Free RPGs

Welcome to the RPG section of 1KM1KT. Here you’ll find member submissions of tabletop pen and paper role-playing games. All of the RPGs available in this section are free for download and are generally in .pdf format. If you’re interested in submitting your own RPG for publication, please visit our submissions page for details or send it to us using our contact form.

Awesome! is a game of telling a story about just how awesome your characters are, and how they kick ass and take names accomplishing mighty feats of derring-do, blockbuster action movie style! For Awesome! characters, the question is not whether they succeed, only how awesome their success is!

Taking A Turn
In Awesome! the character’s action always succeeds–that’s what it means to be awesome. The only thing in question is just how much awesome you can cram into one turn. The player describes the awesome action that the character takes, including (if appropriate) what happens to any non-player characters as a result. The other players (excluding the Director) may, if they wish, vote whether the action is Awesome! or Lame! They need not wait until the action is over, but they may not vote on the same action twice. “Red punches the thug so hard he lands in the rolling chair and rolls back all the way across the room where the chair tips him out the window and he falls into the dumpster below.” “Agent X jumps onto the back of the shark and using his spear-gun as a spur, rides the shark like a surf-board all the way back to the beach.”

A game where you bring part of your own life into the game and then fictionalize it. You play yourself at a seance trying to connect to the spirit of a dead friend with whom you still have issues. The spirits are fictional versions of living people you know, and with whom you have a problematic relationship.

Bring reality into your game, and perhaps game into your reality.

Players: 3 or more
System: Rough Consensus
Need: Pencils, drinking glass, and a large piece of white paper

Written as part of The 1KM1KT / Free RPG Blog 24 Hour RPG Competition.

The document is supposed to be printed as an A5 booklet, therefor the blank pages.

Welcome, oh Seeker of the Dead
This game is about relationships – dysfunctional relationships. We will each bring one problematic relationship from our lives into the game, and in game it will be transformed into a fictional relationship to a spirit.

We will perhaps be able to resolve the issues of the relationships by contacting the spirits at a séance. Hopefully reliving the past and speaking to the dead will help us resolve our issues with the once living. Time will tell.

Before we begin let me first summarize the game we’re about to play. Then I’ll go into more detail about how you do specific parts of the game, and finally we’ll have time for an example and some
advice.

The Great Hamster Rebellion is where pet shop residents meet the Boxer Rebels. The Hamster Republic has been invaded by the robotic Mekaton, and only the mysterious and wise Master Keeton can lead young kung fu hamsters to victory!

For a thousand generations, the hundred tribes of the Hamster Republic lived in peace among themselves and with their neighbours. The Syrians lived alone as was their way, and the Dwarfs lived in small villages as was theirs, and popularly-elected Rulers supervised the happiness of all the tribes. All were content with their lives, living off the land.

Then came the Mekaton. They were autonomous machines from elsewhere, and the hamsters had never seen anything like them. They built massive installations and labyrinthine cities, and mined the earth for minerals to build more like them.

At first, the hamsters tried living peacefully alongside the Mekaton. There was plenty of room for everyone. Ruler Titus even adopted some Mekaton customs. But then, the land started to become poisoned and the waters polluted. The Mekaton were deaf to the hamsters’ complaints. The hamsters grew restless, but wherever their unrest boiled over to violence,
the force guns of the Mekaton made short work of their opponents.

It’s the 1950s. Or is it? You have the eerie feeling that you are being watched, that you are really a character in a B-movie.

And you don’t like the way the Directors look.

It’s time to find the Producer and get some answers.

It’s the ‘50s. Oddly, you can’t quite remember the year. You’re a pretty ordinary person, maybe just a tad better than the average joe, with a pretty exciting life. You’re a jungle explorer, a gangbuster, a private detective, a heroic scientist.

There’s just one problem: you swear you’ve seen this all in a movie.

You can’t quite put your finger on it, but reality just doesn’t seem to add up anymore. Maybe it’s the gaps in your memory; you don’t feel like you have a real past. Maybe it’s the way you suddenly “remember” someone you feel you’ve just
met. Maybe it’s the occasional moments of lost time. Or maybe it’s the way you can sometimes predict what’s about to happen, because it seems to be part of the “plot formula”.

There’s also more eerie evidence. The feeling you’re being watched. The way everything seems to be connected. The way the universe seems to conspire against you any time you try to “break the plot”. And those strangers in the shadows…

Whatever it is, you’re going to get to the bottom of it. And you know Keeton hasthe answers…

Atlantis is a roleplaying game where you play the last inhabitants of the Isle of Atlantis during its last days. Atlantis is burning and at midnight will sink into the sea, forever. Attempt to flee Atlantis while facing your Hopes, deeds, fears, and dooms before midnight, when Atlantis sinks under the waves forever.

Dulse is a game about relationships, ideals, and the choices we make to preserve or destroy them.

In addition to being the name of the game, Dulse is also a character – one who is literally central. The events that inform play, and the other three characters, revolve around Dulse.

Across five life-changing events, you and your friends will explore the sacrifices and betrayals of four people who’ve known each other their entire lives, and who have deep-seated needs that they can’t fill alone. Along the way you’ll make hard choices between competing ideals, and have more choices
made for you. In the end, you will face an uncertain future guided only by a shared past.

IDEALS
Relationships in a game of Dulse are informed by, and changed by, a set of conflicting ideals.

The default conflict is between love and honor, but others are certainly possible and encouraged – this, more than anything, colors the game. Players will make decisions at the end of each event that are directly related to their appreciation of, and observations about, these ideals. In the context of the game, these two ideals are mutually exclusive.

Before play, place two sets of tokens somewhere easily accessible – in bowls, on the table, or whatever is practical. These should be divided into two easily-identifiable groups of twenty – use different colored beads or coins or playing cards. Each set represents one ideal – love or honor.

Enter a world… where valiant knights do battle with robot dragons and the elves are pointier than usual. Superliga is d20-based, flexible, and awesome.

A much more professional looking edition of Superliga. More content! More balance! More columns! A sample campaign! What more could you ask for? More books! Ha! They’re coming soon :)

Superliga is a d20 pen and paper RPG system which is intended to encompass a variety of character concepts. The primary aim of Superliga is to provide players with a wide range of abilities for the personalisation of their characters, while allowing the the flexibility to create their own adventures. Overseer (Overseer is the word I use for “Dungeon Master” to distinguish it from D&D. I will probably revert to “DM” or “GM” because it’s easier to type in a hurry)

The cosmology of Superliga is a mournful salute to every games master ever who’s described the setting of their campaign as a film noir only to be asked if the player can make a drow ranger. Superliga takes place in the twisted psyche of that particular player’s mind – tiny splinters of the material plane float through some dark void where gigantic whales lurk. On some splinters, knights battle valiantly against dragons. On others, walking tanks fire missile salvos against psychic assassins. On the most numerous splinters, the same knights are bemusedly locked in combat with equally confused robots. All it takes to traverse from one splinter to the next is a little imagination, and of course a couple of skill points spent in the Planar school of magic.

A fully functional bestiary and inventory is not a major aim of this edition, but some concessions to Overseers who believe they’re too important to come up with their own statistics for a short sword in their imaginary fantasy land will be made. After all, I need to keep my own notes on my imaginary fantasy land somewhere, so putting it in my own personal rulebook makes sense.

IOWA WE CASK NIACIN WE IX APOGEE IOWA

Enter the world of Normality – how long can you stay sane? What IS sane, when the world is mad? Is madness supposed to be an excuse for those things you did?

Normality began life as a fairly standard post-cyberpunk post-apocalyptic science fiction game. However, that version of the game only exists as a hand-written copy buried in some back corner of a room in a shared house somewhere in New Zealand. What happened next is what matters.

The two authors began on a two-year journey of rage and frustration at the state of the world, and the reactions of those around them to their concerns. We became filled with hatred toward the roleplayers we encountered at local games and conventions, and so we set out to hurt them. To make them cry. We very nearly succeeded.

Emerging from the wreckage we had wrought, we revisited the loosely-bound stack of papers we had used to bludgeon people into submission, and found that (despite what we had thought) there were strong veins of sense concealed in the babble – that with patience, patterns emerged.

We carefully reassembled the hand-typed pages (often pieces of scrap paper – with other text on the opposite side) in what seemed the most logical order. We then edited the book by hand, with marker pens.

From this was born Normality – the world’s first Dada/ergodic roleplaying game.

USE YOUR LIGHT BUT AWFUL CHAINS

The best way to use the book is to consider it as a) a product of the setting it attempts to describe, warped by the twisted nature of the world that produced it or b) the way an actor considers a mask – looking for the shards of meaning that will tie the whole thing together. Certainly, read it all (at least twice) before you dismiss it as mere rambling. Take the introduction seriously. We did.

To make a character, copy the headings we used on our sheets (“Name” “Hit” “Historia” “Good thing/Bad thing” and “Stuff”) then fill them in using the first sentences you see every time you open a book from your bookshelf at random. Look carefully at the resultant sheet, and you will see quite clearly the kind of character you have just created.

There are pre-generated character sheets about halfway through (you’ll know them because they have names on them) as well as a guide for the structure of an adventure. Whether you make use of these is up to you.

Peace,
Hugh Dingwall and Vishãla Jekic

After nearly four years of procrastination, here’s my first stab at the 24-hour RPG challenge. Haven grew out of a desire to re-examine a setting that featured in a friend’s homebrew game back in the late ’80s. In the interests of simplicity, I used a coin-toss mechanic that I think serves its purpose pretty well. Unfortunately, I barely scratched the surface of the setting before running out of time, so I plan to go back and flesh this one out in the near future. This, then, is Haven: a collection of largely unrealized ideas, fairly traditional game mechanics, and unnecessarily spiffy layout.

The Premise
Haven takes place in the star system of Tau, containing many fantastic places and inhabited by several sentient species, and surrounded by an impenetrable barrier field. Several lifetimes worth of adventure await in Tau, but the ultimate mystery is this: who cut out the system from the rest of the galaxy – and why?

Midgard is a mythic-historical roleplaying game, where you take on the role of a legendary Viking hero and complete your own epic quests. With unique and highly-thematic dice mechanics, in-depth grizzled combat and plenty of viking magic and special combat powers, in Midgard you’ll find a shield-splitting, berserk-stoking, rape and pillage of a game.

Midgard is a roleplaying game, where you take on the role of a legendary Viking hero and complete your own epic quests. I am specifying this as a mythic-historic setting—that is one in which you try to stick closely to the history or the period, but assume that all the gods, myths and monsters that the Viking people believed are actually true.

I also think it’s important to point out that Midgard is really only a roleplaying system rather than a setting. As its an historical setting what would be the point me spending hours rewriting Wikipedia’s Norse myth and Viking history pages for you, you can do that for yourself, or just make it up from what you’ve learnt from the films, comic books and other popular culture avenues open to you. There’s always someone who knows more about a given period of history than you so I’m not going to put myself on the spot,, and anyway I’m not sure whether I think it’s that important: if you’re all having fun, who cares about historical accuracy.

At the end of the day, I hope I have managed to capture the flavour of films like the Thirteenth Warrior that were the inspiration for this game in my systems. If you don’t like them, fair enough—you’ve not paid anything for it so you shouldn’t feel cheated. I’m also pretty open to constructive
criticism, so if you have any thing useful to add then let me know and if I get a chance to do something about it I might update the doc with your ideas. Just pop over to whatever blog or forum site you got this from and post your thoughts. If I spot it (and I’m sad enough to regularly check these
places) I’ll reply and discuss your idea.