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.

‘Defenders of the Union’ sets the characters up as a Travelling Soviet of the Peoples Armed Investigative Committee, traveling across the State to root out enemies of the people. It’s set in a USSR that never quite was, perhaps in the past, perhaps in the future. A workers paradise of pristine white apartment blocks and gleaming monorails. Written for the November 25 ‘Ronnies’, using the words ‘Soviet’ and ‘Gun’.

?Defenders of the Union? is set sometime in the future or perhaps sin the past, in a Soviet Union that never existed. It is a Soviet Union as seen through the eyes of its dreamers, it?s poets, its writers and filmmakers. Where the masses live in clean, whitewashed apartment blocks, where they labour in modern factories, where the USSR is a shining light in a world of brutal capitalistic oppression.

But no paradise is perfect and rot has set in at the core of the USSR. Malcontents, traitors, speculators and enemies of the people seek to bring down the edifice of socialist perfection. They claim all is not well, they spread dissent and treachery. And they must be ruthlessly stamped out.

However, are the enemies of the people really the liars that the Supreme Soviet would have us believe? Are their tales of the camps where millions are killed through neglect, overwork and execution mere exaggerations of the truth, or do they represent something more sinister?

In amongst the white apartment blocks, there are bloodstains on the ground. Out in the wastes of Siberia, corpses litter the snow. On far off steppes, savage little wars are fought for freedom. From the Revolution, through the wars, the gun has always been emblematic of the USSR. Even in these peaceful, happy times, a man carrying a gun, alighting from the Moscow monorail can bring fear to the most loyal kolkhoz.

On to the scene step members of the Peoples Armed Investigatory Committee, the feared gunmen of the Supreme Soviet. Clad in their forbidding padded greatcoats, carrying the great pistols that are their badges of power and authority, they descend on communities to root out enemies and ensure correct thought.

GUILD HUNTERS is a fantasy game with six main races: Humans, Elves, Dwarfs, Halflings, ,and Minotaurs. In GUILD HUNTERS you play a meber of a guild in the human city of Council Bluffs. In Council Bluffs reputation is everything you you need to gain lots. Without repuitation no one takes you for a person or a guild and with too much reputation people and guilds come looking for you to build there own reputation on taking you out. Reputation becomes almost a catch-22 where you need it and then you have to defend it. The players and the GM will define what a guild is and what they should do as a guild. A guild could be 2 people looking to grow bigger by building more terf. A guild could be the whole group banding togeather to sell there skills and go out adventuring for glory. A guild could be merchants banding together to get better prices. The game is left open so many different people can play the game different ways.

The game uses a new 3D12 system for the rules. There are 7 main attributes and each main attribute has 2 sub attributes to it. The sub attirbutes cover the skills and the main attributes cover magic defense and other random things. You have a number of actions normally around 6 depending on what weapon you use. You get actions from 3 places: you weapon, weapon style, and everyone gets 2 normal actions. You have hit points for each of the 6 locations: Head, torso, left leg, right leg, left arm, right arm. The weapon damage is fixed with no dice rolling but the weapon damage to hit points is so that even a dagge can kill someone with 1 turn.

Magic in the game is free flowing. There are no magic points or spells to remember. You cast spells as you think them up so you can have a different spell every time if you wanted. The game uses 7 charts to determine your spell where you only need to use 4 of them to make the spell work. Magic is a big part of this world and everyone in the world can cast magic, though many do not or if they do only simple spells. If you fail a spell by 1 or more you take half the affect of the spell. People casting the spells need to think about there spells and the outcome.

Welcome to the world of GUILD HUNTERS. GUILD HUNTERS is a fantasy game. It has everything you have come to expect from a fantasy game with a new twist on things. The GUILD HUNTERS setting is about the thrill, power, and danger that comes from being in a guild. In GUILD HUNTERS you join or create a new guild in the city of Council Bluffs. The purpose of playing this game is to gain as much personal reputation and guild reputation as you can and survive being a guild member. Sounds simple doesn?t it? As you can reputation you are taking reputation from other people and guilds. The more well known you become the more people who want to eliminate you and your guild. This is so for 2 reasons. Reason one is because if guilds lower than your reputation take you out then they gain reputation for being the guild to get rid of you. The other problem is the reputation you get the more you are stealing from other people and no one likes to be up staged.

You will not do this alone however for you can gain allies to help you with your raise to glory, as long as you help with their raise to glory. The course you take to greater reputation and glory varies as greatly as a man. You could take jobs here and there and do well at them and gain the praise of the people you work for, you could blackmail and bribe peers and city officials to make sure your reputation goes up, you could use your steal and cut down all that oppose you and your guild, or you could simply buy out your competition building a huge empire, the list is nearly endless in what you can do.

With all of the backstabbing, bribing, and down right hunting of power in Council Bluffs is not safe for a guild up and raising, but that is what makes it fun. To beat out all others around you and claim the glory that is so rightfully yours. Can you survive? Can you live long enough for your story to be told around the bar? Do you have the wits to become a legend in your own time? Well play and find out.

GUILD HUNTERS is a very dangerous world setting. Combat is fast paced so even the strongest, toughest person could be brought down in one action if it was thought out well enough. If the combat does not kill you the magic might. Magic is very powerful and very deadly. Because magic is everywhere and in everything all players are mages and can wield magic.

A Song Without End is about family, in horrid conditions, and the meaning of justice that arises, when one man has more power than he may know what to do with. The game is set in post-WW2 Soviet Russia, and each player takes the role of a single family, struggling to survive and cling to their existence in the community.

A Song Without End is set in a dismal neighborhood in Soviet Russia shortly after the end of WW2 in Europe. There are still jobs, certainly, but they are almost all working on assembly lines in brutal conditions for state factories. Marketplaces almost never have the goods that are required, and the lines when they do have something are astronomical. Families crowd into small spaces, many people sleeping in the same room. Some families aren’t even lucky enough to have their own room. But they do have each other.

However, there are threats to the tranquility of this family life. Stalin is still the Premier, and his secret police are still arresting and murdering countless ?traitors? to Mother Russia every week. And the voice that condemns you to them may be the voice that sings your praises from the room next door.

This submission has been removed at the author’s request.

Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves is a quick, one-on-one conflict RPG where you collaborate with another player to narrate the course of your duel. Over time, you progress both in ability and towards your final goals. It’s as much a storytelling card game as it is an RPG, but give it a shot – it’s quick, it’s fun, it’s free!

A fight breaks out in the prisonyard because Fat Tommy ratted out the contraband Jimmy was keeping under his mattress. The prisoners form a ring around the two, and Fat Tommy slips the shiv he?d been saving from his sleeve as Jimmy comes at him with a chair!

The Viper is getting too old for professional wrestling, but he has one last shot at making a comeback (and enough money to retire) if he can just beat The Iron Kid!

Fresh from the Wastelands, Ana Goanna is thirsty, but the Settlement won?t let her in unless she has something to barter or a trade to ply. She can weave, but the Settlement already has a weaver. There?s only one option Ana can take: provoke the weaver into a duel in the Deathdome!

When Flavius was a free citizen of Rome, he used to come to see the gladiators and cheer their battles. Now he will fight for his own life against Terminus, a gladiator known for his massive strength. Flavius knows the only way he can beat the juggernaut is to fight dirtier than the famed gladiator himself. Only then can he have a shot at proving his innocence.

John Bartlett, Esq. has never lost a case, and he?s not about to start. But when he realizes the prosecutor is Felicia Jones, the most vicious Assistant DA in the state, he begins to think this won?t be just another celebrity murder trial.

A game about people who have lost everything and live in filth, finally told they have just one chance to get home – or then next best thing.The theme of this game is obsession. An obsession that drives men to madness and despair, to acts of cruelty and barbarism, for the simplest of things: the chance to go home.

In the future, the world has been torn apart by warfare. The skies are eternally blackened with ash-laden clouds, the earth has been robbed of its fertility and the acidic rain pummels everything into muddy ruins. The war is long over, 1 years or so, and though the bitterness has not faded, it has been largely replaced by something else: despair. At first, people consoled themselves. Their wounds would heal, the skies would clear, and they would have to work oh so hard for it, but one day the world would be clean again, and children could play in fields and forests and breathe fresh air.
The children grew up, and most of them now don’t remember anything but the rain and the mud. The adults grow older and see no sign of a return to the way things were. The aftermath of the war continues to produce non-viable or deformed offspring, and those who know something of evolution fear that humanity will never be the same.
The war had other effects too. Cities and technology were, on the whole, destroyed. A culture wholly reliant on electronic data storage realised too late how prone it was to the loss of all its information archives. Complicated technology is in the hands of only a few now, those self-proclaimed genii that were not at the epicentres of the destruction. Their numbers are few, as are the numbers of the people who survived at all. They guide what is left of communities, helping them to rebuild from the shards of the shattered world and telling tales of what once was.
What a world it was, too. Shining towers, gleaming in the sunlight; food and water brought to your home, clean and wholesome. Parks, pets, family and friends, holidays even. A culture build up over thousands of years and the freedom to travel the world and see what had been done in the name of humanity. History. Comfort. Light. Free time, sports, hobbies, books, movies, TV, music when you want it, the change of seasons…
So many things lost, so little hope of seeing them again. Now, all many are faced with is a lifetime of living in ignorance, of near-starvation, of the depredations of bandits, and of the god-damned mud, seeping it’s way into everything. So, if someone said you could have it all back, what would you do to get it? For most people, the answer is simple. Anything.

Stand Off! is a high-stakes, high-impact game of Soviet super spies caught in a trap. The players each begin with guns pointed at each other and the nerve-wracking task of finding the traitor without getting shot first. This game could almost be compared to an intense, high-stakes version of Clue. Stand Off! is an entry in the November 25 Ronny Awards contest sponsored by Adept Press.

Pressure… it?s something we all deal with. Sometimes it drives us insane. Sometimes it drives us to succeed. In Stand Off! it drives us to kill.

What this game is about.

This game is about tension, pressure, stress all boiled down into a single, high-impact event. Set in the 198?s at the height of the Cold War, the players and their characters are slammed into a high-stakes situation where the tension mounts with each passing second. The object of the game is very simple: Live!

What the characters do.

The characters in this game are all Soviet super-spies stationed in and around the Texas research facilities during the 198?s. The Soviet Union was beginning to collapse and Premier Gorbachev ordered that the secret American plans for the U.S. Star Wars program to be stolen at any costs. Anyone who retrieved this information would be handsomely rewarded. The characters in this game are highly trained, crack spies who are the best the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have to offer. There was no doubt at the Kremlin that this group of spies would accomplish their mission. They were the nonpareil. Until something went wrong. The game begins where it went wrong.

What the players do.

The players in Stand Off! must take on the persona of their character. You are the spy you play. To begin, each player will be given a stack of tokens. These tokens are the currency the players use to add Facts to the Situation. Players take turns adding Facts hopefully convincing the other players that they are not at fault for what went wrong. The Moderator (or GM) for Stand Off! ensures that the tension level is constantly on the rise, and that the pressure put on the players and characters is intense and tangible.

Here’s my Star Wars RPG based on the unnamed Neverwhere system – which I’ve dubbed ‘TAGS’ – the Action Game System because it’s ‘Star Wars style’ action orientated and because descriptive ‘tags’ which describe characters also indicate what they can and can’t do.

Characters begin with one ‘background’ which provides a starting point for tags, skills and equipment. Players then select 6 tags and 4 levels of skills based on a brief one-two paragraph description of the character.

Action resolution is 1D1+applicable tags (and skills, equipment etc.) verses the opponents roll – or rarely, a static difficulty number. The winner of the roll decides what happens. The players should never know how many ‘hits’ they can take, instead the Narrator describes the effects (which become temporary tags) of the wounds they suffer.

Unlike most role-playing games, a Star Wars character in this game is neatly described in one or sometimes two paragraphs. From this brief pr?cis, the player will select six descriptive words or phrases, which we?ll refer to as tags from hereon in, that are used to encapsulate the characters main abilities, characteristics or traits. Additionally, the player can choose 4 levels of skills and a ?background? to round out his character; the background is something of a ?meta? tag which carries with it some bonuses and sometimes a penalty or two.

The easiest way to begin is to think about the type of character you?d like to play then choose a background or make up one of your own with the Narrator?s assistance. Most backgrounds come with one or more free tags which don?t count against your limit of 6 initial tags so it?s often best to start here.

Once you have a descriptive paragraph or two, underline the words or phrases that take your fancy. It?s likely that there?ll be more than 6 tags that you?d like to choose but limit it to 6 and keep the others in mind for future character development.

SPHEAR: the greatest sci-fi/horror/action roleplaying game of all time.

Characters in this roleplaying game are everyday folks forced to deal with a very unusual situation: invaders from another world (perhaps another dimension altogether) have settled in the town. Their malevolent intent: to steal human corpses and use them as slave labor on the invaders’ home world.

Your job is to fight back and save the town?or at least, get revenge on those alien bastards.

When everything goes to hell, you’re the first ones they call, because the Intergalactic government doesn’t have to pay you or worry about what happens if you die. You’re eXpendable.

Note: I am aware that this is quick and dirty looking: it was written in three hours while at work while on some funky meds for a bad head cold/flu. Despite being very rough, it is a serious attempt.

Expendables are skilled convicts serving out their sentences by performing highly dangerous missions in return for the Galactic Republic coummuting their sentence. The unfortunate truth is that Expendables rarely survive long enough to benefit from this commution, but those who choose this course do so because the short life of an Expendable is of better quality than any length of life in prison and for the chance at an early parole (if they survive that long).

Very few petty criminals ever take on the role of an Expendable because the chance at freedom and likelihood of death when compared to their total sentence is not worth it; instead, most Expendables are hardened criminals looking at extensive sentences that would otherwise be served out in brutal prison camps for a lifetime or more.

Expendables take five-year service comittments to the program. 1 in 1 does not survive that time. At the end of their service, should they survive, their record is cleared and their time is considered served. They are allowed to return to society as a full citizen of the Galactic Republic and are given a soldier’s pension. Expendables who die in the line of duty can expect any immediate family to be adequately compensated for services rendered.

It should be noted that of those criminals who survive the service, few return to criminal activity. Most are hired by the Republic to serve as part of crack military or intelligence teams.