Fight With Spirit

In August 2025 we presented the digital edition of Fight With Spirit, the sports drama RPG from Storybrewers Roleplaying (Good Society). Your high school or college sports team pursues the championship in one of many different sports, even fantastic competitions that don’t exist in our world. Play episodes of your own anime-style or cinematic series, from opening credits through training sequences and pre-game challenges to the tense match itself. Along the way you’ll face down rivals, explore friendships and feelings, and strive to prove yourself. The real stakes for your team are love, hope, and passion, as you grow up together and share your lives until this time ends.

Fight With Spirit is built to tell sports stories inspired by anime such as Free!, Run with the Wind, and Chihayafuru, as well as high school movies like Bring It On and Remember the Titans. But Fight with Spirit is a flexible system designed to work with a wide variety of sports, from popular options like soccer to intellectual competitions like chess – historical stories like A League of Their Own – even fictional sports like the triwizard tournament or Legend of Korra‘s Pro-Bending. The only requirement is that the two sides face off against each other at the same time. As you battle through a major tournament, your relationships and motivations will change as you connect on and off the court.

Character creation and gameplay in Fight With Spirit are card-driven, and this offer includes all 128 Trait, Condition, and Match cards as print-and-cut .PDFs. Your character has two Traits like Late Bloomer, Tempting Offer, Back From Disgrace, or Still Recovering. Trait cards have leading questions like “Who do you think can’t live up to your standards?” or “Who have you misled about your future here?” Questions printed in orange guide your relationship with other player characters; questions colored pink determine connections to nonplayer characters. The pregame warmup ends with the players jointly choosing your team’s Heart (Laughing, Troubled, or Heavy) and Session Zero-style ground rules.

The path to the tournament championship fills several play sessions covering Quarters, Semis, and the Grand Final. Each session focuses on one match: the players’ daily life beforehand, a pre-game social event that dramatizes relationships, and the match itself. As you roleplay, you may resolve your character’s Traits; you discard the Trait card and earn various rewards, possibly including a Condition such as In the Limelight, At a Crossroads, Worried for Someone, or Awaiting Judgment. At many points in the story, players can offer each other “trouble tokens” that complicate the characters’ lives via connections or circumstances. If you accept a trouble token, you also gain a “fight token” you can spend for a bonus during the match.

The session’s final contest, the match, has distinct mini-games like Opening Moves, Final Moments, and Showdown. In a mini-game, you select a Match card that describes a momentary situation along with an expected interaction with another player. You’re trying to score points – but not the way you think. These “points” aren’t actual goals in the sport you’re playing, but abstract headway or setbacks important to your character: highlight moments, a face-off against your rival, or whether you’re gaining momentum (independent of the current score). For instance, the Match card “Look at Me Now!” says, “Lock eyes from a distance with the person you hope to impress. Ask with your glance: What would it take to impress you?” The named player responds, and then a card draw determines whether your action impresses them. You can spend “spirit tokens” to get more draws, and fight tokens to adjust the cards’ value.

The winner’s team scores 1 point. The team with the most points at the end of the match wins that tournament round – although the technical victory on the field is secondary to your characters’ changed attitudes and Conditions. As in the best sports dramas, the tournament is a backdrop, a framework; you gain the real prizes both on and off the field.

Want to know more? On the Storybrewers YouTube channel the designers have posted a team and character creation tutorial and a lengthy gameplay tutorial.

This all-new Fight With Spirit Quick Deal presented the complete non-watermarked, DRM-free Fight With Spirit Digital Edition core rulebook, along with four Setpieces (scenarios): Carry Your Bat (Victorian-era cricket), Swing for the Future (the early days of American baseball), Skyball: Reach New Heights (magic and maneuver in the Cloud City Apprentices Cup), and The Hadean Games (the underworld counterpart of the ancient Greek Olympics).