The Launch is a GM-less story game of leaving, the long dark, and taking root. An *Auspice* story game for three to five players, 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 colony live. Each player 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, read it aloud, and answer it from your character’s view, letting what the question takes for granted become true as you speak. Then you weigh it. Is the thing you just made true a reason this venture will hold, or a reason it will break? You place the card on the Promise, or on the Peril.
You are not voting on how the story ends. You are weighing, one truth at a time, what this crew is carrying. The story runs in three acts, the Launch, the Crossing, and the Colony, and each closes on a single hard question everyone answers together: Do we launch? Do we survive the landing? Does the colony live? The two stacks are the answer. And when an act goes badly, the trouble you named carries into the next act, true and active, and every prompt afterward is answered in its shadow. Nothing here is ever simply undone.
Get The Launch
The Launch is debuting in the GM-less Games Bundle on RPG Trader: 106 GM-less games from 106 creators, pay what you want, running July 17–21.
It is also available on its own, free or pay what you want, on RPG Trader.
About This Edition
The Launch is an ashcan alpha (v0.2, 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. 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.
Credits
Written & Designed by Christopher Allen ChristopherA@DyversHands.com
In the lineage of Alex Roberts’ For the Queen. Safety tools adapted from the X-Card by John Stavropoulos. Cover photograph by Todd Trapani on Unsplash.
©2026 by Dyvers Hands Productions, LLC. Dyvers Hands™ is a trademark of Dyvers Hands Productions, LLC.