Kids on Bikes — Kids, bikes and small-town weirdness

"Grab your bike. The grown-ups won't believe you anyway."

Diced4–d20 (one die per stat)

Players2–6

Prep~15 min

Foundry VTTCommunity

Complexity

What is this system

Kids on Bikes is a rules-light RPG by Jonathan Gilmour and Doug Levandowski about everyday people, usually kids and teens, facing terrifying forces they can't defeat, control or even fully understand. The whole group builds the town, its secrets and the ties between the characters together. Each stat gets its own die from d4 to d20, and failures bank Adversity Tokens for later. The 2024 second edition from Hunters Books and Renegade Game Studios refines the Powered Character rules and expands the GM section. Its sibling game, Kids on Brooms, takes the same engine to a school of magic.

Setting

A small American town with woods behind the school, an abandoned factory on the outskirts and strange lights over the highway at night. You pick the era: Stranger Things eighties, the nineties or today. The town is built by questions around the table: who really runs it, what everyone knows but won't say, and why nobody goes near the old water tower.

What it looks like at the table

An unmarked van picks up speed and your teen pedals hard for the bridge. Flight is a d10 and the GM sets the difficulty at 9. You roll a 7, two short. You spend two Adversity Tokens banked from earlier failures: +2, total 9. You duck under the barrier while the van screeches to a halt at the river's edge. Had the die shown a 10, it would have exploded: roll again and add.

Playstyle

Mystery Narrative Modern Weird

Key mechanics

A die for every stat

Six stats (Brains, Brawn, Fight, Flight, Charm and Grit) each get one die from d4 to d20. Rolling the maximum explodes: roll again and add. With time to plan, you can skip the roll and take half the die's top value.

Adversity Tokens

Every failed check earns an Adversity Token. Each token is +1 on a future roll or fuel for your character's Strengths. Today's failures become tomorrow's heroics.

A shared town

Players answer questions together about the town and how their characters know each other. Tropes like the Brilliant Mathlete, the Popular Kid or the Loner Weirdo make building a character fast.