Neighbors

The city has always been shared. Most tenants just aren't on the lease.

There's something under the third arch of the viaduct, and it's shedding.

Public Works calls it spalling. The old neighborhood calls it bridge dandruff and leaves rice crackers by the east abutment. A contractor wants to foam-seal it. An inspector wants the bridge closed. Someone's already filming it for content.

You've got until dawn to work out what it actually needs.

Neighbors is a tabletop roleplaying game about coexisting with the uncanny things that live in a city — the infrastructure spirits, the boundary-keepers, the grudges given shape, the thing on parking level 4½. It takes its cue from yōkai folklore: the supernatural as a difficult neighbor to be negotiated with rather than a threat to be eliminated.

You don't ghostbust them. You find out what they want, and you broker terms everyone can live with.

HOW IT PLAYS

Every case looks like a monster and turns out to be a misunderstanding. The chupacabra isn't really out for goat.

• Roll 2d6 + a stat against 6, 8, or 10. That's the whole system.
• Three scenes, 30–45 minutes. Signs & Rumors → It Gets Worse → The Accommodation.
• Every Neighbor has a Surface Read and a Truth. What frightened people assume, and what it actually needs. Uncovering the gap is the game.
• Nobody dies — in either direction. A horde of tentacles is something you beat back with brooms. It can't be killed, and it can't kill you. Failure produces complications, not casualties.
• You win by making a small, mundane, slightly ridiculous arrangement. The morning bus pauses ten seconds at the east end. One unsold item gets left out at closing. The drainage seam reopens every March. That's a victory.

Built on TiGGR (Tiny Game for Generalized Roleplaying) — 2d6, pencil, paper, 2 to 5 people.

WHO YOU PLAY

Not chosen ones. Not kids on bikes. Adults with standing — because somebody has to actually convene the parties, sign the form, hold the ladder, get the bus to pause.

A bureau worker who needs the file to close cleanly. A shop clerk who just wants things back to normal. A retired sign-painter who knows which tags on the underside were load-bearing. The one person the Neighbors trust first.

Your characters will disagree, constantly, about what "handled" means — and that friction is the engine. Nobody walks away from the case. They just can't agree on when it's finished.

WHAT'S IN THE BOOK

• The Primer — what the game is and how it thinks
• Five 2d6 scenario tables — roll a complete case in five throws: the Neighbor, the Haunt, the Disturbance, what it actually wants, and who's making it harder
• Two archetype families — eleven guarded Caseworkers and five permeable "Unlocked," with the agendas that set them against each other
• Two complete scenarios, ready to run
• A conversion procedure — take any monster from film or folklore and run it through the engine, with a worked example and a clearly marked limit case for what the game won't metabolize
• Series guidance — running a campaign of episodes that rhyme without sharing continuity, and the Ledger that accumulates neighbors instead of kills

PRICE

Free. Not pay-what-you-want — just free. Download it, run it, hack it, publish your own scenarios.

Released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. Use it, sell your own scenarios built with it, keep the same spirit of openness. Credit the original.

IF YOU LIKE

Mushishi · Natsume's Book of Friends · The Host · the bathhouse politics of Spirited Away · Toriyama Sekien's night parade · every city that left an offering somewhere and forgot why

Built with the CGCG Helix by The Grey Ledger Society. Sweep east, not west.