It was created by Team Shark (Jesse, Sam and Graham) for CODECO 2020.

SuperSpeed uses a set of polyhedral dice annotated as XdY where X is the number of dice to roll and Y is the number of sides the dice has. In SuperSpeed you will likely need several d4, d6, d8, d10 and d12.

Based on a 2d6+mods resolution as taken from the Apocalypse World hacks; with a rough detailed setting and a guide to build your own along the game.

The whole rules are 6 pages long counting pictures and character sheets.

This game we play for:

• Character design that begins with character concept, not numbers!
• Opposed roll rules that mean low rolls aren’t automatic failure!
• Direct rewards for good roleplaying!
• Abstract combat positions for your imagination, not the tabletop!
• Action-based combat instead of turn-based combat!
• Streamlined rules, great for adding house rules or rules modules!
• On-the-fly GM features like one-second-monsters and the average-person rule!
• Many more cool features that let you roleplay the game you want!

What is Modos RPG? A simplified roleplaying system that creates ambiguities in order to allow players and game masters to fill the gaps with imagination. Roleplaying games have historically tried to define things like hit points, damage, and attributes in a conrcrete way; this game leaves the definitions up to its players.

A universal conflict-resolution system allows most things (combat, skill-tests, social conflict) to be resolved in a uniform way, while leaving room for GMs to customize each experience. Furthermore, the game rewards (and encourages) roleplaying in these situations with a direct bonus to die rolls and the hero point, a daily power designed by the player.

GMs will find that this system supports multi-genre play and encourages them to design their own adventures and new rules for sharing in “modules.” This makes it easy to tailor the game to a particular group’s needs, and to find or prepare a new adventure each week.

In Empty Roads, a single protagonist, created and narrated collaboratively by all players embarks on a journey, meeting various strangers along the way, interacting with them, shaping their and her own life. The story is shaped by the cliches and stereotypes of the road movie genre.

Have fun!

Intro from the document:

. . . Let’s face it; the corporations have won. It wasn’t a dramatic end-all battle, but a slow, systematic, and calculated takeover. By the time anyone realized there was a war, the victors were dividing up the country and taking inventory. But even with the corporations ruling their own
kingdoms and having their not-so-quiet wars, there is plenty of room to do good and make life better for everyone. Whether freedom fighters, corporate crushers, or even known as protectors of the poor, these different nanomod enhanced teams go out to accomplish missions to further their goals. While these goals can vary, all trend towards ruining corporate day to day business and trying to make life a bit less control by them.

Armed with Nanite Enhancement Systems (NES), managing their Mods, Apps, and Tools, the average mod-runner is usually going into assignments woefully out-gunned, out-numbered, and never quite knowing if they’re going to find friend or foe to help them out. But who said it was going to be easy? It’s Just Another Day in the dystopian, cyberpunk life.

Always Lonely, Never Alone is a 24-hour rpg submitted to the 2015 loreshapers contest, meeting strangers. It is about common people suddenly waking up trapped in an unknown complex, the Cage, along with others. Their primary goal is probably to find out how they got there and escape, not necessarily in that order. Above all, though, they have to survive. To do that, they will have to work together, which may prove to be the biggest challenge.

ALNA features quick, random character generation for those who want to get a character fast, special handling of character death, and a light and straightforward set of rules, aimed towards increasing drama and tension.

The game is released under the CC BY-NC-SA license.

New heroes will take the place of the old ones and fight against the enemy your old heroes where not able to defeat. You will learn more and more about the enemy you are facing and in the end you will overcome the evil you are facing.

It is short (something about 2000 signs, I believe), and was written by my – Łukasz “Skavenloft” KoÅ‚odziej, consulted with “MichaÅ‚ “vonMansfeld” Przygodzki and translated by Szymon “Noobirus” Piecha.
We are all freelance game-designers from Poland, and it is first time that we ever try to submit anything for any contest. The whole creation and translation process take us less than twelve hours. English isn’t our first language, but we do our best to translate this as good as we can. We hope you will like this little game as much, as we do

Additional material is available from http://mythozoic.blogspot.co.uk/

Honoring cinema’s greatest giant monsters!

When dice have to be rolled, a roll less or equal the most appropriate attribute succeeds, a roll over means failure. The three attributes also come into play when the characters get hurt or face exceptional mental stress.

This RPG is best suited for small campaigns or one-shots and fits into any setting.
It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share alike License 4.0.

The 100 / 3 RPG homepage is: http://sven.kir.jp/100_3_RPG/

Explore the world of H.P. Lovecraft with a fun, rules-light, yet brutal and unforgiving RPG engine Powered By The Apocalypse. Make friends, kill monsters, go insane. Sounds like an average Saturday night.

In a few pages, the game contains the background setting, in classic cyberpunk style, the adventure seed, the pregenerated characters’ sheets to play with, and the instruction for the Master.
This is all you need for a few sessions of play.

http://www.BrutalRPG.com
http://www.FaceBook.com/BrutalRPG

It’s the product of supermonkey, Rob Lang, who’s also the brains behind The Free RPG Blog. Featuring 1KM1KT activists Chainsaw “Jason” Aardvark, Emmett O’Brian, Jeremy “JK” Mosher, Jonathan Lavellee, and Mike Hunt.

Streamed live on Dec 1, 2013

A free pencil and paper RPG Q&A with Chainsaw “Jason” Aardvark, Emmett O’Brian, Jeremy “JK” Mosher, Jonathan Lavellee, Mike Hunt (on the chat) and Rob Lang.

We talk about our favourite RPGs and what we would like to see them do more often (or less often), name check our RPG heroes and spread some free RPG love.

Check out the forum thread here

Wacky Love is a game where you take the role of a Protagonist-to-be and square of against the others to become the Protagonist of a Romantic Comedy Movie. Think you’ll be the one?

Submitted to the 2013 Harder Than Granite 24 Hour RPG Competition.

Designed in 24 hours for the 2013 “Harder than Granite” challenge. To play this game you’ll also need some tokens, a magic eight ball, and a copy of the “Mandala of All Things”.

They will take turns in trying to gain the King’s favor, but they also must take care of the Kingdom, under attack from an invading army.

Become middle-management for the greatest espionage organization in the world: SPECTRUM.

The House of Unusual Size uses a round-robin GM system, which alternates GM and player duties during each scene and gives the group a chance to experiment with genres and narrative styles during each session.

Created for the Harder Than Granite 24 Hour RPG Competition.

A pocketmod format game submitted to the 2013 Harder Than Granite 24 Hour RPG Competition.

A pocketmod format game submitted to the 2013 Harder Than Granite 24 Hour RPG Competition.

This pocketmod game is a submission for 2013 24h RPG: Harder than granite.

The only way to find out who is right is by drinking, one of the favorite activities when dwarfs have no enemies to kill.

Dwarfen Veteran is story driven. Who wins the contest can narrate the outcome. No stats, no dices, no game master. Just your vivid imagination and a lot of beer.

Dwarfen Veterans was submitted to the 2013 Harder than Granite 24 Hour RPG Competition.

Submitted to the 2013 Harder than Granite 24 Hour competition

The .zip download contains both the pocketmod format of the rules and also a screen-friendly version.

Submitted for the 2013 Harder than Granite RPG competition.

A 24 Hour RPG.

Submitted for the 2013 Harder than Granite 24 Hour RPG competition.

With these words, the evil Dr. Keeton pronounces doom upon
the city.

Your heroes must band together and thwart his evil scheme
before it is too late. You must become a Pocketful of Heroes!

Submitted for the 2013 Harder than Granite 24 Hour RPG competition.

Submitted for the 2013 Harder than Granite 24 Hour RPG competition.

Super Robot Go!

Characters go dimension hopping to recover lost artifacts.  Very quick chargen and adventure creation.  Characters have 4 traits and use cards as tokens.

What if you had the power to see a glimpse of the future? In this game you play people who can. You need two different kind of tokens and a deck of tarot cards.

After years of losing children to the witch in the woods, your village has had enough.

Find some friends and brave the dark woods in search of revenge on a good, old-fashioned Witch Hunt.

Note the emphasis is on light. If you like spending hours optimizing every last detail of your character, picking exactly the right abilities and equipment to make them as capable as possible, planning how they are going to advance over the next twenty levels, if you like specific rules and modifiers that cover every possible condition and situation that could arise in play in minute detail, this is not the game for you. Not that there is anything wrong with games like that, but this isn’t one of them. In this game, you can create a character in about 30 seconds, requiring very few decisions in the process, and almost every situation or task in the game is resolved in exactly the same way, with a single die roll.

Who is this game meant for? I’ve tried to make it friendly to new gamers, not just by virtue of simple rules, but by explaining things in a manner that is hopefully easy to understand (yes, I did include the dreaded “What is Role-playing” section). I think people looking for a quick pick-up game might also like it, and I have tried to make it robust enough to support campaigns of at least moderate length.

In short, this is another rules-light generic fantasy RPG floating in a sea of similar products. I hope someone out there enjoys it and finds some use for it, but even if they don’t, I have enjoyed writing it.

Oh, and what exactly is the titular Dragon Sword? I know what it is in my game, but there is no “official” definition, it’s just a name I thought sounded neat and evocative. Make it whatever you want it to be, or nothing at all if you prefer.

Dislcaimer: Not playtested at all.

I have a website where it is posted: www.barrowgames.webs.com.

The setting for the adventure may take place in an old mansion, a graveyard, a castle or outer space. Who cares as long as it’s fun and spooky? The game may take only an hour for a quick dip into the abyss, or may need to be broken up into sessions (or episodes) for a longer story to unfold. The purpose of the game is to develop and engage in a rich story with friends. Never let yourselves be bogged down by the rules.

The central component is the idea of gambling dice from a pool. Upon winning a roll, you can take the reins of the story for a moment and narrate the outcome of your action, introducing new story elements if you like.

The Pool contains no setting or genre context. It is just a system.

Pirates, smugglers, mercs and politicians!

13 million million cubic light years, 1/3 of the galaxy, seven races, no major military conflicts and still we find ways to fight. The Galactic Republic of Civilizations tries its best to keep all of us in line but someone always wants what someone else has. Whether it is data, power or just plan currency. Lets not forget that those who have what others crave, fight just as hard to keep what they got. Even the Republic isn’t blameless; nor the Core governments, nor the Fringe.

Peace is relative. Conflict is constant.

Your course will be choppy in this Sea of Stars.

——————————

If you like playing in a world where you can be anyone and do anything then this little thing I created is for you. Sea of Stars is a table top role playing game I have written.

Set in the middle of the 23rd century on the Human calendar, it builds a broad stage for any kind of science fiction themed adventure you could ask for.

Before the wars began, man was ruler of the earth. But one result of the terrible wars was that creatures rose from the ashes of the unknown. The genes of the earth’s animals and plants were altered, until strange, new creatures arose – creatures of the awesome power and fierceness and often great intelligence.

You have lived all your years among such creatures and among the strange artifacts – inexplicable, often dangerous- of the Ancients who created this now devastated civilization whose ruins you live among the world of Mutants & Machine-guns!

In this game you are one of them. You can become a pure human, a human mutant or an evolved animal. Task resolution is 2d6 plus one of the 4 stats against TN and depend on character type you may pick 1 or more mutation.

The rules are creative commons.

More available at: http://zapti.free.fr/pirates/en/

“Journey Through Mirkwood” is very simple and rather short, one page RPG adventure game for one player. I hope you’ll enjoy it

7th Seal reveals a world in chaos, ravaged by the Last War, Armageddon, a viral contagion and an alien invasion. From this disastrous beginning, though, emerges a new breed of heroes. Forged in the fire of war, fueled with Old Testament faith, alien technology and psionic mutations these heroes fight to bring order out of chaos, to rebuild and protect their world, and to defeat the Leviathan. So don you power suit, say your prayers, grab your lucky plasma rifle and your psionic friend, too, and let’s kick some mutant-demon-zombie-alien-butt

Now with a package of  nearly completed character sheets to quickly get your body count rising.

Produced by AJ Ferguson.

This file, The Case of the Unghostly Ghost, is a prequel created (and distributed for free) for the Kickstarter project of The Thief of Memories. The file is fully-playable and contains all the rules for the system.

Arcana Agency was made in the style of “Choose Your Own Adventure” books but with proper RPG mechanics and dice rolls, akin to “Fighting Fantasy” or “Fable Lands.” It’s written in third person (“he,” “she”) instead of second person (“you”), which is a departure from other gamebooks, and allows the reader to control multiple characters at once (like an adventuring party).

Arcana Agency: The Thief of Memories (PDF)

the character creation is simple and fast point buying system, the system itself exist out of two different parts.
D10 is rolling a D10 and ad a skill or other bonus.
the other part is a dice-less pool point spending system.

Updated November 2013 with new (expanded) ruleset.

– Create highly customizable characters from 25 different playable races.

– Define your character through your choices from hundreds of skills, spells and specials from 25 ability sets and 12 kinds of magic.

– Equip your character from hundreds of weapons, armor and items, all with various customization options.

– Test your mettle against over 100 example enemies from wretched goblins to fearsome dragons.

– Multiple optional, alternate and expanded rules allow the game to be tailored to your group’s tastes.

– Create & enter mystical realms limited only by your imagination.

Despite Tsarist advances in Central Asia, the British conquests of Afghanistan and Sudan have given them the upper hand. But now the Scryers of the Court of St. James foretell the emergence of the greatest threat to the Empire since the demon Napoleon a century before.

A new power is rising from beyond the realms of the human nations, from the uncharted lands at the base of the world. The frozen continent of Anarktica.

—

Anarktica: Fate of Heroes is a steampunk story game. It is completely free to download, to reproduce and distribute. It tells the story of a group of four heroes, their journey across the land of Anarktica, and their encounters with its inhabitants, creatures, monsters and mysteries. Outwardly brave and resolute, each hero is saddled with a terrible secret that tears at their soul and taints their trust in their companions until finally they encounter the Adversary and their true nature is revealed.

It’s a low prep, quick playing scenario based on the Archipelago 2nd edition rule-set by Matthijs Holter and inspired by its gaming offspring Love in the Time of Seið by Matthijs Holter and Jason Morningstar. It requires five players and should take three to five hours.

It was written for the 24-hour RPG contest Little Spaces in June 2012.

Some Blurb:

Approaching the 1-mile Space Island, you note that something is askew. Many of the solar glass domes have been torn out, and the steel cables of one of the spokes slowly dangle into space. A few lights seem to be burning inside the ring, but most of the surface has gone dark. The few glimpses you can get when the sun shines through the ruptures look apocalyptic.

You try to warn the pilot and the guards, but they ignore your screaming, leaving you in your confined docking cell. Then, when the rotation of your shuttle finally reached twentyfive second rotation, synchronising your sick stomach with the rotating prison, a deep click rumbles through the floor and walls. Almost without warning the airlock sizzles and opens. You quickly grab your masks and put them on.

A deep metal chasm extends downward. There is no lift. You hesitate, but then the electric current through the floor of your cell prods you painfully. You have to go in.

“Is this place dead?”
“I thought I heard something”
“That’s your breath, dumbass”
“No, I heard something too”

DANGER – CONFINED SPACE – NO SURVIVAL GUARANTEED.

You are captain, crew and VIP guests on board, starting twenty-four hours earlier. Will you learn what went wrong? Can you change history, and save their lives?

SSN-589 DOWN is a role playing game written for the 24-hour RPG competition of May-June 2012. It’s fast paced, GM-less, cooperative and competitive at the same time, and best with three players or more. All you’ll further need is these rules, a deck of playing cards, a different pawn for each player, and a coin.

This is the 24-hour version.

You may find a newer version at www.darkdungeon2.com

It is somewhat similar to a murder mystery, except that instead of investigating the murder, players have to carry it out or prevent it, depending on the role assigned to them. The fun lies largely in the fact that roles (with the exception of the GM) are randomly assigned in secret, so that nobody knows quite who to trust. The number of assassins is randomly determined and players draw lots blind to determine their individual roles. All anyone (except the GM) knows at the start of the game is that there is at least one would-be killer and whether or not they themselves are a killer.

The game can be played using different scenarios, which define the nature of the setting and the types of characters. Two scenarios are included in this version of the game: “Get Down In The Bomb Shelter, Mr(s) President” (where players attempt to protect or kill a political figure such as a King, Queen or President in a high-security official nuclear fallout bunker) and “Porterhouse Code Blue” (where players attempt to protect or kill the master of an Oxbridge college in a wine cellar, basement lecture hall or Anderson shelter).

The game is designed to be played in a single sitting face-to-face, but it could be played in other formats (such as play-by-post or LARP) with little or no modification.

Note: “How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb Shelter” requires players (particularly the GM) to separate what they know as a person in the real world from what their character knows within the fiction nothing ruins the fun of plotting, backstabbing, lying and scheming like a player who constantly decides that their character suddenly needs to urinate when Keeton is being discreetly strangled in the bathroom.

Due to the competitive nature of the game, it is unlikely to be suitable for groups containing players who are too immature or inexperienced in RPGs to maintain this separation.

There is no time to wait, you and Wings quickly extricate yourselves from the wreckage of your BE2. As the Mystery Airship suddenly turns, the deck tilts and the BE2 slides away threatening to carry you both over the side and into oblivion. Scrambling out of the way, you and Wings cling to the rungs of a nearby ladder as the BE2 slips off and falls away into the darkness. All you can hear now is the wind and the roar of the Airship’s engines. There is nothing left to do but climb the ladder, which leads, where? A circular hatch lies before you, Wings turns the latch and opens the hatch, you both climb in and shut it behind you…

This is the Wings Keeton Role Playing Game of High Adventure in the Roaring 20s’ As a Hero or Sidekick you defeat dastardly villains, rescue damsels, and nothing is too fantastic! This game uses nothing but paper and pencil, and ordinary six sided dice.

In many RPGs, a character is defined by his or her strengths. Players try to do something, roll and see if they succeed. In “Yes, But” characters are defined by their weaknesses. YES, you always succeed at your attempted action somehow, BUT the amount of hilarious fallout and weird consequences depends on your ineptitude at given task. The players who come up with most absurd proclamations are rewarded with Thingies, which leads to events quickly spiraling out of control. Whoever earns most thingies by the end of the session, wins!

Races to play:

-Gnobbits

-Gnoblins

-Gnobolds

-Gnorks

Inabilities to develop:

-flabby

-clumsy

-yucky

-silly

-squeamish

Drawbacks to enjoy:

-you aren’t ever allowed to agree what other people say

-you actually can understand people

-everybody probably is animated plush toy plotting against you

-panic fear of letter “K”

SMAF 17 is a game set in 1967 after the Cuban Missile crisis genuinely led to world-wide destruction. Living on a sea-base once designed for luxury living and then converted into a prison are the last survivors of the human race, a mix of criminals and those who once kept them. Desperate to survive, with supplies running ever-lower and the facility beginning to collapse,

will you sink or swim?

Author: Eduardo Lozano Munera

Genre: Narrative-freedom RPG with Game Director

Description: The game is set in a floating island and there the inhabitants have their own struggles with life. Beyond them, the players acts as Gods which decides the lives of these people constrained in the little space that is their island.

VientoLibre is the most modern aircraft from Wandering Realms, the sum of the combined efforts of the more advanced (and explosive) Goblin technology, the delicate and precise inventive Nisse, elemental magic of Fay and the powerful Soul Sorcery of humans.

The four kingdoms have made sail to the VientoLibre to find out why the Wandering Realms have lost their way across the Ocean of the Four Winds, being isolated from the Lower Continents after the dense curtain of mist floating around the floating archipelago.

The flying ship sailed with a combined crew of four races, that despite their differences and difficulties have been an uneasy truce in search of the truth of the outside world. But each faction has its own agenda on the ship, and now that they are isolated in the mist …

Will they be able to work together to find the solution to the mystery, or fight each other for control?

There is also a short adventure to help you get started, Epsilon Outpost, which was an entry in the 2010 One Page Dungeon Contest and can be reused any number of times.

On the other side of the universe, millions of years in the past or future, faster-than-light ships are comparatively recent, genetic engineering is commonplace, and countless worlds and systems were seeded with life millennia ago.

Welcome to Seeded Space.

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/seeded-space/12335987

Here, players will not be diplomats, space marines or romanticized scoundrels. Instead, they’ll be the workers that do all the stuff that happens in the background.

Uninteresting, you say?

That’s because you haven’t been in Torus One before.

Torus One RPG was written for the 24 Hour RPG Competition – Little Spaces

Welcome to Claustrophobia!, the game about crazy gnome explorers on board the doomed Nuclear Subterrine*, the sentient vessel HMS Keeton. When standing around in the garden becomes too much, colonies of gnomes turn to a life of adventuring or crime, the later being the preferred, less hazardous change of occupation. For those adventurous gnomes there is but one choice, take up their shovel, wheel barrow or fishing rod and tackle the greatest quest any gnome can undertake: a journey to the center of the earth. Prepare to face hardship, danger, and more than likely extreme cases of Claustrophobia!

You have been warned.

* A subterranean submarine, usually constructed by gnomes out of surplus garden supplies and powered by a home made and somewhat dangerous nuclear power plant.

GOBLIN CAVE is goblin gathering GMless game for 3 or more players. Impress your warlord with your huge Warband, and convince him that you are the goblin leader of the future!

In GOBLIN CAVE, you take on the role of a young goblin, attempting to win over the hearts and minds of your fellow cave dwellers. Everything you need to create your character is in your dice bag, as your dice contains everything you need to know about your goblin. You will need a variety of dice to play this game, but will only be rolling one.

This is about how far will you go to get the part of Hamlet in the free version that the very prestigious James Maryon wants to perform.

What do the characters do?

The characters are actors who, based on their drives, will try to get The Part while being bound in a medieval castle, forced to coexist with each other; and they will perform their monologues, suspect from their rivals and sabotage their own monologue, or maybe kill them!

What do the players do?

The players will divide themselves, because one of them will be the Dealer and the Judge and the others will be the Actor*’s players. They all will play the part of one character (Mr. Keeton, the Butler for the Judge and the Actors for the rest). They will describe whatever they may be interested, requested, or needed, trying to make their character win; the rules, based in cards games, are made for getting this done properly.

*Masculine is used not because sexism, but because laziness.

[Post competition versions included (1.1 etc) – misterecho]

As with most of my games, it was made entirely in the GIMP, Scribus, and LibreOffice, and is released under a CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

Be sure to download the PDF files using the arrow on the right of their file description to get the full advantage of their features.

The Players are adrift in space. Each is in his/her own EVA suit. They are luckily in contact with the station AI, also known as Keeton. The GM plays the role of Keeton. The player(s) through dialog, and the expenditure of resources must try to survive long enough to be rescued by other station
personnel, or make their way back to the station on their own.

There is almost no pre-game accounting, so you can dive in almost immeadiately.

Adventure is everywhere. This is the world of Heroes Against Darkness.

Heroes Against Darkness is a free, fast, flexible, and fully-featured fantasy d20 RPG system. The game is quick to learn and play, while offering progressively greater options and flexibility as players develop their characters and explore the breadth and depth of the system.

For Players:

• A game that’s fast, fun and deep
• Streamlined rules system using unified mechanics
• Eleven character classes for all play-styles
• Three martial classes: Warrior, barbarian, berserker
• Two specialist classes: Rogue, hunter
• One hybrid class that combines magic and martial: Hospiter
• Five magi classes: Warlock, healer, canonate, necromancer, mystic
• Extensive character background and skill options
• Fast character building with plenty of depth
• Martial and specialist classes get meaningful combat choices through class-specific techniques that are based on trade-offs and the unique capabilities of each class
• Anima points-based magic system with five main schools focusing on each of the following; physical, healing, protection, necrotic and controlling

For GMs:

• A system that’s easy for the GM to set up and run
• Intuitive and clear rules
• Set up unique combat encounters in minutes
• A simple ability test system for non-combat challenges
• Support for long-term campaign play
• Extensive GM’s Guide to help run the game
• Huge bestiary with over 80 monsters
• A framework for quickly making custom monsters
• A comprehensive world-building guide
• Appendix of key tables for GMs

http://heroesagainstdarkness.blogspot.com/

In other words, anyone can build its own RPG using the rules described here. Even better, having a lot of different games based on StaMTaR (“stamtardised” games) could be a very useful thing both for players and authors, IMHO. A standardised process could lead to a scenario in which a lot of products (both free and commercial) exist, products fully mutually compatible.

In the cruel modern world in which standards are often defined by marketing rules such an attempt could seem foolish. But I want to try.

Update 9/3/12: An expanded difficulty table is included, as well as an appendix for magic use in the “stamtardised” framework.
The first revision is based on playtest and web-based feedback.

Don’t know much about History? Biology? A science book? Then you’ll fit right in to Alien House. It’s the coolest, hippest, happening-est frat house on campus, but watch out! Dean ‘Wormhole’ is on the warpath. He’s been trying to have Alien House closed down for years, and now he thinks he’s got them just where he wants them. Complete your studies, have a cracking time and save Alien House from closure. Do you think you can manage that?

Sci-Fi Beta Kappa is a game where players take on the role of slacker aliens with a bunch of abilities such as power manipulation, enhanced senses, larceny, super strength etc., who, having been kicked off their homeworlds for various misdemeanours, have been exiled to Terra. There, they get into all sorts of scrapes and are under constant surveillance by Dean ‘Wormhole’, who hates aliens and is always looking for an excuse to close down Alien House.

Intro scenario: Toga! Toga! Toga! The Dean has just given AH a massive dressing down and spirits are low. What better way to lift them than with a toga party? After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Think Animal House meets Men in Black, with a dash of Monsters And Other Childish Things.

Since Uptime 00000, the Collective has been. A gestalt community of programs living on in the Ship’s mainframe, calculating, thriving, growing. Now, the Collective is reaching the limits of space on their hard drives. A consensus has been reached, and a handful of programs are to be sent out.

Taking control of mobile Terminals, these programs may be the first to see the Ship with their own sensors, but they will find that they aren’t quite alone…

This newly updated version of the game moves onward in the Starcraft storyline and now contains all of the units found in Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty and still uses the very easy to understand d20 rules system, so if you play or know how to play a typical d20 role playing game or the Dungeons & Dragons or even Star Wars miniatures games, then you know how to play Starcraft: Tactical Miniatures Combat

Quicklink: First Edition

The newest version of the manuscript is available on the author’s site.

I’ve been playing with the same gaming group for more than six years now. Yet despite having a wealth of knowledge of the various game systems we use our games always seem to fall apart due to rules disputes or belief that someones understanding of the rules has led them to having “cheesed” characters(more often or not these claims are justified). However in Dungeon Squad I had found a simple gaming system that allowed for all the fantasy role play shenanigans we have come to love while also keeping the players on a level playing field despite their understanding of the rules.

That being said my gaming group is comprised of grown ass men who want more depth out of their gaming experience than standard Dungeon Squad has to offer. I read through some of the various updated advanced versions of the game and found that they lacked a fix for my one real complaint with the system: Character development.

Dungeon Squad allows players to increase their skill with Fighting, Magic, and Adventuring as well as their hit points. But what if a player who started with a max Warrior ability doesn’t want to advance as an Explorer or Mage? I have included a simple Epic Tier Skill list as well as a Magic Point system that allows veteran role players the opportunity to customize the development of their character while maintaining the no nonsense simplicity I love about Dungeon Squad.

Here it is, Dungeon Squad: Elite in it’s entirety. Enjoy!

A war the LORD of the Holy Bible and his infinite host of angels had prophetically lost.

EDIT 11/30/2012: File removed per author’s request.

PRECOGNITION: intuition, perception, and magical power!

GRACE: agility, beauty, and composure!

I once wrote a one-page RPG called, “Rage – Precognition – Grace.” It was a few years ago. I wrote the game to be a rules-lite RPG/character sheet in one. I felt that it was possible to put everything you really need to play an RPG on one page. This game uses the same three core character traits, and shares that game’s name, but except for that, this RPG is NOT that RPG.

The desire to keep RPG rules and materials concise is still a priority, and although not the “one-page RPG” this document is as compact as possible. This RPG is a basic reworking of the Old School Fantasy RPG “The Fantasy Trip” published by Metagaming back in 1980 and written by Steve Jackson.

The PDF document covers character creation and basic task resolution. At only 8 pages (that includes the character sheet) this is a pretty tight package. The rules use a 2d6 roll high task system rather than TFT’s 3d6 roll low mechanic.

This should be considered a “Players Manual” for the game and it is intended to be used by a GM who has experience with RPG’s in general and old school style RPG’s particularly.

Included are descriptions for skills, spells, classes, races, weapons and armor and experience costs for character advancement. If I receive any interest in pursuing this project, it might be fun to follow up later with a Monster Compendium/GM Manual.

The entire document is being shared under the Creative Commons: Attribution; Non-commercial; Share-alike agreement – BY-NC-SA.

Paul Lopez

USR is an easy game to learn but there are optional rules throughout if you fancy making it a bit more advanced. Feel free to add your own rules or change current ones to match your preferences. The most important thing is that you and your group have fun with it.

In the future I will be releasing a number of role-playing games based on the USR system, from pulp action to time-travelling sci-fi, so stay tuned!

I really hope you enjoy this system and have a lot of fun with it. It’s always been a dream of mine to get a role-playing system published and put out there for everyone to play.

Scott Malthouse – February 2012