Welcome, dear reader! In this new “Parole de Rôliste” piece, I have the pleasure of talking with Daniel, creator of the new tabletop RPG Sylkaen (Vestiges). A game with a strongly marked setting and style: from its conception to what it offers at the table, everything about it speaks of mystery and “depth”. So grab your picks: we're going to have to dig…
Hello Daniel! You created Sylkaen. Can you walk us through this RPG in detail?
Hello! Gladly. The simplest way in is the gesture that sums up the whole game: in Sylkaen, you dig. And one line from the book says better than I can why that is dizzying: “You don't dig a hole, in Sylkaen. You pierce worlds.”
That's the founding idea. The world your characters live in is not the first one. It rests on the stacked corpses of those that came before. The universe has gone through a succession of Cycles, entire ages, each one closed by a catastrophe called a Rupture.
And each time, what existed doesn't really disappear. It settles. It becomes ground. Your characters walk, plough and build their cities on the compressed ruin of civilizations that believed themselves eternal.
So let's start at the surface and go down together. Up top is the Crown-World and its peoples, the inhabited world of roads, cities, wars and harvests. Twenty peoples live there, in four great families, and that split is not cosmetic: it tells you how each relates to the world's past.
- The Founders are the eight peoples shaped by history and politics, Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Halflings, Orcs, Goblins and the rest. They form the backbone of the present world, and their relationship with the ruins is frankly utilitarian: what sleeps under their feet is a resource, a treasure, a diplomatic argument.
- The Ancients were sculpted by extreme environments rather than empires, Saurians, Aeris of the heights, Nereans of the depths, Felyrs, Khepras. They have a patience measured in millennia, never sought to dominate anything, and watch the Founders' agitation with a kind of weary politeness.
- The peoples of the Strata are far rarer and far stranger. There are only three, and each carries in its flesh the imprint of a function of the Cosmos itself. The Eclipsed come from what might have been. The Morphids, from what changes. The Mnesics, from what is remembered. Peoples born not of a land, but of a principle.
- And then there are the peoples of the Vestiges, my favourites to write: four peoples who are themselves living remnants of vanished Cycles. The Lithari are stone, the Ferrans metal, the Verreans crystal, the Sylvans plant-life. They live extremely long, they descend from a world that no longer exists, and playing one of them means playing an antique that still walks.
Beneath the surface lie the Sediments, the world's physical verticality, where a great many adventures happen. Six tiers, from nearest to deepest: the Living Crust, the Foundations, the Bed of Ruins, the Bedrock, the Deaf Layers, and at the very bottom, the Bottomless. The rule is simple and perfectly unnerving: the deeper you go, the stranger the world used to be there. Each tier is one Cycle older than the last. Going down on a rope isn't dungeon-crawling, it's climbing back through time, metre by metre.
The Bedrock is the hinge, and it's a threshold I'm quite proud of: above it, the laws of physics and magic your characters know still hold. Below, they don't. Certainty stops there. As the book puts it, dig deep enough and it always stops being archaeology and becomes cosmology.
Then there are the Strata, which are not the same thing at all: the distinction is the game's signature. The Sediments are physical: you go down with a rope and a lantern. The Strata are not spatial at all. You don't descend into them. You tip over into them.
There are five: the Stratum of Memories, where what has been settles; the Stratum of Possibles, where what never happened persists; the Stratum of Time; of Metamorphoses; and of Silence. Not old-school parallel planes, not elsewheres: they are the layers Sylkaen itself deposited as it collapsed, again and again.
And the Cosmos is the container. It is not limited to Sylkaen. Other worlds exist, separated from ours precisely by the Strata, and the oldest traditions hold Sylkaen to be “one threshold among a multitude”. I've left those other worlds almost entirely blank. Sylkaen is the first, the one where every story begins, but it doesn't mark the edges.
One detail I love: there is no official cosmology in the game. Priests, mages and philosophers each have their version; they contradict one another, and nobody can prove which is right. Your characters will never get the answer. They'll get clues, and they'll have to decide.
What you bring back up are the Vestiges, objects, fragments, machines, remnants. And a Remnant of Sylkaen is never a sword with a bonus: it carries an Echo, a still-active trace of the Cycle that produced it. It has a memory. Sometimes it has an opinion.
So the game's promise is this: you play people, ordinary or not, in a world that has already forgotten everything a dozen times. You descend beneath your own cities. You bring back things that were buried for good reasons. And the real question in a session of Sylkaen is almost never “can we open the door”. It's “should we have”.
What makes this setting stand out? How does that excavation of the past show up in actual play?
In one sentence: the past is not scenery in Sylkaen. It is a working part of the world. It still functions, it has effects, and it does not agree to keep quiet.
That was my obsession throughout the writing. Everyone has put evocative ruins in their setting; if they only exist to look good in an illustration, why bother? So my rule was to ask one idiotically effective question at every step: concretely, what does this change for the people who live here? If a piece of lore changed nothing in someone's daily life, out it went.
The result runs down into the game's foundations, most visibly in three places players touch constantly.
Magic. For the first release I wrote two spell families, and neither is an abstract school of “fire versus ice”. The first works Vestiges and Resonance: you make what has existed vibrate, you wake a trace, you force an object or a place to replay a fragment of what it lived through. The second works Strata and Thresholds: you open a passage toward a layer of the Cosmos, and you let something through, in one direction or the other. Casting a spell in Sylkaen is never producing energy out of nothing. It is always making contact with something that was already there. The mage isn't a battery; the mage is an intermediary. And intermediaries sometimes get answered.
Items. Two very clear categories, and players get the difference within one session: Crafted items are what today's artisans still know how to make, safe, expensive, predictable. Remnants come from a vanished Cycle and carry an Echo, a still-active trace of their era. A Remnant is never a sword with a small bonus. It is a fragment of someone else, still carrying momentum. Around the table it completely transforms the loot moment: instead of the “I equip it” reflex, players look at each other and hesitate. Who carries it? Do we sell it, and to whom? Do we put it back where we found it? What used to be a bookkeeping line becomes a scene.
The gods. Same principle, pushed all the way into theology. In Sylkaen, what is eternal are the Laws, abstract principles structuring the Cosmos. The gods are mortal on the cosmic scale: they rise, embody a Law for a time, then fade and are replaced. The current pantheon counts fifteen figures, including fallen gods, Laws lost along the way. For a believing character it changes everything: the god they serve wasn't there a few thousand years ago and may not be there tomorrow. Faith stops being a line on a character sheet.
There is also no official truth, and I hold to that. I wrote the competing traditions, not the answer. For a GM it's a gift rather than a gap: no official chronology to be afraid of betraying, just sources that argue, and you side with whichever makes your game better. For players it produces a feeling rare in fantasy: actually investigating. You don't wait to be recited the lore. You cross-check, you doubt, and you end up deciding for yourselves.
At the table, the typical shape of a Sylkaen scenario is the descent. It always starts with a mundane, present-day problem. A spring that ran dry. A village where all the children share the same dream. A mine that pierced something it shouldn't have. Nothing cosmic, a neighbourhood problem. Then you go down, and since the world is stacked in Sediments, each tier you cross is a Cycle older than the last. Nobody needs to announce “you are entering a dangerous zone”. Players feel it on their own, because the scenery no longer resembles them.
That's where the game's nature tips over. In the upper layers you're doing archaeology: collecting, dating, understanding. Past a certain depth you're doing cosmology, which is a different activity altogether. It's no longer you studying what you find. It's what you find starting to take an interest in you.
And the end of a scenario rarely takes the form of “boss defeated, we go home”. It takes the form of a decision. Do we seal it up, or leave it open? Warn the city above, or keep silent to avoid a panic? Bring the Remnant back, or let it sleep? Digging is never neutral in Sylkaen. You don't recover loot, you disturb something. And the question that stays on the table at the end of the night is almost never “did we manage to open the door”. It's “should we have”.
Let's talk about the game system. What is it built on?
On the SRD 5.2.1, under Creative Commons, in plain terms, the fifth-edition rules core many players already know. If you've played any fantasy game these last years, you're operational in ten minutes, reflexes intact.
I own that choice without hesitation: I didn't want to reinvent a system. My subject was the world. Sylkaen already asks you to learn an entire cosmology; the rules shouldn't be one more obstacle.
I did hold to one strict principle: the dual system. On one side, what's mine, the world, the peoples, the pantheon, Sylkaen's own classes, the items, the creatures. On the other, the generic rules, which stay generic and are never renamed. A Dexterity is called a Dexterity; the flavourful terms live only in the setting pages. Formalism, yes, but it bought me two things: perfect legal hygiene, with no grey zone between what's open and what's mine, and unexpected portability. Because world and rules were separated from the first line, I could port part of the range to the 3.5 SRD under the OGL without touching the world.
That said, there is real original mechanical content: the traits of all twenty peoples, calibrated against the SRD species chassis; all the spells, without a single borrowing; the Remnants' Echo mechanic; and some fifty creatures with full profiles. The core is familiar so the strangeness can live elsewhere. That was exactly the point.
How did you get the idea? What was the trigger?
It starts from a reader's frustration, and not a glorious one. I've played and run games for a long time, and I ended up noticing that almost every fantasy setting tells its History the same way: a nice straight line. A founding empire, a fall, a dark age, a renaissance: there, you can play. Everything neat, everything dated, often with a chronology in the appendix.
But that's not at all what you feel in front of real ruins. In front of a real ruin you see one layer. What lay beneath is illegible. What's told about it is half false. Specialists argue, guidebooks simplify, and the truth has probably been lost for ages. That feeling of uncertainty, that slight vertigo, was exactly what I couldn't find anywhere.
The trigger was a change of mental image. I stopped seeing the world as a timeline and started seeing it as a stack. A millefeuille. Not “there was an empire a thousand years ago”, but “there is an empire under your feet, forty metres down, and another one beneath it”.
From there everything fell into place almost by itself, which is usually a good sign. If ages stack, something must separate them: the Ruptures. If they stack physically, you can climb down into them: the Sediments. If the stacking leaves traces that aren't physical: the Strata. If peoples live on top of all this, they don't all relate to what sleeps below the same way: the four families of peoples. Each consequence called the next.
The best surprise was theological. I realized that if the ages stacked, the gods could stack too. That's where the idea came from, eternal Laws carried by ephemeral gods who rise, embody a principle for a time, then fade and are replaced. It wasn't premeditated; the founding premise produced it. Those are my favourite moments in writing: when the world offers you something you hadn't planned.
A second, quieter thing mattered. I wanted a setting where the GM isn't afraid of being wrong. I've seen too many tables where someone hesitates to invent because they dread contradicting an official canon they haven't finished reading. A world with holes in its memory is a world where the GM's improvisation is structurally legitimate: if the sources already contradict each other, your version is as good as any. That was a design intention as much as a theme.
And to be completely honest, the real fuel was simpler. I wanted to find in a book the feeling I'd had around certain tables: the moment when the group goes a little too deep, understands a little too late that it shouldn't have, and nobody speaks for a few seconds. Sylkaen was born from the desire to reproduce that silence.
Anything else we should know about Sylkaen?
Three things, one of which I'd rather say myself than let you discover. First, where the range stands: this is not a work-in-progress announcing intentions. The books exist and are finished. A Player's Book of just over two hundred pages, a Game Master's Book of comparable size, a complete Bestiary, and ready-to-play scenarios. Everything exists in French and English, and the whole range is also available for the 3.5 SRD and for 5e. It's sold as a single pack, both systems included, around twenty euros.
The Bestiary deserves its own mention. Beyond the game profiles, every creature has a lore page written like a codex entry: where it comes from, which Cycle it is the remnant of, what people say about it and what part of that is true. You can read it without playing: I took an almost guilty pleasure in writing it.
Second, Sylkaen is a deliberately unfinished project, and I hold to that. Entire spell families set aside for later. Scenarios in reserve for high levels. Regions barely sketched on the map. Cycles we know almost nothing about. And whole worlds behind the threshold that remain rumours. These are not boxes I didn't have time to fill: they are room I leave for the tables. For a setting whose central theme is memory full of holes, shipping a hermetically complete product on day one would have felt almost contradictory. A GM who plants their campaign in one of my blank zones isn't tinkering behind my back: they're doing exactly what the game expects of them.
Finally, transparency about the illustrations and the writing. The range's images are produced with the help of AI, as are the proofreading and the English translations. I say it clearly, I document it, and I don't intend to hide it. That choice has a real cost and I pay it: some distribution platforms flatly refuse games containing AI; others impose labels that make you less visible; part of the specialized press won't open the book. I could have said nothing, as some do. But I believe a buyer has the right to know what they're buying and to decide with full knowledge. If someone prefers to walk away for that reason, that's a perfectly legitimate position, and I'd take that a thousand times over a good surprise turning bad three months later.
So: a world finished in its rules, open in its margins, and honest about how it was made.
In your view, what is the strength of tabletop RPGs?
It's the only medium where the story was written by no one before it existed. A novel, a film, a series, even a very open video game: someone, somewhere, already decided the ending. You can discover it: you can't produce it. Around a table, no. Nobody knows. Not even the GM, not really, because one unexpected player decision is enough to send everything elsewhere.
That shared uncertainty is the heart of it. There are moments when five people discover at the same time what has just happened, including the one who caused it. Nobody was a spectator. Nobody can say “I was told this story”. We did it together, live, without a net. No other pastime makes that.
That's why you remember a session twenty years later. I can recount in detail a scene played years ago with people I no longer see, while I've forgotten half the films I watched last year. Not because the scene was better written, because I was responsible for something in it.
There's a second, quieter strength. Tabletop RPG is probably the only entertainment where you spend hours sincerely trying to think like someone else. You don't play an avatar; you play a person with their fears, limits and blind spots, and you're forced to ask what they would do, even when it's foolish or costly. As an empathy exercise disguised as a hobby, it's hard to beat.
And then there's the plain fact of being together. Real people, in one room or on one screen, granting each other hours of uninterrupted mutual attention. In 2026, that's not nothing. It's one of the last activities that demands you fall silent to listen to someone tell a story, and then truly answer them.
Some clichés paint RPGs as reserved for initiates. Your opinion?
I think we took an access problem and turned it into a legend. Seen from outside it does look closed: technical vocabulary, table habits nobody writes down anywhere. But that's true of any hobby with its own culture, listen to two cooking enthusiasts discuss fermentation, same wall. Except here, what the wall hides is utterly ordinary: telling a story together and wondering what happens if we try something. We all did that at seven in a schoolyard.
Two clichés worth dismantling: no, you don't need to do voices. The best players I've seen weren't the most demonstrative, they were the ones who listened. And no, you don't need to have read the whole book: it's a reference work, not an entrance exam.
I can see concretely that the closed-club story doesn't hold. I run several tables in parallel, some with players over fifty, others with players in their twenties. Watching new generations try the hobby genuinely delights me, and what strikes me is that they arrive with very different references but hook onto exactly the same thing: the moment their decisions start to matter.
That's also why I built Sylkaen on a known rules core rather than inventing my own. I'd rather the difficulty be in the world, not in the instruction manual. The real obstacle isn't rules complexity, it's finding a table and a patient first GM. Not an intelligence problem: a meeting problem. Once that bridge is crossed, the rest comes with time.
Is there a question you wish I had asked?
Yes, a very practical one, because I fear I gave a false impression by talking so much about descent: do you have to dig to play Sylkaen? No. Absolutely not. You can run an entire campaign without setting foot underground.
On the surface there's politics first. The eight Founder peoples form the world's backbone; they have borders, debts, alliances and grudges, and their relationship to the ruins is openly self-interested. A campaign entirely about who controls a dig site, without ever going down, stands perfectly well. The best conflicts of Sylkaen are property conflicts.
There are the peoples' own stories. Playing a group of Lithari or Ferrans means playing beings who are themselves the living remains of a vanished Cycle, in a world that looks at them as antiques and hesitates between venerating and exploiting them. Nothing to excavate there: the past is you.
There's religious investigation, a terrain I love. Sylkaen's gods are mortal on the cosmic scale; they rise, fade, and some have fallen. A campaign can be about understanding why a Law no longer answers, or who is currently rising. That plays out in temples and libraries, not tunnels.
And remember: the Strata, unlike the Sediments, are not a place you descend into. You tip over into them, which means the strange doesn't wait to be fetched. A Remnant can arrive in town with a caravan, a threshold can open in an attic, and an entire district can start remembering something that never happened.
The descent is the game's emblematic gesture, but it's one door among several. Sylkaen isn't a basement game. It's a game about what the past does to the living, and that plays just as well in full sunlight.
One more word on AI. What it does here: the illustrations, the proofreading, the English translation. What it doesn't do: the world. The Cycles, the peoples, the gods, the spells, the creatures, the scenarios come out of my notes, over years. A machine has no reader's frustration, and a reader's frustration is what started this project. And on the images, it isn't a button you press: I had an art guide written before the first illustration, a Vestige is not a dungeon, a Lithari is not a golem, a Ferran is not a robot. Making that hold takes many attempts and many rejections. It won't convince everyone, and that's not the goal. I'm just saying where the line runs: Sylkaen would have existed without AI. It would have had fewer images, worse English and more typos.
Thank you Thibaut for your questions, and above all for doing what JDR-Mania does: showing that this hobby truly is for everyone. A good journey to those who push open Sylkaen's door.