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.

A failure as far as the 24hr game exersize goes, but a useful one, this contains the seeds of what will probably become a pretty good game.

Ye Olde West by James Bore

vs. Monsters is a roleplaying game in which the players take the roles of 19th century monster hunters living in the America of the time. This is the America of Edgar Allan Poe. This is America seen though the goggles of distortion that are used by such greats as Lewis Carrol, Tim Burton, and Mike Mignola. This is America as it never really was.

If you like the free version above, you can download the commercial version of vs. Monsters here.

Philip Reed always finds it funny when he?s writing about himself in the third-person. It?s just one of those strange things that writers tend to do on occasion. Writing about himself in the third-person is almost as funny as calling himself a writer. A graphic artist for over eight years Philip has spent more time pushing images, words, and assorted bits around trying to make them look pretty than he has trying to string words together into a form that people will pay him for.

Philip is rambling now and could probably stop and work on something a bit more important like finishing the game but instead he prefers to tell you a little more about himself. Philip is an Origins Award nominated game designer (Frag, 2001, Steve Jackson Games) but that really only means as much as the Awards themselves (which isn?t much at all). He?s also worked on some other things like the Munchkin Master?s Guide, Car Wars, and Battle Cattle The Card Game (all Steve Jackson Games) and Enter the Viking (for Atlas Games? Rune). His non-game, Vigilante, still brings in fan mail but he?s happy to report that the hate mail has slowed to one annoying e-mail a month.

A “twenty minute game” is an exercise in extemporaneous game design. As the name suggests each twenty minute game initially took no more than twenty minutes to conceive and design. Despite being a product of harried creative force, each twenty minute game is a fully functioning source of amusement.

Sunrise by Jeffrey Schecter

This is my first attempt at writing a role-playing game, or anything similar. I got the idea while pondering a question: “What would a game be like that was overtly geared towards Illusionist or Participationist play, to the point that it had mechanics to support this style?”

Pace is a 24 Hour Game, which means it was started with the intention of writing a 24 page RPG inside of 24 contiguous hours. In this, it has a strong relationship to the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), in that the intention is to crank out a work without looking back at any point, without pausing and wondering if you’re doing it right. The point is to get the ideas out of your head and onto the page. This game will doubtless reflect the warts of such an approach; one hopes it also has a shot at reflecting the beauty.

Far above the planet Clymexia, a Behemoth class starship slides through the chronoluminiferous ether. The fabric of space and time distort around it, a miracle of technology, possessed by few, and understood by fewer still. Inside, a man paces, bothered by an unidentifiable something. In a previous century, they might have called it ?conscience,? but for Herr Grodz, ?conscience? was an unfamiliar word. He was a cyborg, created to carry out the will of the Galactic Grand Emperor, and no force in this universe or any other, could stop him from doing his duty.

Criminal Element by Michael P. O’Sullivan

Terrak pulled his cloak closer about him. The air was chill in the pre-dawn light. He looked up and his gaze stretched across the imposing width of the Outer Wall. Nearly stretching from one end of the horizon to the other, the intricate frescoes glorifying the Empire were just starting to emerge from the shadows. Guards patrolled the Wall, their torches like tiny sparks of fairy light moving slowly across the top. Beyond that Wall lay a city of immense riches and wonder. A hundred miserable little cons and thefts had led up to this moment. This was his one chance to parlay a lifetime of petty crime and hardscrabble existence into something so much more. Terrak took a deep breath and headed towards the Gates of Earthly Paradise.