Save Your Breath

On a forsaken asteroid mined by families locked in a generational feud, some dream of the stars. Others look to the wealth and freedom found at the bottom of an icy mine shaft. Now, during a dangerous storm, dreams, feuds, and familial frictions collide in the storm shelter. Save Your Breath is about love, isolation, families, and generational memory. It’s about small towns, loving families, and what you’d do to escape both.

Long Description

This could almost be a nice place to live… if you didn’t have to share it with them. On this forsaken asteroid mined by families locked in a generational feud, some dream of the stars. Some look to the wealth and freedom found at the bottom of the icy mine shafts. Now during a dangerous radiation storm, love, isolation, families, and generational memory collide here in the shelter.

Your home has a few names: Tyche; Mining District 8291f; 2194 KF. Most of you just call it the Rock. It’s a dirty clump of water ice, rock, methane ice, and some veins of assorted metals out here in the Kuiper Belt. Tough work mining that stuff, but it’s what drives the economy of the entire system these days.

The Lockbonnets and Hardthwaites have split the Rock for generations. Each family swears to a version of the past that makes the other into a problem, even if none of the residents were there and the stories have never matched. But no one’s letting it go. The isolation only makes the memories longer.

There are others on the Rock. The newcomer Abes, here for only two generations, are trying to make Tyche a verdant paradise; a world for more than a handful of hardscrabble miners. And the “stranger boat” has recently arrived on its tour of the Belt, with its handful of visitors here to provide services or lure residents away to “civilization.”

It’s a hard life in the Belt. Not everyone’s cut out for it. Sometimes, a person wants more. Or wants less. And now, in the midst of a radiation storm, everyone on the Rock is forced into the same place at the same time for the first time in decades. Secrets will be revealed. Barriers will break. At the edge of the Solar System, people are still people. Some joys—and pains—are universal.

Save Your Breath is a mechanics-light, feelings-heavy game about small towns, loving families, and what you’d do to escape both. It focuses on identity, relationships of all kinds, and what one does when the desires of one’s heart are in conflict.

Characters are mostly player-defined genders, but there are a few characters with set genders that will be matched by casting survey.

Some characters have romantic attachments or romantic possibilities. Several characters have aro/ace-friendly relationships. Relationship preferences will be on the casting survey.