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.

Disaster! is a game where characters face an overwhelming threat which surely will destroy their community and their world. The players play the role of special people which are both, boosted and hindered by the emotions of other significant characters. They will share their happiness and hopes, but also their pain and deception. Thus, they will need to protect others to save themselves. When pain becomes unbearable, they have the choice to go far beyond it. Getting into a trance-state where they are disconnected from their emotions, they are able to perform amazing deeds. But this may endanger both, their safety and the safety of the others. Will any one of them survive the terrible coming disaster? Probably not, but they will make a good tale fighting until their last stance.

This game has been designed and written in about 24 hours for the Ronnie?s contest of October, 2005. The game central motives are: Fight and Pain.

Disaster! was somehow inspired by the story ?Scanners live in vain? by Cordwainer Smith.

The game concept and mechanics are in debt to many discussions held by members of The Forge forum. They are also highly influenced by some indiegames I had the opportunity to read recently. Looking backwards I specially recognize the inspiration of ?My Life with Master?, and ?Legends of Alyria?.

Red Rain is a role-playing game about boxers dealing with pain in their lives and in the ring. Two fighters deal with issues and make hard choices as they prepare for their next match, then they face off using fun playing card mechanics to play out a boxing match, round by round. The game is built for three players, and can easily be played in a single game session.

Red Rain is a role-playing game about boxers dealing with serious issues inside and outside of the boxing ring.

The game requires three players. Two players take on the role of opposing boxers getting ready for their fight against one another. And, one player takes on the role of the ?referee,? overseeing the drama that builds around these two fighters, their relationships, and their ultimate confrontation in the ring.

The game has two distinct phases. First, players explore the tough lives of the two boxers, resolving the fighters? personal issues and working through their difficult choices as they prepare for the big fight. Then, players actually play through the boxing match, round by round and blow by blow, to decide which of the two fighters emerges the victor.

Players will need a deck of poker-style playing cards (remove the jokers), and a couple pieces of paper to keep track of the fighters and their relationships.

Celestial Sphere: The Fight for the Cosmos in the Age of Pain is an entry to the October 25 Ronnies. The challenge was to write a game using two of the four terms (Cosmos, Fight, Pain, and Sphere) to create a 24 hour RPG. I took the whore-route and combined all four into one game that pretty much wrote itself. Although I think it would be a fun game, there are much better entries you should check out.

You take on the role of a Constilation sent to earth to try and repair the damage done to the Spheres of the Cosmos in a time of chaos.

In the beginning all was as it should be. The Spheres existed in harmony, and the Cosmos was balanced.

Since the beginning of time the Celestial Sphere was where a Hero would find themselves when they fell. From the Mortal Sphere these fallen heroes could still be seen as Constellation, and they provided hope and guidance to the inhabitants of the Mortal Sphere. The Constellations (or Celestials as they called themselves) took pride in their position, and proudly looked down from the heavens, offering assistance and support to those who needed it.

The change started subtly, with mere ripples in the Celestial sphere, subtly warping the distances between places. Those few Celestials who even noticed the change were not believed at first. Others claimed that they had simply gotten lost or that they had been mistaken in their direction, these distortion in the sphere continued and grew larger until no Celestial. these distortions warped the sphere to the point that not all of the Sphere orbited the Mortal Sphere. Tales began circulating of heroes going missing, or becoming eternally lost.

The effects on the Mortal sphere were even greater. Since the two spheres had always been closely bound what effects one inevitably effects the other one. With out the guidance and memories of the Constellations to guide them the mortals began to loose their way. Soon memories began to fade of the legends of old, and magic itself began to disappear from the Sphere.

Before the Celestials had a chance to respond to the situation on the Mortal Sphere or fully comprehend what was occurring on their own Sphere, things took an even more sinister turn. In the newly remote areas of the Celestial Sphere tears and dark holes began to form. In the area around these ‘black holes’ the Celestials started to feel a draining of the very energy that sustained them, the Divine Manna. Those brave heroes who began to investigate the phenomenon disappeared. The first Celestial to return from a chasm, was Vulcan, and he did so heavily wounded, barely clinging to life. When word of a survivor came Celestials from all over the sphere came to see if Vulcan had learned something that could possibly bring an end over the sphere came to see if Vulcan had learned something that could possibly bring an end to their troubles. When asked what he saw the hero responded with one word “pain” and promptly passed away, something which had never happened in the Celestial Sphere before.

It was then that the Chasms erupted with activity and a dark army spilled from the chasms, as though Vulcan’s death had some how summoned them into existence. From the void came drove after drove of beasts and demons of all sizes. These ‘Gorgons’ fell on the assembled Celestials. The battle that ensued was swift and brutal, but in the end the Celestials stood victorious.

The heroes had managed to beat most of the beast back into the darkness, but a few managed to escape, by slipping into the Mortal Sphere and taking the guise of mortals.

The Celestials are aware that these Gorgons are in some way responsible for this new Age, the Age of Pain, and they must now hunt the remaining Gorgon, whither they be in the heavens or the earth. Only by defeating the beast can they ever hope to understand the source of the damage done to both the Mortal and Celestial Spheres. As the greatest heroes of the Mortal realms they are charged with regaining a balance between the spheres, or they are doomed to watch the Age of Pain become the Age of Oblivion…

Space Rangers is an RPG about playing the people the galactic Confederacy call when the job just has to be done right.the first time.

In a Galaxy of 1 trillion nearbaseline humans and 6 trillion other sentient, about a quarter of which belong to the Confederacy, occasionally doing things through the regular channels just won’t or can’t take care of the problem.

When that happens in the Confederacy somebody calls in the Space Rangers.

This is my submission for the October 25 Ronnies.

Some days start better than others.

This was not one of them.

I’m Sara Levi. At 5′ 8 with the curly hair and straight nose given to me by my Jewish heritage, I?ve been called a good-looking brunette. I am also a Confederacy Ranger.

So what does that have to do with me having a bad day? Well I had been investigating a slavery ring based in the Empire of Men but operating in Confederacy space. Nasty chaps, these guys were picking off underdeveloped colonies, killing everybody and destroying everything they couldn’t sell, nuking the colony till it glowed and selling the proceeds and chattel (that’s right, sapients) over across the Arm in the Empire.

Personally, I’ve never understood slavery. Free women (and occasionally men) work so much better at everything. But that’s not how it is seen in the Empire. Now if the slavers had attacked a world like my homeworld, Liberty, there would have been a few less slavers in the Galaxy. We like to shoot at people; it keeps the blood moving, particularly when they are shooting back. If you shoot at me you are bound to get your damn fool head blown clean off. Makes me a fun girl to have at a party if you don?t mind things getting a little out of hand. Unfortunately, slavers prey upon worlds that can?t or won?t defend themselves.

So the Confederacy Congress decided to send in the Rangers to prove the existence of the slavers as an organization under the direct influence and protection of the Empire of Man or, failing that, undermine and destroy the slaver ring in the most effective manner possible.

Which meant, in this case, they sent me.

I was just about ready to wrap up my investigation and even had enough names of the big dogs in the Empire to make my case before the Confederacy. The slavers I was spying on were in fact collecting fuel to make the final jump home from a comet wending it’s way inbound in a solar system whose star just happened to be almost smack dab between the trailing arm of the Confederacy and the leading arm of the Empire.

The system in question has two habitable terrestrial planets, a rarity in anybody?s book. Why these slavers hadn’t cleared the worlds which had technology no better than that you?d find during the Terran European Middle Ages and would have been an easy mark for these guys, I?ll never know, but as it was they often traded for supplies with one of the kingdoms on Loran, the world that orbits closer to the sun. This particular kingdom on Loran practiced slavery. That being the case the standard trade was slaves for supplies.

While most of the slaves they had pulled in their last job could be sold in the Empire of Man, a few, for whatever the reason, had proved to be too much of a problem. The normal practice for recalcitrant or less than useful slaves is to push them out of an airlock, but with Romant being between here and there it made sense to collect the bunch that were not going to work out and sell them to the locals. That might actually be why the Empire slavers didn’t do in the planet, after all, it’s hard to find good help 5 light years from any place “civilized”.

Be that as it may, Grogh, he was the piece of work in charge of this lovely band of miscreants, decided it was my turn to head down to Romant on Loran and negotiate with the natives for supplies.

So in a shuttle with 6 of my ‘fellow’ slavers I was sent along. The fact that we were not carrying any “cargo? to show off our wares should have tipped me off but we were in low Loran orbit before I put two and two together and realized I must have been compromised.

Which is where my day began to suck really bad.

The Sphere is the size of a large city. From its surface can be seen an eternal night sky above and a flat never ending desert below. No one knows where the Sphere is. No one knows who built it. No one knows why it exists. No one knows how they got there.

Every inhabitant of the sphere was plucked from their former lives and woke up here. Some survive, some die. No one leaves. On the sphere there is no government and there are no rules. A select few are different.

These few wake up with a weapon beside them and a digital display device embedded in their left hand. The device constantly cycles a sequence of names and faces. The sequence ends with a simple phrase, “Kill or Be Killed…” These few are called “Gladiators.” No one is really sure what happens to the last one standing, maybe you’ll find out.

This is a game about playing Gladiators, people plucked from their former lives and forced to kill each other for an unknown prize. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. A lot more people than the Gladiators have been snatched from their former lives and forced to live on The Sphere. These people have formed their own gangs, tribes, governments and other communities and come with all the complications of everyday human life.

One of the design goals of Fight Sphere is to focus the game on the Gladiators’ interactions with these communities. The more the character’s engage with the situations and conflicts found among these people the greater their chances of surviving Gladiatorial Encounters.

The primary influences on this game are the films Series 7, Cube and Escape From New York. Episodic television series such as The Fugitive and The Hulk are also major influences. The mechanics borrow heavily from the games The Pool, Trollbabe, My Life With Master and The Farm.

3:16 is a SF game for the October ‘Ronnies’. It uses the terms ‘Cosmos’ and ‘Fight’. It is in the style of Aliens, Starship Troopers, WH4K, etc. and the players are all members of the doomed 3:16th Expeditionary Force sent from Terra to conquer the cosmos.

Vrakkkk-kkkk-kkkkk. Corporal Tollman?s Energy Cannon converted the group of huddling creatures into a cloud of swirling space dust. Vrakkkk-kkkk-kkkkk. Another group, and another, and another. The cannon?s gunnery computer was beeping into Tollman?s earphones at a rapid tempo. These little green bastards were getting murdered. The Kill Counter on top of the cannon increased by the millisecond. Impassively counting the carnage. The rhythmic beeping was trance-like and hypnotic.

Vra-wheeeeeeee. The energy beam sheared off, missing the target and detonating a pile of rocks instead. Suddenly, from all around little green men started to race closer and closer. Tollman?s mind flashed back to a time long before?

She was maybe 1 and they?d been playing The Game. In The Game you went into this really dark cave. All the other kids were already in there and they had sticks and stones. They poked, prodded, bashed and frightened you while you tried to make it to the back of the cave. You had to get there, overcoming your fear and panic, and grab some moss, slick and wet to touch, from the very furthermost cave wall. Then you had to run over the wet floor of the cave avoiding the tripping feet and thrown rocks to break out free into the light.

If you did that then they let you join their gang. It had taken Tollman five or six attempts to get to the back of that cave. But when she did she had learned not to panic or be frightened even when the unexpected happened. She was cool under pressure and had learnt to keep it simple. It was something that had served her well in the Force too.

Never panic, it?ll get you dead.

Back to the present Tollman lowered the cannon and swept a series of ravening beams of energy through the fast-approaching hordes. They fell into clouds of dust. Motes drifting intricately through the alien atmosphere of this hell-hole of a planet.

Vrakkkk-kkkk-kkkkk. The last little green bastard evaporated into a cloud of constituent atoms. The Kill Counter stopped at 97. The tip of the cannon was glowing white hot and the whine of the cooling fans was the only sound left.

Sergeant Brand looked over the top of the trench, ?Corporal, status??

?All Clear, Sergeant. A series of trenches ahead and then we?re done here. After that,? she paused, ?it?s not so clear.?

Brand nodded at the Lieutenant next to him in the trench. The first hurdle had been cleared.

A space fantasy in the line of Rom the Spaceknight- superhuman heroes struggle to save mankind against aliens- while at the same time, who will save mankind from itself?

Starblade Echoes is a space opera/fantasy, inspired by comics such as Rom the Spaceknight, the various Ultraman manga series, and anime like Tekkaman or Tekkaman Blade. The players take the roles of Spaceknights, undertaking missions from High Command to protect the people and planets of United Human Space from the Ningar. One player takes the role of gamemaster (GM), who creates the missions, as well as the other characters who the Spaceknights encounter on their travels.

The 24 hour RPG where all-powerful brands compete for market share in mythical 1985 Los Angeles. My first ever attempt at any type of game design, it ended up a little unwieldy and unfinished. Oct Ronnies entrant.

Material World is the roleplaying game of corporations and their brands struggling for the hearts and minds of the brainwashed public, whose whims can shift billions of dollars at a moment’s notice The corporate world is in constant turmoil, as brand managers, lawyers, advertisers, and private commandos attempt to gain ground for their Brands, pushing other Brands out of the public awareness. This conflict hinges on the player characters, who are the only people with enough Cool Stuff to decide the world’s fate.

Player’s take the role of ideologies that explain the nature of the universe, competing for the chance to define reality.

Developed for The Ronnies, October ?5 (Cosmos, Fight)

Introduction

In this game each player will take on the role of some explanation for the universe, embodied within a mythos, belief system, science, religion. These opposing views will clash, gain favor, lose followers, until at the end there is only one remaining and the truth of the universe is known.

Reality Cops is a sci-fi flavoured game about the people who defend the real world against changes brought on by exposure to different realities. The Cop’s effectiveness in other realities is governed by how much their life sucks in this one.

On March 6th, in the year 2217, Martin Thompson applied a revolutionary combination of mind theory and chemical science, to discover that ours is not the only world. He learned that certain minds, under certain conditions, can be made to shift their perception into other realities. Other worlds. Some of these worlds are much like ours, some are very different. He called these alternate realities phases of existence, and proposed that when a mind transitioned between them, the phases met and touched at that single point, much like soap bubbles floating in air. And like those bubbles, they proved fragile, some more so than others. In early experiments, three volunteers were driven insane when the communal phase they occupied broke under the pressure.On December 9th 2219, Martin Thompson died, went insane, and disappeared, in approximately that order.

This was the first recorded incidence of reality subversion.