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Between & Beyond

"Everything daemoniacal holds an intermediate place between what is divine and what is mortal."
"What is his power and nature?" I inquired.
"He interprets and makes a communication between divine and human things, conveying the prayers and sacrifices of men to the Gods, and communicating the commands and directions […] from Gods to men. He fills up that intermediate space between these two classes of beings, so as to bind together, by his own power, the whole universe of things."

— Diotima, in Plato, Symposium, 202d–e, translated by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)

Play those who stand between us and what exceeds us.

Between & Beyond is a tabletop role-playing game about our relationship with what exceeds us — death, time, the divine, the unknown — and about the figures that myths, religions, fantasy, and science fiction have invented to reach it: gods, angels, psychopomps, revenants, vampires, intelligences from elsewhere.

The game takes seriously those who stand in this in-between.

It begins from a simple premise:

A Power becomes present in the world through its Agents.
An Agent is not entirely determined by it: through contact with the world, they become other.

The players take on the roles of these Agents. What This Game Is About explains why.

Horizon, Powers, Agents​

A Horizon is something that exceeds us, such as Death or the Divine. Several Powers are its forms, depending on the age and the culture. Each becomes present in the world through its Agents. A game can explore a single Horizon or bring together Powers from several.

The game calls Becoming the part of a being or the world that is not entirely determined by what it already is. Humanity is often a major source of it — through relationships, creations, institutions, and contradictions — but Humanity does not have a monopoly on Becoming. Other Agents, other forms of life, environments, events, or chance may just as well make an Agent become other.

Every Agent answers four questions:

  1. What horizon exceeds you? — the Horizon, and the Power that gives it form for you.
  2. How does it pass through you? — the Bond, and its traits.
  3. What have you become through contact with the world? — your Anchors.
  4. What can appear in the world that your Power does not yet contain?

Contents​