designer, producer, and creative director. He is the creator of Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound and Broken Weave, and has worked on some of the most well-known and beloved IPs and TTRPGs in the world, including Lord of the Rings (The One Ring, Adventures in Middle-earth), Warhammer (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition, Warhammer 40,000 Imperium Maledicum and Wrath & Glory),Doctor Who (Doctor Who the Roleplaying Game, Doctors and Daleks), and Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere RPG.
We are working with some of the best fantasy artists and illustrators in the gaming industry, whose credits include Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine 2, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Critical Role, Hogwarts Legacy, and more. Our team of talented artists includes Álvaro Jiménez, Clara-Marie Morin, Siman Vlaisavljević, Eugenio Frosali, and Findara McAvinchey.
We have some renowned guest writers and designers working on our adventure scenarios, including Elaine Lithgow (Heart: Ways and Means, Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Children of Time RPG), Colin Le Sueur of By Odin’s Beard RPG (Midnight of the Century, Runecairn, We Deal in Lead), and Eleanor Hingley (Hollows, Uncaged: Volume II, Doctor Who).
If we reach our €100k Stretch Goal, we’ll also add composer Si Rutherford to the team, who will be creating an original soundtrack for Ink Ribbon. Si has made original music for a number of Actual Play shows, including Oaths & Empires, Rotating Heroes, Godkiller: Balance and Wayward Autumnal, and composed soundtracks for the TTRPGs Sin Eater, Cinderedge, and the City of the Black Rose campaign setting.
