Bound
Section IThe Contract
In Bound, every player character draws their power from Contracts — binding agreements forged with powerful entities. Gods, spirits, fey lords, eldritch intelligences, or abstract forces of the universe itself. Power is never free. Every gift comes with a leash.
Each Contract has three parts:
Lysra's Contract with the Goddess of Life — Grant: heal wounds, cure disease, sense living things, bolster vitality. Binding: you shall not take a life by your hand or will. Grey: "by your hand or will" — does gravity count? Does negligence?
Section IIResolution
When the outcome of an action is uncertain, roll six-sided dice. The number of dice you roll depends on how your action relates to your Contracts.
| Situation | Dice |
|---|---|
| Within your Grant — using your contracted power | Roll 3d6, take highest |
| Mundane action — outside any Contract | Roll 2d6, take highest |
| Against your Binding — violating your oath | Roll 1d6 |
| Exploiting the Grey — see below | Roll 2d6, GM rolls Arbiter Die |
Read the highest die result:
| Result | Outcome |
|---|---|
| 6 | Critical success. It works better than you planned. The patron approves — or the world bends in your favor in a way that feels like more than luck. |
| 5 | Success. You achieve what you intended. |
| 2 – 4 | Partial success. You get what you want, but with a complication, cost, or compromise. |
| 1 | Failure. Things go wrong, and there may be consequences. On 2d6 or more, failure is impossible — there is always something to work with. |
Hard & Dire
Some actions push against the weight of the world. When the GM declares a situation Hard, subtract 1 from your highest die after rolling. When the GM declares it Dire, subtract 2. A result cannot drop below 1.
| Modifier | When | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Hard (−1) | The action is impossible for a normal human — only someone carrying a Contract would even attempt it | Subtract 1 from highest die |
| Dire (−2) | The action violates natural law — defying forces that even patrons respect, breaking rules the world was built on | Subtract 2 from highest die |
Hard and Dire do not change the number of dice you roll — they change what the dice mean. Hard makes criticals impossible — a natural 6 becomes a 5, which is success but not spectacular. Dire makes both criticals and success impossible — a natural 6 becomes a 4, a partial. Under Dire conditions, the best outcome from any pool is a partial success. The patron's power still works. It just cannot work cleanly. The world is telling you: this is not supposed to work. Whether you try anyway is the character's choice, not the mechanic's.
GM: Use these sparingly. Most rolls in Bound need no modifier — the pool size already reflects the difficulty. Hard and Dire are for the moments that should feel desperate. If every other roll is Hard, nothing feels hard. Reserve these for the rolls the table will remember.
The Arbiter Die
When you exploit the Grey — acting in the ambiguous space of your Contract — roll 2d6 as normal, but the GM simultaneously rolls 1d6: the Arbiter Die. If the Arbiter Die is higher than both of your dice, a Reckoning occurs. Your patron noticed. Your patron has opinions.
Resolve the action normally based on your highest die, then apply the Reckoning.
Section IIIReckoning
When you push the Grey too far or act directly against a Binding, your patron responds. The GM chooses or rolls for the consequence:
The beauty of Narrowing is that the system self-corrects. The more a player exploits ambiguity, the less ambiguity remains. The Grey is a finite resource that regenerates only through renegotiation.
Section IVGrowth & Renegotiation
There are no levels in Bound. Characters grow by renegotiating existing Contracts or forging new ones. This always happens in fiction — you must seek your patron (or a new one) and bargain in person.
Renegotiation follows the logic of the deal. Nothing is free:
Multiple Contracts
Characters may forge Contracts with more than one patron. Each is tracked separately with its own Grant, Binding, and Grey. The danger — and the drama — emerges when Bindings conflict.
Your Contract with the Goddess of Life says "do not kill." Your Contract with the Iron Duke says "never show mercy to the defeated." Someone surrenders. What do you do?
When Bindings conflict, you must break one oath to keep another. Reckoning follows accordingly. Choose wisely.
Section VDesperate Deals
When all seems lost, any player may cry out and make a Desperate Deal. There is no mechanical trigger — it is a narrative declaration, a moment of surrender:
"I call out to anything that will listen."
You do not choose who answers. The GM decides what entity arrives, and it is never the patron you would want. The Goddess of Life does not answer desperate pleas. Something hungrier does.
The Salvation
Describe what you need to happen right now. It happens. No roll. Automatic, total success at whatever you were attempting. This is the bait.
The Price
The GM writes the Binding — but writes it face-down. The player knows the broad shape of the deal ("you owe the Hollow King a debt") but the specific restriction reveals itself only when they would first naturally trigger it in play.
You made a Desperate Deal with the Whispering Court to survive a collapsing temple. Three sessions later, you try to lie to an NPC and the GM flips the card: "You shall speak no falsehood while the moon is visible." It is nighttime. It has been nighttime a lot lately.
The Structure of a Desperate Contract
The Escape Clause
Every Desperate Deal has one way out — but the patron sets the terms. A quest, a betrayal, a sacrifice of something dear. The GM reveals the Escape Clause when it is dramatically appropriate, not necessarily when the player asks.
Stacking
Desperate Deals do not replace existing Contracts. They accumulate. A reckless character may carry a negotiated Contract and two or three Desperate Deals, each with its own Binding, each without a Grey. Every action becomes a minefield of overlapping restrictions — a character who is powerful but increasingly trapped.
The Spiral
Optional rule. If a character accumulates three Desperate Deals, the entities begin to confer. They collectively present a Final Bargain — one Grand Contract that consolidates everything. The Grant is immense. The Binding is total. The character becomes something between a champion and a puppet. This is the endgame for those who leaned too hard on borrowed power.
Writing Good Desperate Bindings
Guidance for the GM — the best Desperate Bindings are ironic (connected to the moment of weakness), creeping (not immediately catastrophic but increasingly inconvenient), socially complicated (forcing strange behavior around others), and conflicting (contradicting an existing Contract so the player must eventually break one oath to keep another).
Section VICharacter Creation
A character in Bound fits on an index card. Follow these steps:
- Name your Patron — and the domain they represent.
- Write the Grant — three or four things your Contract empowers you to do.
- Write the Binding — one or two things you cannot do, or must always do.
- Write the Grey — one clause with deliberate, exploitable ambiguity.
- Choose three mundane skills — things you can do that have nothing to do with your Contract. Fighting, sneaking, persuading, crafting, sailing, cooking — anything that grounds you as a person beyond your power.
- Name yourself.
That is all you need. Play begins when the ink dries.
Section VIIMaking It Yours
The settings, patrons, grants, and bindings in this book are starting points — sparks to light your own fire. They are not canon. There is no canon. There is only your table, your story, and whatever you and your GM agree is true.
Inventing Patrons
Work with your GM to create a patron that fits the story you want to tell. All you need is a domain (what the entity cares about), a personality (how it treats those who serve it), and a hunger (what it wants from the world). A patron can be anything powerful enough to offer a Contract and interested enough to enforce one — a forgotten god, a sentient storm, a dead empire's last law, the concept of debt given will and appetite.
Writing Your Own Grants and Bindings
Grants should be broad enough to be creative with and short enough to fit in a sentence. "You can command fire" leaves room for a hundred different uses. "You deal 2d6 fire damage in a 15-foot cone" does not. Trust the fiction. Trust the table.
Bindings should be behavioral, not mechanical. They restrict what your character does, not what your character sheet allows. "You shall not lie" is a Binding. "You take -2 to Deception checks" is not. The best Bindings are the ones that hurt most in the moments that matter most.
The Settings Are Kindling
The settings that accompany these rules are invitations, not instructions. Mix them, break them apart, steal the pieces you love, and discard the rest. Run the Grind's Institutions in a fantasy city. Put the Ember's dying sun over a modern world. Invent a setting that has never existed and populate it with patrons no one has imagined yet. The system does not care about genre. It cares about oaths, loopholes, and the people caught between them.
If something at your table is working — a patron, a mechanic, a tone — it is correct. If something is not working, change it. The contract between this game and its players has the widest Grey of all: whatever makes the best story.