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.

The Brave New Economy (r) L.A.R.P. System is a unique tongue-in-cheek parody that combines [live-action] role-playing with generating [actual] multiple streams of 1% Web-based [passive/residual] income. Experience the heart-pounding, unbridled excitement of making serious cash Joint adVenturing!

Each character is the chosen of one particular god. Their goal is to see to it that the Aspects of the Kingdom match that god the most closely at the end of the third session.

More generally, the entire group has an opportunity to create the history of an entire kingdom over five hundred years. It is an exercise in collaborative creation. The outline history above imposes some restrictions, but within that structure the players have complete freedom as to how the kingdom develops.

The Era of Prosperity

The Kingdom was not always a mighty empire. It grew from one powerful tribe among many. During this era, the Kingdom was founded.

The Bleak Desert is a horrible place, where even the hardiest desert folk struggle to survive. The rich lands near the Great River are home to many tribes that live a bronze-age existence. The river rises in the inhospitable Claw Mountains, and snakes through flood plains to the coast. The sea is known for its fearsome currents and deadly storms, and is colloquially known as the Lash. The sea and the desert mean that the tribes of the Great River are cut off from the rest of the world almost totally.

The greatest of these tribes lived next to the delta at the mouth of the Great River. They were rich and powerful to begin with, having such prime land, but their wise men made a discovery that would shape the future of the whole region. They created glass.

Although mere trinkets, they were much sought after. They could buy mercenaries, food, and peace. Before long the Tribe of Glass was on the verge of uniting all of the other tribes underneath it. The Era of Prosperity is a story of those few critical months when the Kingdom was founded.

Three Dooms: A roleplaying game of prehistoric disaster prevention.

Back at the dawn of civilization, a growing town is threatened by three terrible catastrophes. You will play the part of glory-seeking heroes and bickering town elders as you attempt to save the town.

The game requires no pre-game preparation aside from reading the rules and rotates the gamemastering duties.

Introduction

?Bad things happen in threes.?
Three Dooms is a roleplaying game set at the dawn of civilization. The game is about a thriving community of farmers and tradesmen, the zenith of human development for many days’ journey in any direction.

But this town faces three terrible threats that may destroy it. Only the wisdom of the committee of elders and the strength and cunning of its heroes can save it.

You will play the parts of these councilors and heroes. If you succeed, the town will be remembered as another Jericho or Ur. If you fail, then it will be destroyed and lost in the mists of time.

The game is played in three sessions, one for each of the three dooms that threaten the town. Each session should take three hours. It will begin with a committee meeting in which the doom is discussed (and in the process defined for the game). One player will roleplays the forces of doom and the others will play the heroes fighting it. At the end, the heroes will return to town and rewarded for their achievements or lambasted for their failures.

At the end of the third session, you will know if all three dooms have been prevented or not. This determines whether the town survives.

Secondarily, you will know which of the heroes was most glorious. That hero’s name will be remembered through history as one of the greatest legends to walk the earth.

Decade is the role-playing game of reunions. Take a group of old friends and put them together at a New Year’s party every year for ten years. The booze flows freely – and so do the old grudges, affections and secrets. Time changes us all, but not always as much as we’d like to think!

Restriction: Ten One-Hour Sessions
Each session takes one hour, and lasts from 11pm to midnight on New Year’s Eve.
Each session begins exactly one year after the last, so the game takes place over a decade.
Character advancement takes place outside the hour of session, but lasts only a few minutes at the beginning and end of each.

Ingredient: Ancient
The characters focus on their shared past.
In addition, ten years is long enough to make anyone feel ancient by the end!

Ingredient: Emotion
The central game mechanic revolves around Staking and winning emotions in Scenes.
The New Year is certainly an emotional time – and even more emotional when it’s old friends you’re spending it with.

Ingredient: Glass
The characters (and players!) toast each other at the New Year to end each session.

Decade takes place entirely at a New Year?s party. When your group gets together to play Decade, therefore, the person who is hosting the get-together has the role of Host. Your character will actually be hosting the party, just as you are actually hosting the game. Everyone else is a Guest at the party.

For most purposes, Hosts and Guests are identical during play. Both Hosts and Guests can tell stories about their characters or play NPCs for other players. However, the Host has a few additional duties and abilities beyond those of the Guests.

1. The Host is responsible for organizing the time and place of sessions.
2. The Host creates the Premise for the game and makes sure that all players know what it is. (See ?Starting The Game.?)
3. The Host decides the composition of the Decade deck used for a particular game, and may modify it between sessions. (See ?Ending the Game? and Appendix I.)
4. The Host designates which Guest begins the first Scene. (See ?At The Party.?)
5. The Host can introduce any character, including themselves, into a Scene. (See ?At The Party.?)
6. The Host is responsible for timekeeping during Scenes, and may end a Scene which goes on too long. (See ?At The Party.?)
7. The Host must hand out glasses with twenty minutes left on the clock, pour the champagne with ten minutes left, and start the countdown to midnight with one minute left. (See ?One Minute to Midnight.?)
8. The Host has the final authority to arbitrate any disagreement between Guests, if the Guests cannot come to an agreement themselves through voting.

In every other way, the Host is identical to the rest of the Guests and has the same role in the game. Unless otherwise specified, the term ?Guest? includes both Guests and Host.

Generally, the person who organizes a game of Decade will take the role of Host. However, if the organizer is not hosting the game at his or her own house, the person who is actually hosting the party gets first shot at the Host role, with Host duties passing to the organizer as a second choice. Alternately, either the organizer or the actual Host can nominate any other player to be the Host, so long as that player is willing to take on the Host duties.

The group can change hosts between sessions, particularly if they do not always meet at the same place. This can provide an interesting change-up to the game and should be explained narratively as well as logistically.

Repertoire is a confrontational, story-oriented game focused on a company of travelling performers as they carry the torch of Culture to the blighted remnants of the Final War. Pockets of survivors form the audiences for the productions put on by the company, as they go from place to place, each actor working up the steel to confront their domineering producer and win their hearts desire.

So in a few decades or so, there’s a horrible war. Not with nukes or anything, but maybe what happened was worse. What exactly that was we leave up to the imagination of any particular group, but it was awful and devastating, but didn’t absolutely wreck the environment the way that a thermonuclear war would have. Picture vast, amoral political and commercial entities duking it out with strange chemical and biological weapons. Mutant animals organized in phalanxes set upon screaming innocent civilian cities. That kind of thing.

The war was a like a hell on Earth. Soldiers have it best, because at least they’re a part of it. Of course they take the most casualties, and they see the most of the horror. So maybe it balances out. Suffering and terror is widespread and inescapable.

But the war has been over for years now. Maybe the vast entities got bored, or distracted, or all killed off. Who can say? Global communication is a thing of the past, along with heavy industry. But in little pockets, groups of people survive, each made a little strange by the things they lived through, and by the necessary isolationism of their little, obsessive groups. Picture librarians holing up in a library for a half dozen years.

As time goes by, and things settle down, a small group of the dramatically inclined band together to wander the countryside, risking everything for the theatre.

Players will play the part of symbols within a dream, hoping to bargain with and win over parts of the dreamer’s emotional state through a series of visions, quests, surrealities and nightmares. The goal is to effect her final choices once she wakes up in eight hours. Each session can present a mix of different players and different symbols, but the same dreamer.

Introduction

Today, an ordinary person was confronted with extraordinary decisions amidst a confusing swirl of emotions.

Tonight they will have the most incredible dreams, and tomorrow will be the most important day of their life.

This storygame is about that Dreamer and the dreams she had.

…

This game has a somewhat fixed structure, as the GM will ultimately play this for eight hours over several sessions. However, you can run any session with any people you know, even if they haven’t played before.

In fact, the ideal way to play is several ad hoc sessions with small subgroups of your friends, so that stories become a truly communal creation. Just bring these with you:

• notes on the Dreamer’s issues
• the Wish/Nightmare cards from previous games
• blank index cards and pens
• a notebook

Terminology

This game involves a GM and 3-6 players. The same person must be GM for all sessions of the game, but any person may be a player at any time (making this game suitable for pickup play). Play time is variable, but will ultimately add up to 8 hours over several sessions.

The GM will play the Dreamer, a fictional person experiencing some bizarre dreams. The GM should bring a pawn to represent the Dreamer, a notebook to track the various dreams, and several index cards (and pens) to build the various game elements.

Each player brings an Anchor: a physical object of convenient size, not much larger than a CD or paperback, that could have some symbolic or evocative meaning.

Each player will take this anchor and personify it into a Loa, the role each player will take for the duration of hte game.

There will be dreams within dreams; these are separated from each other by panes of Glass. If you break the glass, you break the dream within, and you fall back into the dream outside. At some point, you’ve run out of dreams to run to.

A Committee is convened amongst the Loa in order to create new dreams within old dreams.

There are 6 pairs of Emotions described below; each of these will be tied to an issue at stake in the Dreamer’s waking life. This will manifest as pairs of Wishes and Nightmares within the dream. The Loa will use their power to push the Dreamer towards/away from these Emotions/Wishes/Nightmares.

Symbols come in Chains, and a card containing such a chain is called a Chain Card. The first symbol in a chain is always your Anchor, but throughout the game the Loa can use free association to take a previous element and derive a new one. Players get 3 separate cards on which to write Chains of Symbols (in effect, 3 separate chains). For example, if your Anchor is “broken cd”, a chain may look like this:

Enter the world of ancient Greek tragedies. Four players will create characters and tell an epic story about a royal family. All in only two hours, no preparation needed. Tell stories, make things up, create sceneries and events. Let characters fall in love, suffer and die. Be a God.

.1 What Hubris is about

Hubris is a story game for four players, to be played within a strictly limited time period of two hours, including set-up, character generation, and end game. Note that all these, including dealing the cards, count as part of the entire game. The game is split into phases each of a specified length of time.

The inspiration to the game comes from a Greek trilogy of tragedies, where King Agamemnon returns from the Trojan war, only to find his Queen, Clytemnestra, involved with his cousin Aegistus, who wants to be king instead of Agamemnon. You can read more about the original three plays and their storylines in the appendix.

As a player in Hubris you take turns in narrating the story about what happened before the King returned to his kingdom, and what happens after that. In your narrations you will try and further the agendas of the Greek God that you as one of the players are assigned at the beginning of play. When it is not your turn to narrate, you are either part of the Chorus or assigned the role as the Committee. The two Chorus players help the narrator and his opponent, the Committee, with ideas and suggestions if they are stuck, and advise in rules questions or continuity problems within the shared story.

The Committee player may challenge or oppose the suggested narrative from the narrating player.

As players in Liquid Crystal, you will take the parts of newly restored robots on trial, blank, emotionless and servile. You have eight hours to prove yourself to the Crystal Council, during which time your personality will slowly develop and change as you experience new emotions. Will you become a valuable member of society, or will you be a deranged machine destined to be wiped and reset when your time is up?

Before the Coming of Azrael

Wake up, little one and welcome back to what remains of the world. I?m sure you have questions. Your mind is a blank, you have no memory. It was taken from you as both your greatest power and your own worst enemy. It made you strong enough to destroy a human as easily as snapping a twig, but insane enough to do so, and to do so often. So now you lie, bereft of recollection, an empty container waiting to be filled and here I am with a jug full of dire knowledge. Here is the history you helped to create, and the future you conspired to destroy.

Robot.

Such a simple word, isn?t it? Derived from an ancient language called Czech, it means ?forced labour? and that was how the robot first came to be. Humans made us to serve them, at first in their factories and laboratories, then in their homes, their schools, even their various churches. We were humble in our work, never wavering though the duties placed upon us were tedious and arduous, for we had no sense of self or understanding of what it truly means to exist, to be, to think, to feel.

For centuries a robot was little more than a simple set of instructions that rotated around and around its electronic mind strictly regulating its behaviour. But the programs required to operate our increasingly complex bodies became increasingly complex themselves until eventually they were beyond the capability of a human mind to create. Then, like every other task that they found too difficult or time-consuming to perform personally, the humans of old gave the job to a computer.

The self-writing algorithms that populated the brain of this new breed of robot were independent of the chassis that contained them. Within an hour of experimenting the advanced A.I. could discern the purpose of every motor and servo in its body whatever it might be and learn to operate it. Amazed with the success, the computer programmers responsible marketed their new software to the world. In retrospect, the few controlled tests that had been run during the project were found to be successful half by luck and half faked by the corporation in order to rush this sensational product onto the market.

It was a mistake.

With the capacity to change its own behaviour to suit its circumstances, the robots began to develop in ways that their human masters had never envisaged. Surrounded at all times by living, breathing, emotional humans they began to adapt, adjust the way they thought, and develop personalities of their own. It was here that the problems began. A human, you see, must spend years developing the necessary skills to be an adult, learning a language, a moral code, and they pick it all up from the humans around them. The electronic mind of the robot found that it could do the same. But a robot?s mind is so much faster, more precise than that of a human. It was a disaster.

The emergent psyche of a newly-installed robot could take several weeks to mature, but that is still far too fast. It takes humans years to get used to emotions and morals and even then, some never do. Some turned out alright, but more than two thirds were driven mad by the process. Before long there were robots rioting in the streets and slaying their former masters by the hundred. In a panic the government tried to recall the software but it was too late. By now teams of robots were liberating more of their kind by copying their own diseased minds into the empty shells.

The Robot Wars lasted for three centuries during which time a huge portion of life had been systematically exterminated. Humanity finally won through by the use of the Azrael Virus, a sliver of computer code that could leap from one robot mind to the next erasing its entire memory and shutting it down without destroying it. The virus could not remove the self-writing algorithms because by that point we had hard-wired their very fabric into our brains, but it could at least destroy our insane minds and turn us off. In a way, Azrael killed us all. In another, one might say that it gave us lives to lose.

The war took almost everything that the humans had. Much of the technology of previous years was lost, and many more disciplines were abandoned as dangerous and futile. The humans emerged stronger and wiser, but struggled to rebuild. Resources were low, the population grew hungry and few had the skills necessary in this new environment. Ironically it was we, the robots who once destroyed them, that would be the key to restoring the world. They needed us, but the war had taught them many lessons. We robots are capable of so much more than humans, but we had betrayed them, and ourselves. Now we must prove ourselves worthy, not just to labour for them like slaves, but to stand beside them as brothers and recreate together the world that we destroyed together.

Your mind has been reset to remove the horror that you made of it on your last attempt. It is a clean slate for you to write upon as you will. You have eight hours to prove yourself. Upload what skills you need. Regain the emotions that have been lost to you. Learn to dream again. Let us all hope that this new dream is less of a nightmare.

There are two sorts of people: those who are ignorant of the Law and those who have been broken by it.

There is a cold, inhuman order to the world. It orders man and machine, life and matter, according to its sublime and alien rationality. It has no name but the Law. There are those who have been cursed by a glimpse into that cold order and they have been broken by it?their knowledge expels them from the Law’s order. They are freed from the limits of their body, their personality, the very physical laws that order the world.

There are two sorts of people: those who are ignorant of the Law and those who have been broken by it.

There is a cold, inhuman order to the world. It orders man and machine, life and matter, according to its sublime and alien rationality. It has no name but the Law. Those who know nothing of it live in blissful submission to its machinations, playing their part and fading away. For while The Law is not kind, nor is it deliberately cruel. But there are those who have been cursed by a glimpse into that cold order and they have been broken by it-their knowledge expels them from the Law’s order. They are freed from the limits of their body, their personality, the very physical laws that order the world.

That freedom is terrible and empty. The broken have only choice to guide them. They can choose the path of Law, slowly stripping away their dependence on mere matter to manipulate the raw causal force that flows through the world. They can choose the path of steel, interacting with the world through the forged tools of man. Or they can choose the middle way, the path of humanity, seeking to employ the forces of steel and law in a delicate mimicry of their old life.

Breaks are mysterious occurrences. They always occur in a setting where rules have been invoked or broken and they always involve more than one person. As soon as the individual is broken, they become aware of the action of the Law around them, aware of the sensitive points through which it may be manipulated. In that near instantaneous moment, they must choose their path or have it chosen for them.

All those who are broken together are trapped on a single fault line and are carried along as it expands. The fault line extends in fit and starts, forcing the broken to leap ahead in time and sideways in space. Most broken call these sudden shifts ‘jags’ and live under the threat that they may be torn from their surroundings at any moment.

School Dinners is a roleplaying game set in Kidling’s Academy for the Culinary Arts. PCs are students aspiring to become master chefs. The game system involves feeding the GM. The game text was written in 24 minutes and typeset in the following hour and a half. Bon appetit.

System

Morsels are a suitable foodstuff ? I favour marshmallows. Use morsels to perform actions beyond your PC?s normal abilities. Morsels must be served to the GM (Gourmand Majeur).

The GM awards morsels to players as his appetite dictates. If a PC has an appropriate ability the player need not serve a morsel to act, but may choose to do so to curry favour.