If you’ve been following along with the development of The Plain, you know that one of our goals has always been to bring this world to the tabletop. We’ve been crowd forging the world with all of you for a while now, and getting to actually play in it is, honestly, a big part of why we’re doing any of this.
So we’ve been looking at game systems. And right now, the one that keeps rising to the top of the pile is the Year Zero Engine (YZE) from Free League Publishing — the same engine that powers games like Mutant: Year Zero, Forbidden Lands, and Alien. Here are six reasons we think it could be the right fit for Kethar.
1. It’s Built for Harsh, Dangerous Worlds
The Year Zero Engine was originally designed for a post-apocalyptic world where every day is a fight to survive. Sound familiar? The Plain is not a place that forgives carelessness. Acid storms roll in without much warning. Tunnel cats hunt in packs. The Great Sand Slip swallows anything that sits still long enough. Even the most experienced guide on The Plain will tell you that knowing better and doing better are two very different things — and skipping the second one can get you killed.
YZE combat is fast and often deadly. Experienced characters don’t become bulletproof; the risks just get higher stakes attached to them. That’s exactly the tone we want when a group of adventurers is three months deep on The Plain with no help coming.
2. The Push Mechanic Rewards Desperation
Here’s one of our favorite things about the YZE: the push roll. When you fail a dice roll, you can push it — re-roll the dice and try harder. But pushing always costs you something. Maybe you take damage. Maybe you take stress. Maybe you hand the GM a Doom Point to use against you later.
That tension is the Plain in mechanical form. Think about old Blu from Floomton, rubbing night swarmer blood all over himself and lying still while the swarm crawled over him. That is a man who has pushed every roll he has left. There’s nothing graceful about it. It’s desperate, it’s costly, and it works — barely. The YZE gives us a mechanical way to put players in that exact kind of moment, over and over again.
3. Archetypes Fit Our Career System Naturally
We’ve already done a lot of work building out careers on The Plain — Mercenaries, Guides, Berry Traders, Placement Advisors, Stalkers, and more. The YZE uses archetypes (sometimes called roles or careers) as the foundation of character creation, and the system is designed so that archetypes reflect the setting.
That’s a clean match. We don’t have to fight the system to make a Mercenary feel different from a Stalker or a Buyer’s Consultant. Each archetype shapes your attributes, skills, starting specialties, and gear — which means a character built as a Mercenary is going to play differently from a Guide, right out of the box, just the way it should be on Kethar.
4. Skills Are Broad Enough to Stay Flexible
The YZE has twelve core skills — things like Survival, Marksmanship, Stealth, Crafting, and Persuasion — and the system is designed to stay broad by intention. The fine-tuning of characters happens through specialties (also called talents), which are narrower abilities that give you an edge in specific situations.
That modularity is good news for us. We’re building a world that has rail guns and dog oxen, acid storms and agdal farms. We need a system that can handle a frontier setting with some unusual technology and weird creatures without bending itself into knots. YZE lets us add, remove, and rework skills and specialties without blowing up the rest of the game. We can make it feel like Kethar without rewriting the whole engine.
5. The License Is Genuinely Open
This one matters a lot from a practical standpoint. Free League has published a Free Tabletop License for the Year Zero Engine, and it’s actually friendly. You can use the YZE SRD to build your own tabletop game — print it, sell it, put it in a PDF — as long as you include a notice that your game isn’t affiliated with or endorsed by Free League, and include a copy of the license. You own your game. They own the SRD. Nobody’s fighting over it.
For a project like The Plain, that’s huge. We want to be able to publish a full RPG setting — not just a skin on someone else’s rulebook — and the YZE license gives us a solid legal foundation to do exactly that.
6. It’s Easy to Learn, Hard to Put Down
One of the things we love most about this community is that it’s full of people at all different levels of tabletop experience. Some of you have been rolling dice since before we were born. Some of you are just now figuring out what an attribute score is. The YZE was designed with that in mind.
The basics are genuinely easy to pick up. Roll your dice, look for a 6, see what happens. The depth comes in layers — push mechanics, specialties, conditions, stress, panic — and those layers add themselves naturally as you play. You don’t have to front-load a new player with a hundred rules before anyone has any fun. You just start playing.
That’s the kind of table we want to run for The Plain. Pull up a chair. Pick your career. Let’s find out if you make it back from the Plateau.
We haven’t locked anything in yet — this is still in the “kicking the tires” phase. But we wanted to share what’s been exciting us and get your thoughts. Have you played any Free League games? What do you think about the Year Zero Engine for The Plain? Drop it in the comments.
