The Launch is a GM-less story game of exodus, the long dark, and taking root. An Auspice story game for three to five storytellers, told in a single evening.
Together you are a crew who built a ship to leave a home that can no longer hold you. You cross the void, and you try to make a new home live. Each storyteller speaks for one member of the crew, in their own voice. Nothing fixes whether you are people much like us or something far stranger: the deck keeps its questions open, and the table decides what it is looking at as the story unfolds.
How It Plays
There is no game master and almost nothing to set up. On your turn you draw a prompt and answer it in your character’s voice, letting what the question takes for granted become true as you speak. Then you weigh it: is the truth you just made a reason this venture will hold, or a reason it will break? You place the card on the Promise, or on the Peril, one truth at a time, until the two stacks are the answer. You are not voting on how the story ends. You are weighing what this crew is carrying.
It runs in three acts, the Launch, the Crossing, and the Colony, each raising the stakes and closing on one hard question the whole table answers together. The first is Do we launch?
Those truths, weighed one at a time, are the signs the crew reads for what is coming, and whether what they carry is enough. Reading the signs is the small augury the line takes its name from.
Get The Launch
The Launch is on RPG Trader, free or pay what you want, with the full rundown: how each act resolves, a taste of the prompts, and the way a hard act carries its wreckage forward instead of ending.
About This Edition
The Launch is an ashcan alpha (v0.4, 2026-07): a rough, early edition let out before the art and the polish are anywhere near done, so tables can play it and tell me where it needs work. I’ve watched it played at my own table, and it has grown from what those tables found. What I most want now is a table I’m not sitting at: play it without me, and tell me how it went, where it held and where it broke. It is a Print-and-Play PDF, 80 cards across eight Avery ten-up sheets, text only by design, so the crew can be human or something stranger. All text is licensed CC-BY.
Design Notes
The Fate You Make
(a Design Diary)
On the empty space where For the Queen ends, and the two things I built The Launch to do about it.My last note ended on a small complaint I could not let go of. For the Queen stops the instant you answer its final question. The Queen is under attack,...
For the Queen
(a Design Appreciation)
On the craft around the prompts, and why Alex Roberts’ little deck seems to run itself.Most summers I give myself a creative project: some corner of game design I want to understand by making something inside it. This summer, the project picked me. My local group, the East Bay Story...
The Power of the Prompt
(a Design Diary)
A Design Diary, on writing a question that does three jobs at once.A while back, my friend Deanna got me thinking about exposition, about how a storytelling-game prompt can hand the storytellers a whole world without ever sounding like a lecture. I’d been treating exposition, character, and plot as three...
Credits
Written & Designed by Christopher Allen ChristopherA@DyversHands.com
In the wider tradition of Alex Roberts’ For the Queen. Safety tools adapted from the X-Card by John Stavropoulos. Cover photograph by Todd Trapani on Unsplash.
Playtested at earlier tables by Deanna Zibello, Charles Picard, Tess and Brian O’Riva; and at Go Play NW by Kate, Keith, and Zim.
©2026 by Dyvers Hands Productions, LLC. Dyvers Hands™ and Auspice™ are trademarks of Dyvers Hands Productions, LLC.