Tox RPG is a fast-paced, creative game of dramatic powers and weaknesses

Tox RPG is an indie, table-top roleplaying game (RPG) designed for people who enjoy:

  • Characters with supernatural, technological, or superhuman powers.
  • Strong characters and dramatic stories.
  • A balance of strategy and story.

Tox RPG provides many simple abilities that can be customized and themed.  You and your friends  can create any character or setting.  Gameplay is quick.  Customizable powers and weaknesses help make each character’s personality a central part of the game.

Tox focuses on character and story with a unique twist: every use of a power also fuels a character’s unique weakness.  The relationship between powers and weaknesses gives players compelling strategic and narrative decisions about when to use a power.

If you’re interested in play testing Tox, join our email list.  You’ll get the latest updates and opportunities to play game creator Alec Sorensen.

Play Tox RPG

An RPG with design-it-yourself powers

RPG character builds monster robot.

If you’re playing for speed, you can design superhuman powers in a few short steps:

  • Pick one of 26 unique Gift mechanics.  Examples: Blast, Prophecy, Travel, etc.
  • Write a short, open-ended Theme that describes the nature of your Gift.  Examples: Eye lasers, Dreams, Flight.
  • Select a Power Level for your Gift, ranging from a simple uncanny knack to massive world changing ability.
  • Choose a Skill Level for your ability, increasing your characters chances to activate powers and use them in creative ways.

With these 4 stats, players can quickly design powers for a variety of characters.  A young runaway with dangerous, barely-controlled spells.  A cyborg with subtle, precise abilities.  However, players with time can customize more, adding unique limits or buffs to each Gift:

  • Tweak values like range, duration, and more.
  • Add requirements: actions, materials, or circumstances that needed to use a Gift.
  • Package Gifts together so they can be (or must be) activated all at once in a transformation.
  • And much more

A unique Achilles heel

RPG character enchants an object with shadow looming in the background.

Each use of a Gift adds to the character’s Tox.  Tox is a measure of bad karma that hinders the character.  However, Tox affects characters in different ways:

  • Players can pick from 7 different Tox Effects, from madness to physical damage to bad luck.
  • Players write an open-ended phrase as their Tox Theme to describe the effect.  For example: Meglomania, Harmful chemical side-effects, Jealousy of Hera.
  • As characters grow, they can spend points to increase their Tox Tolerance and become heroes of legend.  Heroes that could break mountains—without going mad.
  • The gaming group decides how characters can lower their Tox.  Does it return all at once after a rest? Or do characters have to get their hands on rare chemicals to keep their alien implants going?

Simple, customizable rules for the mundane

Of course, Tox isn’t only an RPG about super powers.  It has rules for training, skills, and items.  It has rules for wealth and status.  It even has a unique system for supernatural disadvantages called Banes that allow you to recreate the strange weaknesses of your favorite monster or malfunctioning android.  All of these systems are designed with Tox’s philosophy of “start simple, allow for customization.”

Play Tox RPG.

Tree background by David Revoy / CC-BY-SA-3.0