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.

Crazy Train is a roleplaying game where the GM must spend his resources in order to make sure that the plot is followed faithfully and the reluctant heroes make it to the end of their journey.

HOW DO YOU START?

The first thing the game needs is a story. The GM decides on 2 things first: What is the genre of the story(post-acolyptic horror, tolkien fantasy, etc etc) and how many protagonists(Determined by the players available) there are. After that, the GM writes the story broken up into specific parts called “Story points”, which are either PC Decisions or Scene Framing.

PC Decisions are a description of what choice the PC makes and what happens afterward. Refer to the PC as its players name because the PC’s haven’t been created yet and we therefore know nothing about them. Scene Framing is the description of a new scene, what it looks like and what is going on in it.

Write 6-12 Story points and you’re done with a Story that you can play out with your friends! Note that you have Resource Points equal to three times your Story Points.

Raiders of the Ruins of Kanthe is a solitaire dungeon crawl RPG, in response to a challenge issued by Jeff Moore.

Introduction

Ages ago, the magnificent cities of imperial Kanthe dotted the landscape. Kanthe was the most advanced culture of the world, the greatest builders in stone, the makers of the best arms and armor, the most educated civilization. Civilized Kanthe discovered how to manipulate magical forces and bred specialists in sorcery, alchemy, conjuration, and enchantment.

But Kanthe felt threatened by barbarians. Its people, wanting to feel secure and feeling that mere walls were not enough, began building elaborate underground fortifications, tunneling deep into the earth, protecting their dungeons with clever traps, some of them magical. There were even some who built portals of endless generation which spewed forth strange beasts to prowl and protect.

Ironically, it didn’t protect them. A massive earthquake in the region leveled the magnificent cities above ground and sealed many of the entrances to the underground. The survivors, thinking that the gods were angered, fled the land and later founded the Nine and Thirty Kingdoms, a pale shadow of ancient Kanthe, but still the envy of the barbarians.

For another irony is that many barbarians, far from wanting to destroy the remnants of civilization, want instead to share in its wealth, become civilized themselves. Kingdom folk are prejudiced, however, and rarely accept strange newcomers as equals. But kingdom folk also envy the knowledge of lost Kanthe and wish to regain it. Too fearful to return to the ruined cities or descend into the underground, they are grateful for any outlander rogue willing to risk the dangers and reclaim the treasures of Kanthe.

Outlander rogue. That means you.

As members of the Steel Watch, the Watchmen pit their blades against those of the criminal syndicate the Night Lords, and now in a ten-month crack down, they’re playing for keeps. Together with your team of fellow fencers, coordinate your moves and strategies for maximum effectiveness against an enemy that never seems to run out of criminals. Do you and your fellow players have what it takes to take down the forces of anarchy, or will the Kingdom fall on your watch?

Object of the Game

Each player controls one member of a team of the Steel Watch, arresting criminals in the name of the King. The game takes place over a ten-month period during which the King is cracking down on a criminal syndicate known as the Night Lords. Each month the Steel Watch is sent out to arrest a new batch of criminals.

Every session begins at the Tower of Blades, the headquarters of the Steel Watch. In the first session, this time is used to create characters, which is framed as the characters arriving at the Tower of Blades for the first time. In later sessions, this time represents the Watchmen recuperating from their last arrest and preparing for the next, spending the Victory Points that they earned in the last session. Players usually spend about ten to twenty minutes at the Tower of Blades.

The rest of the session concerns the Arrest, where one of the Watchmen takes Sentry, observing the battle from the perimeter to watch for criminals who escape. That Watchman’s player controls the Criminals while the other players control their Watchmen, trying to subdue the Criminals before they escape. The role of Sentry rotates through all the players.

If, by the end of the ten arrests, the players are actually able to arrest all sixty-five members of the Night Lords, they will be hailed by the King as heroes of the law, and awarded titles and lands that will preserve their family names for generations. If they can’t get all sixty-five, well, there’s always more mercenary work to be had somewhere.

Cage of Reason is an age of enlightenment game of pile-driving philosophes and eye-gouging Essayists. Characters are intellectuals and reformers struggling to bring the light of reason to societies weighed down by despotism, superstition, and stultifying custom. The Characters’ struggles against censors, priests, and reactionary aristocratic twits are played out as professional wrestling matches.

Cage of Reason is an age of enlightenment game of pile-driving philosophes and eye-gouging Essayists. Characters are intellectuals and reformers struggling to bring the light of reason to societies weighed down by despotism, superstition, and stultifying custom. The characters. struggles against censors, priests, and reactionary

aristocratic twits are played out as professional wrestling matches. Cage of Reason was written an entry in the 26 Game Chef competition. It is organized to be played over four game sessions of two hours each. During the first session, players create characters and plan out the upcoming wrestling events. The last three sessions are main event wrestling extravaganzas, with interviews and other rituals leading up to matches between characters and villains that represent the clash of ideas in the age of enlightenment.

The game also incorporates three .ingredients. from the Game Chef competition: law, team, and steel. Law becomes the enlightenment era ideological struggles over the laws of nature and laws of men and nations. Team and Steel are present in the wrestling rules that allow tag team action throughout and require the final session matches to be fought in a steel cage with elevated brutality.

Inspired by the Hermann Hesse novel of the same name, “The Glass Bead Game” challenges players to find connections between the emotions they bring to the table, building a structure for the stories they will tell. Players create characters that express the themes found at the intersections of these emotions, and play out scenes where their control is limited only by the will of the other players and the constraints they themselves created. The stories they tell will culminate in a narrative that resides in the unmapped space between them.

Author?s Notes

Special thanks to Andy Kitkowski for running Game-Chef and this year?s great theme and ingredients, to the other competitors for their fascinating ideas (both as part of their own work and while commenting on each other?s) on the 1km1kt forums, and to Mike O?Sullivan for letting me know about the competition in the first place.

My muse didn?t get working on my Game-Chef entry until Saturday morning. I stared at the ingredients Friday night and very loudly complained that I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. Sometime between then and the following morning, however, something must have clicked. Most likely it was seeing my new copy of Hesse?s novel sitting snugly on my bookcase.

Ingredients-wise, my entry is a storytelling-by-committee game based on connecting emotions via a system which is an attempt to emulate the one vaguely described in Hesse?s ?The Glass Bead Game.? The inital board is built purely by vote and negotiation, with later conflicts being handled by a combination of arbitration, point spending and chance. The concept of bounding the game in time, with the players literally working against the clock from movement to movement, prevents gameplay from becoming bogged down in the details. While building the maps which guide the story (and even acting out scenes), the ticking clock should remind players that they need to keep things moving.

The central intention of this work was to build a system for telling stories that guides and rewards players for using concepts and ideas that are half-way between their own and the other players?. It paradoxically gives more control to players who do not force their original vision onto the work, in the form of points. The original emotions the players put into the game are only ever worth a single point, and can only ever produce one further point during the course of the first session.

Concepts which link one more or player?s ideas, on the other hand, are worth far more, with the Trigger Node, the concept linking as many of the given themes as possible, becoming the basis for the story told. During conflicts the more a player?s desired resolution attempts to include the ideas of other players the more likely it is to succeed.

Meanwhile, the design attempts to evolve the structure of the stories told by using the ideas and concepts which were most popular with the players as the basis for future stories.

All of this hopefully adds up to a game which encompasses Hesse?s ideas on music, science, art and connection. Play involves a rigidly structure system which still allows a great deal of freedom and creativity.

In ?The Glass Bead Game?, Hesse notes that novices often begin their training by looking for connections between two seemingly incongruous works; for example, a piece of music and a scientific principle. By forcing their minds in new directions, by attempting to explore the strange space between the given points, they end up somewhere they never expected. I?m hoping players of my Glass Bead Game will end up in the same place.

Periodically, Persephone, queen of the underworld, throws an elaborate wedding for a chosen couple. Hades often finds himself needing to make things ready for the festivities, and entertain the guests when they arrive, tasks that are beneath the dignity of the lord of the dead. But a team of heroes has recently joined the ranks in the Elysian Fields, a team who doesn’t know any better than to accept Hades’ offer. It is also the second main course in the Full Course of Love and Death.

This RPG is the second main course of a Full Course of Love and Death, coming between the first main course of Someone to Love and the third, One More Hour. The couple to be married is one of the most successful couples in the prior game of Someone to Love. Likewise, the team of heroes after gaining the favor of the gods in The Marriage of Persephone will return to life once more, to attempt their last mission or betray it to seek some measure of peace in their lives. Like all games in this Full Course, The Marriage of Persephone is intended for five players.

As a game designed for Iron Game Chef 26, it is necessary to discuss the allotments made for that contest. Indeed, for the theme of time, Marriage of Persephone fulfills the two sessions of 6 hours requirement, including the intervening 2 weeks. And it uses the following contest terms: Law, Actor, and Team.

The players take the roles of the Magisters, supremely old and powerful wizards that control the mystic city of Magicant. The leadership of the city is empty, and the Magisters must choose one of their own to rule. The Magisters are the mystic equals of one another, and their conflicts can only be resolved by a vote of the group as a whole. Council of the Magisters is a game for exactly five players, for exactly four sessions of exactly two hours each.

Each player takes the role of one of the Magisters, empowered with that Magister’s sphere of influence. The Council of the Magisters meets both in-game and out-of-game for four sessions, each two hours long. The purpose of these meetings is to choose one of their own to be the Supreme Magister. Each session, one of the players will become ineligible for the position of Supreme Magister; but they still attend the sessions, and vote just like anyone still in the running! (Note: the terms “Player” and “Magister” are used fairly interchangeably in the text. Council of Magisters assumes that the players will be using Actor stance, and being fairly immersed in their roles. In addition, several rules refer to the ages of the Magisters. Magisters should be considered to have the same relative ages as their players.)

In Council of the Magisters, Game Time and Real Time takes exactly the same amount. If it takes the Players of the Magisters an hour to resolve a conflict, that’s how long it took the Magisters themselves. For the most part, the players of the Magisters should sit around and talk in-character, acting as the Magisters themselves, engaged in a tense debate for leadership. (This is known as “General Debate,” as opposed to “Vote Debate.”)

Play a circle of fantasy dwarves knocking back a few pints at the local pub, boasting about their heroic exploits. Boast all you like, but once another dwarf shouts, “I’ll Drink To That!” all bets are off, and you may have to Drown Your Sorrow or Go Bottoms Up in order to finish your story. There’s no namby-pamby spending of magic points or anything in this game; prove your mettle and your side of the story by downing more drink than your detractors, and coming out of the pub as the Last Dwarf Standing.

Properly speaking, this is not a “pen and paper roleplaying game.” First of all, this is a roledrinking game. Secondly, there are no pens involved, and the game ought to be printed on the side of a beer stein, not on any namby-pamby paper. So the game to the right is laid out to fit on a stein available through cafepress.com hence the sidewaysness — don’t worry, it’s not the alcohol. Not yet, anyway.

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That Oh So Little Death is a RPG about sex. But many things in art and fiction are metaphor for sex, and sex itself is a metaphor for many things. This is a game that explores those boundaries. It is also dessert in the Full Course of Love and Death.

This game is the last in a Full Course of Love and Death, a quintology of RPGs. It is the dessert, and has been design to add a delightful twist to the chronicles of Love and Death through which the players have already ventured. What the other games have danced around, That Oh So Little Death embraces. When played as the dessert, each player should choose a character from a previous RPG in the course, and should remake them for this game. In many cases, the archetypes below will make that an easy matter. As playing That Oh So Little Death in this way, consider how the events of the previous game could have been simply a metaphor for the activities in this one. Like all games in this Full Course, That Oh So Little Death is intended for five players, ideally the same five who started this journey with Escape from Prince Charming.

As a game designed for Iron Game Chef 26, it is necessary to discuss the allotments made for that contest. Indeed, for the theme of time, That Oh So Little Death fulfills the single session of 2 hours requirement. And it uses all of the contest terms: Glass, Committee, Ancient, Emotion, Law, Actor, Steel, and Team.

The Capital of the Eternal Century is a game of urban psychogeography. It celebrates the city as a puzzle of emotional zones. Themes drawn from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project provide the pieces. Think of it as a barely-recognizable 19th Century Paris experienced by a fl?neur (stroller) voraciously absorbing the dense details of streets life and urban transformations while walking through the metropolis.

Capital of the Eternal Century is a game of urban psychogeography. It celebrates the city as a puzzle of emotional zones. Themes drawn from Walter Benjamin?s Arcades Project provide the pieces.

Think of it as a barely-recognizable 19th Century Paris experienced by a fl ?neur (stroller) voraciously absorbing the dense details of streets life and urban transformations while walking through the metropolis.

The game follows a single character out on a long, meandering stroll: ten hours from a day in their life. You will play the game as ten one-hour sessions. The fi rst session fi nds the character eating a meal in preparation for the long walk in front of them. During this fi rst hour you will begin to build the character by establishing some of his or her emotional and intellectual facilities. You will fi ll in part of a phrenological map of the character?s mind and personality, leaving blank spaces that will inscribed over the course of the remaining sessions.

You have the choice of whether the initiating meal is breakfast, lunch or supper, which determines what hours of the day the character will be out strolling. Since the mood of a city changes throughout the day, the time you set will shift the emotional resonance of the nine city districts the character experiences.

Sessions two through ten each take place in a different zone of the city. These zones are physical settings with varying mixes of inhabitants, architecture, street activity and businesses. More importantly, every zone is infused with its own unique mood, which will influence the game as much as much as the city?s physical layout.

The fl ?neur character spends exactly one hour walking though each zone. He or she may pause, step inside a shopping arcade, chat with a friend, be drawn intoa temporary escapade, but by the end of the hour the character will have moved on the next district.

Players open each of the strolling sessions with approximately fi ve or ten minutes of description to establish the setting and color of the zone their character is passing through. For the remainder of the hour, players introduce confl icts linked to the zone?s mood and to themes of 19th century urban modernity. Confl icts in the game unfold in three varieties. The fl ?neur can be confronted directly? perhaps by a petty criminal, gendarme, scam artist, lost child, street preacher or the like ? choose to intervene in a tense situation, or create the tension by intervening. The character can also observe confl ict as an emotional voyeur by fi xing on the disputes and passions of people encountered along the way. Finally, confl ict can play out internally among competing mental drives as the character reacts to the cityscape and the issues inscribed in its boulevards.

The outcomes of these conflicts add new details to the character?s mental topography. Over the course of play, the phrenological map that defi nes the character blends with the other ?map layers? of the game. Movements tracked along city streets. Psychogeography?s validation of the emotional resonance of place. Benjamin?s schema of cultural trends and material artifacts that made Paris the capital of the 19th century.

Capital of the Eternal Century was written for the 26 Game Chef competition. It incorporates the time limitation of ten one-hour sessions, with character creation taking place during the initial session and each remaining session exploring a different city zone. The game also uses three ingredients: glass, ancient, and emotion. Glass gives the game the glass roofs of the arcades that signify the rise of modern consumer culture. Ancient provides the buried city of the river, the sewers, and the metropolises deep history. Emotion inspired the psychogeographic division of the city into emotional zones and the emotion-description based conflict resolution system.