Assassin’s Creed tabletop RPG focuses on its science fiction elements

The time-hopping Assassin’s Creed franchise, first launched by Ubisoft in 2007, has been adapted into a tabletop role-playing game by CMON and is now up for pre-order. But rather than placing one of its many, many existing and extremely popular historical timelines at the center of the action, the publisher has made the bold choice to center the game’s primary narrative throughline in the modern day. That’s right: Assassin’s Creed Roleplaying GameThis episode will be focusing on the Animus, a MacGuffin shaped futuristic piece of technology which lets people feel what it felt like to commit murder in distant times. A 130-page “quickstart” Animus Training ProgramDownload it now for free.

For the uninitiated, Animus technology is a form of virtual reality that reads latent fragments of a subject’s ancestral DNA and uses that biological information to reconstruct events from the past in an immersive simulation. Narratively, anyone who has ever enjoyed an Assassin’s Creed video game has been inhabiting a character from our own, modern era who is themselves placed inside the Animus machine. Their genetic information then tells their story, something that is periodically reminded to the player via short playable scenes and cutscenes.

But while many fans — including some here at Polygon — find the Animus aspect of Assassin’s Creed games to be either extremely confusing, needlessly complex, or both, CMON’s emphasis of it appears to be why Ubisoft ultimately greenlit the TTRPG.

“I think that’s exactly what got us the job,” CMON’s head of tabletop role-play, Francisco Nepitello (One RingIn a recent Polygon interview, he said: “There were several projects that were pitched to Ubisoft for a role-play game, but we were the only ones who actually presented the game with [an Animus-centric] angle.”

The weird part is — and stick with me here — the game actually sounds kind of cool. Nepitello said Assassin’s Creed Roleplaying GameThe Animus will constantly throw your characters in the middle of action. This allows you to play only the exciting portions of a TTRPG, and skip over the dull parts. If you’re playing in ancient Greece, for instance, you don’t have to worry about superfluous things like the currency system or even the specifics of the culture. You can just throw some dice, and then do awesome stuff.

“All we have to do is to play out, for example, a scene where you have to break into a temple and get something and get out,” Nepitello said. “So you inject the right amount of information to set up that situation. You don’t need to create the whole world. And that’s exactly why, during the same session or along several sessions, you can hop from one time frame to another without any problems at all.”

In fact, CMON’s new TTRPG won’t limit you to existing, mainline franchises in the long-running series for your time-hopping shenanigans. The game will also mine smaller video games, which some may say were overlooked. It includes Assassin’s Creed: Memories, a defunct 2015 trading card game for iOS. Final product also includes all new assassins, like Major Gallagher fighting Nazis during World War II France. Even better, players can create their assassins.

Naturally, character advancement will be a big part of the equation — just remember, it’s your modern-day character who’s leveling up, not their various historical antecedents.

“You will grow as an assassin during the game in different ways, but especially through the ‘bleeding’ effect,” Nepitello said, “where by getting into the Animus and reliving your ancestral memories as an assassin from the past, you inherit the abilities of your ancestor. […] As the game goes on, you’re growing in power because you start displaying those abilities — even in the modern day.”

Assassin’s Creed Roleplaying GameCustom dice is a feature that some people might not be comfortable with. Luckily there’s a free mobile app, available now, that will do all the dice rolling for you. The pre-order price for the game starts at $35, and goes up to $130 with 13 miniature assassins. There is also a nearly two-and-a-half-hour actual play video that gets into the nitty gritty of the game’s unique mechanics. The final physical product will be available by October 2024. A digital version of all the books is also expected to be released on DriveThruRPG before that date.

The next mainline Assassin’s Creed video game, Assassin’s Creed MirageIt is planned to release on October 5th.