WELCOME TO FLOWERBOUND.
Flowerbound is an erotic fantasy Role-Playing Game of collaborative imagination and kinky exploration.
A GAME THAT SIMULATES SEX, NOT COMBAT:
Flowerbound is built from first principles to make sex scenes, rather than fight scenes, the central aspect of play. The game's systems strive to provide a welcoming and open sexualized environment supporting a robust turn-based tactical sex-simulation that thoroughly queers the adversarial-cooperative binary. The rules of Flowerbound are designed from the ground up to never dictate your intent or your consent to you, allowing you to freely pursue or reject the sexual goals presented to you within the fictional events in your theater of the mind in whatever ways feel natural in the moment.
If you're looking for a Role-Playing Game that treats sex, rather than combat, as its primary realm of mechanical focus, you're reading the correct rulebook.
THE CORE FANTASY:
Flowerbound takes place in a set of fictional outer planes, afterlives, collectively referred to as the Starheart Lodge. There was a time when the Lodge visited the material plane to trade knowledge, goods, and opportunity with other realms, but long, long ago, beyond even immortal memory, a great calamity struck the material plane and all means of travel and trade were lost; all contact between the Lodge and the material plane was seemingly cut off from the rest of Creation.
One hope still exists. Souls, cast into the timeless void by the entropic material universe, can sometimes be detected and rescued, should those souls have just the right inclinations. It is a difficult process, but it is the only hope those souls have, as well as the only means by which the Starheart Lodge can grow it's population.
Each of the Starheart Lodge's planes compete to find and rescue those lost souls who departed their mortal life with a deep unfulfilled longing for a highly sexualized existence, the kind of highly sexualized existence that the Starheart Lodge offers to its denizens. For that has always been the nature of the Starheart Lodge and the planes it binds together, and the realm of desire in which it is best at calling souls back from oblivion.
As a player of Flowerbound, you are a soul that has, perhaps unknowingly, answered this call.
THE CORE MECHANICS:
The ultimate purpose of any game mechanic is to provide a definitive answer to a narrative question. Hit Points, for example, answer the very simple question: Can I keep fighting? In Flowerbound, you do not have (renamed) Hit Points, because merely answering the question of whether or not you can keep fucking, is not enough.
Flowerbound, rather than blindly imitating combat-focused systems that do not actually translate very well to simulating sex, operates on a novel set of foundational principles:
- In an Encounter between two partners, instead of there being one 'winner' and one 'loser', there is a win condition and a loss condition within each individual, independently, allowing cooperative play, adversarial play, and the full spectrum between, all within the same game mode.
- Stimulation is not Damage, and should not be treated as such: delivering too much Stimulation can be penalized just as much, if not more, than delivering too little.
- Orgasm is a state of play that changes the emergent nature of an Encounter; Orgasm is not an Encounter's hard-coded win or loss condition.
Flowerbound makes heavy use of typical dice rolls, in which you simply add numbers together to get results, but it also strongly features the more unique signed-difference roll, in which you get your result by rolling two dice and subtracting the second from the first, getting a number that can be negative, zero, or positive. Flowerbound will (almost) never ask you to multiply or divide, but to play, you will often need to do subtraction, in addition to addition.
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