Introducing
Nocturne
A tabletop role-playing game about the things that follow us into the dark.
Nocturne is a therapeutic tabletop RPG where the monsters are metaphors and the goal isn't to win, it's to meet what haunts you. It’s a narrative-driven tabletop roleplaying experience built around emotional exploration, symbolism, externalization, and self-discovery. Rather than simply defeating the monsters you encounter, Nocturne asks a different question:
What if the monster is trying to tell you something?
Nocturne is a game about meeting yourself in the dark.
Most tabletop roleplaying games ask players to defeat monsters. Nocturne asks what those monsters might mean.
You might not be ready to talk directly about grief, shame, rage, abandonment, identity, or fear.
But you might be ready to ask:
Why does my character keep running from this creature?
What happens if we stop fighting it?
What would it mean to let it go?
That is where Nocturne lives.
Sometimes the things that are hardest to approach directly become easier to explore when they belong to someone else, even if that “someone else” is a character you created.
Nocturne uses fantasy as psychological distance. A monster can become grief. A haunted landscape can become a memory. A relationship between characters can illuminate something about our own relationships.
You aren't required to say, “This is about me.”
You can start with:
“I wonder what this means.”
The Monsters
Phantoms
What follows you.
Phantoms may embody grief, shame, fear, rage, abandonment, or other experiences that linger long after the original wound.
Beasts
What keeps you alive.
Beasts may represent survival responses, impulsivity, addiction, defensiveness, or patterns that once protected you.
Horrors
What you cannot easily name.
Horrors may emerge around identity, meaning, existential questions, fragmentation, and larger struggles with being.
Horrors
Beasts
The Witness
In Nocturne, the facilitator is called The Witness.
The Witness does not simply run the game. They observe, guide, pace, individualize, and help maintain the container of the experience.
They hold the world while the players explore what happens inside it.
Who is Nocturne for?
For curious people.
For tabletop roleplayers who want something stranger, deeper, and more introspective than a traditional campaign.
For storytellers.
For people interested in symbolism, narrative, character psychology, and stories that don't always resolve neatly.
For clinicians.
Nocturne may also be used as a therapeutic adjunct when facilitated by an appropriately qualified clinician.
Nocturne is not psychotherapy and is not intended to replace psychotherapy.